May 6th, 2013
This is a good article and I am surprised that we have not seem more on this topic recently. I could not agree more with Rich Castagna from Search Storage. Why are we still backing data up using traditional methods and mindsets. Answer is quite simple which is one area that I think is not highlighted enough. In most companies the people who drive retention are not in IT. They think in terms of traditional retention methods and thus the technology that exists is not moving forward because of this though process.
Data storage and backup? Fuggedaboutit! – Rich Castagna is editorial director of TechTarget’s Storage Media Group.
Many storage shops are fighting a losing battle when it comes to data storage and backup protection, with too much data and not enough time. Maybe it’s time to rethink the process.
It’s 2013 and we’re still doing backup. I know things tend to toddle along kind of slowly in IT, but the way we protect our data has barely changed at all in my lifetime, and I’m hardly a kid. Backup keeps getting better, of course, with techs like data deduplication and bigger, faster storage targets to send all that backup data to. But today’s data storage and backup process requires essentially the same oversight and administration it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
Few things stagnate like that in the tech universe without a reason, and there are plenty of reasons why backup has been lingering in a time warp for so long. Along with everything else in this world, if you follow the money things start to fall into place and a lot of the mystery disappears. Backup is a complex process involving software, hardware, manpower and special expertise. That makes backup a pretty lucrative endeavor for vendors and offers little motivation to disrupt the status quo by doing anything that might simplify or streamline the process.
We can blame ourselves, too. After so many years, we’re set in our ways and just accept that we need special people with special skills to ensure all that backup hardware and software runs right. There’s definitely a “because that’s the way we do it” mindset when someone asks why so many copies are made or so much data is backed up. And there’s no denying that changing backup procedures and apps is no small matter, especially if you have a lot of old backup data stashed on tape.
There’s some blame that can be shared among vendors and users alike. With the inexorable growth of file data about to put a stranglehold on storage operations in many companies, there are probably a lot of storage pros who realize that keeping everything is impractical but still don’t know what data can be ditched. That usually means shops are backing up data that should have been discarded and making multiple copies of useless stuff. Six or seven years ago, a few startup vendors helped define a new storage product category with data classification products that could help cull the goodies from the garbage. But they were largely ignored and the concept of data classification has mostly gone away, leaving a bunch of backup admins trying to figure out what to keep and what to toss.
Since the great recession put the brakes on a lot of planned storage purchases, data storage managers have learned to use their installed storage as efficiently as possible. Some of that efficiency also shows up in backup operations, but not enough to stem the tide of spiraling data stores.
So maybe it’s time to rethink data storage and backup. Just as RAID and erasure coding are built into systems and run virtually unattended after some setup and with a little oversight, backup ought to be far more integrated with storage systems and processes. As an external process, backup isn’t cutting it; many companies are struggling to complete backup jobs before the morning shift arrives or trying to cope with voluminous, multiple backup sets. And with so much pressure and so little time, it’s inevitable that some data — maybe some important stuff — is slipping through the cracks. A few companies have even stopped trying to back up everything; they just spin off copies of the critical things and keep their fingers crossed about the rest of the data.
It has to be a lot easier than that. Let’s just get rid of backup. The tools and technologies are here, they just need to be better integrated. By now, one would have thought that continuous data protection (CDP) would be an integral part of everybody’s data protection plan, but adoption has been slow. On our most recent Purchasing Intentions survey, only 18% of respondents said they’re using some form of CDP and 13% said they plan to add it to their backup repertoires this year.
The combination of CDP plus snapshots plus replication could be the wonder drug that cures backup’s ills. Rev up CDP, and without doing anything else, your company’s data gets backed up not in big unwieldy batches every night, but in little drips and drabs throughout the day. Now what if CDP was built into the storage system’s operating system just like other services? You might have to turn a few dials to set how frequently the new or modified data should be scooped up and where it should be sent, but the process would be nearly invisible and cause far less disruption than traditional backup operations.
Of course, even if backup was tightly integrated and largely unseen, you’d still need to monitor it to make sure it’s doing what you expect it to do. You need to know, for example, that database tables have been copied in a consistent manner using Microsoft VSS or a similar technology. You’ll also want to control what gets copied and when, so you’ll need to be able to throttle CDP services appropriately for mission-critical data down to user files.
There are many more details that you’d need to work out, but if a decent data protection management app was tossed into the mix, you could keep tabs on the process and be warned if something jumps the tracks at any point.
Backup is tough, but it’s tougher than it should be when it operates in isolation from the rest of a storage system’s processes. A number of startups — as well as established players — are beginning to address the issue, but the required degree of integration is not yet in sight. But as data continues to grow and storage managers get more desperate for a data protection scheme that works, perhaps storage vendors will pay attention. And maybe then you’ll be able to forget about backup.
Many storage shops are fighting a losing battle when it comes to data storage and backup protection, with too much data and not enough time. Maybe it’s time to rethink the process.
It’s 2013 and we’re still doing backup. I know things tend to toddle along kind of slowly in IT, but the way we protect our data has barely changed at all in my lifetime, and I’m hardly a kid. Backup keeps getting better, of course, with techs like data deduplication and bigger, faster storage targets to send all that backup data to. But today’s data storage and backup process requires essentially the same oversight and administration it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
Few things stagnate like that in the tech universe without a reason, and there are plenty of reasons why backup has been lingering in a time warp for so long. Along with everything else in this world, if you follow the money things start to fall into place and a lot of the mystery disappears. Backup is a complex process involving software, hardware, manpower and special expertise. That makes backup a pretty lucrative endeavor for vendors and offers little motivation to disrupt the status quo by doing anything that might simplify or streamline the process.
We can blame ourselves, too. After so many years, we’re set in our ways and just accept that we need special people with special skills to ensure all that backup hardware and software runs right. There’s definitely a “because that’s the way we do it” mindset when someone asks why so many copies are made or so much data is backed up. And there’s no denying that changing backup procedures and apps is no small matter, especially if you have a lot of old backup data stashed on tape.
There’s some blame that can be shared among vendors and users alike. With the inexorable growth of file data about to put a stranglehold on storage operations in many companies, there are probably a lot of storage pros who realize that keeping everything is impractical but still don’t know what data can be ditched. That usually means shops are backing up data that should have been discarded and making multiple copies of useless stuff. Six or seven years ago, a few startup vendors helped define a new storage product category with data classification products that could help cull the goodies from the garbage. But they were largely ignored and the concept of data classification has mostly gone away, leaving a bunch of backup admins trying to figure out what to keep and what to toss.
Since the great recession put the brakes on a lot of planned storage purchases, data storage managers have learned to use their installed storage as efficiently as possible. Some of that efficiency also shows up in backup operations, but not enough to stem the tide of spiraling data stores.
So maybe it’s time to rethink data storage and backup. Just as RAID and erasure coding are built into systems and run virtually unattended after some setup and with a little oversight, backup ought to be far more integrated with storage systems and processes. As an external process, backup isn’t cutting it; many companies are struggling to complete backup jobs before the morning shift arrives or trying to cope with voluminous, multiple backup sets. And with so much pressure and so little time, it’s inevitable that some data — maybe some important stuff — is slipping through the cracks. A few companies have even stopped trying to back up everything; they just spin off copies of the critical things and keep their fingers crossed about the rest of the data.
It has to be a lot easier than that. Let’s just get rid of backup. The tools and technologies are here, they just need to be better integrated. By now, one would have thought that continuous data protection (CDP) would be an integral part of everybody’s data protection plan, but adoption has been slow. On our most recent Purchasing Intentions survey, only 18% of respondents said they’re using some form of CDP and 13% said they plan to add it to their backup repertoires this year.
The combination of CDP plus snapshots plus replication could be the wonder drug that cures backup’s ills. Rev up CDP, and without doing anything else, your company’s data gets backed up not in big unwieldy batches every night, but in little drips and drabs throughout the day. Now what if CDP was built into the storage system’s operating system just like other services? You might have to turn a few dials to set how frequently the new or modified data should be scooped up and where it should be sent, but the process would be nearly invisible and cause far less disruption than traditional backup operations.
Of course, even if backup was tightly integrated and largely unseen, you’d still need to monitor it to make sure it’s doing what you expect it to do. You need to know, for example, that database tables have been copied in a consistent manner using Microsoft VSS or a similar technology. You’ll also want to control what gets copied and when, so you’ll need to be able to throttle CDP services appropriately for mission-critical data down to user files.
There are many more details that you’d need to work out, but if a decent data protection management app was tossed into the mix, you could keep tabs on the process and be warned if something jumps the tracks at any point.
Backup is tough, but it’s tougher than it should be when it operates in isolation from the rest of a storage system’s processes. A number of startups — as well as established players — are beginning to address the issue, but the required degree of integration is not yet in sight. But as data continues to grow and storage managers get more desperate for a data protection scheme that works, perhaps storage vendors will pay attention. And maybe then you’ll be able to forget about backup.
March 27th, 2013
CHICAGO, March 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ – Storcom, a leader in the storage and data protection industry, has announced a major enhancement to its highly regarded RecoverSM by Storcom “recovery as a service” offering through its partnering withSingleHop, a Chicago-based global leader in highly automated hosting and infrastructure services.
Recover by Storcom is a complete solution that provides disaster recovery and business continuity planning as well as structured, public, and private cloud-based backups that allow for recovery ranging from individual systems to complete location outages. Each Recover by Storcom solution begins with an on-site review in which design architects use decades of experience and state-of-the-art tools to analyze storage and recovery needs. Storcom creates an optimum disaster recovery solution based on best-of-breed technologies.
“We are delighted to announce the selection of SingleHop as our Tier 4, SAS 70-certified data center,” said David Kluger , Principal Technology Architect at Storcom. “After an extensive search and due diligence we selected SingleHop because of its industry-leading operational standards, automation tools, exceptional support, and its multiple data centers to provide geographically dispersed recovery options.”
Recover by Storcom builds upon SingleHop’s highly scalable, on-demand infrastructure services to provide a range of storage and recovery solutions, including private-cloud deployments. SingleHop, a cloud hosting company that offers highly scalable, on-demand infrastructure services to both end-users and resellers, delivers state of the art resources and services with industry-leading deployment time and custom support.
“We are proud to be partnering with Storcom in providing the industry’s strongest disaster recovery solutions,” said Zak Boca , SingleHop President & CEO. “We’ve long admired and shared Storcom’s commitment to meeting and exceeding customer needs.”
Storcom was drawn to SingleHop for a number of reasons, including the completeness of its offerings. “Prior to SingleHop we felt we had to assemble infrastructure solutions from multiple entities,” Kluger says. “SingleHop offers everything we need, providing us with a unified solution and seamless access to vast infrastructure resources and a level of control that we were not able to get with other data centers.”
“We have looked at all of the moving parts that are necessary to make business continuity in a public or private cloud a reality and bundled them into one solution using the best technologies,” Kluger said. “Outsourcing all or part of backup and recovery frees an organization’s IT staff to focus on projects relevant to their organization’s core business values while reducing the risk of data loss, preventing corruption, and improving the ability to provide business continuance.”
About Storcom
Storcom, a leader in the storage and data protection industry, specializes in understanding the latest technologies—from public cloud storage solutions to solving the performance demands of today’s key applications with emerging technologies in the storage industry & data protection industry. Visit recover.storcom.net to learn more about Recover by Storcom. Visitwww.storcom.net to learn more about all of our other offerings.
About SingleHop
SingleHop is a cloud hosting company that offers highly scalable, on-demand infrastructure services to both end-users and resellers. With clients in 114 countries, multiple data centers, and over 10,000 servers online, SingleHop delivers state of the art resources and services with industry-leading deployment time and custom support. SingleHop was established in 2006 and makes its home in Chicago. In 2011, the company was named #25 on the Inc. 500 list for the fastest growing companies in America.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/storcom-enhances-its-innovative-recoversm-by-storcom-recovery-as-a-service-partnering-with-singlehop-for-infrastructure-services-199539151.html
SOURCE Storcom
RELATED LINKS
http://www.storcom.net
January 25th, 2013
Storcom has been one of the leading Compellent integrator in the Midwest for 7 Years. We are proud of being a Dell Compellent Partner and being involved in the continual evolving life cycles of this technology to a tier one enterprise storage platform. . Dell Compellent Fluid data architecture still continues to innovate the in the market with these new features. We are also proud of working with AppAassure software for over 3 years now and seeing this technology evolve . These solutions are allowing us to produce robust solutions for our clientele.
- New Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3 can increase performance up to 100 percent over previous versions when running enterprise workloads[1] and can double bandwidth as the first storage array featuring end-to-end 16Gb Fibre Channel from server to switch to storage
- New Dell PowerVault MD3 array software offers enhanced data protection, capacity utilization, and virtualization capabilities in an affordable, high performance solution
- Dell data protection portfolio bolstered by new solutions, including the Dell PowerVault DL4000, providing feature-rich AppAssure software optimized in a 1U backup appliance
At its second EMEA Dell Storage Forum customer and partner event, Dell today unveiled a series of end-to-end storage portfolio updates designed to advance the Fluid Data architecture and to help customers further optimize data at every point in its lifecycle.
“The nature of IT and what a data center should do for an organization is changing rapidly as customers face multiple and often competing models of how technology is delivered — from client to cloud to converged,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager, Dell Storage. “Dell is best positioned with an end-to-end storage architecture that can optimize data at every point in its lifecycle through intelligence and automation. Dell’s Fluid Data Architecture enables new capabilities that power the data center, so customers can drive real business results.”
New Dell Compellent and PowerVault MD3 Software Increases Performance and Automation
Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3 array software unveiled today offers enhanced scalability and performance for Dell Compellent arrays. Compellent SC8000 controllers with Storage Center 6.3 software can increase performance up to 100 percent over previous versions when running enterprise workloads.1 Additionally, with this release, Dell is the first storage provider to announce end-to-end 16Gb Fibre Channel capability — from server to switch to storage — doubling bandwidth and speeding access to business critical applications and data.
Designed for medium to large enterprises and cloud computing, Dell Compellent arrays offer best in class automated tiering, advanced data protection and superior ease of use. These features combine with a highly scalable, modular design that enables users to update storage software at no additional cost and easily expand without requiring a “rip and replace” of their existing infrastructure. According to a new IDC White Paper, commissioned by Dell, Compellent installations had almost twice as long a productive life span than non-Dell storage solutions with organizations replacing Compellent every 6.9 years compared to 3.5 years for their other storage environments.[2]
Additional enterprise enhancements from Storage Center 6.3 announced today include:
- Synchronous replication enhancements that can improve resiliency for data recovery and provide multi-site replication flexibility designed to reduce recovery time and recovery point objectives;
- Expanded Microsoft integration with new Windows Server 2012 support;
- Enhanced security and reduced administration time with Active Directory and LDAP support that automates and integrates Compellent storage with a corporate directory to enable a single authentication and authorization process for granting access;
- Improved federal government security by supporting USGv6/IPv6 requirements for a wide range of available IP addresses; and,
- The ability to intelligently alert and recommend placement of volumes across multiple arrays based on proactive performance and capacity monitoring.
New Dell PowerVault MD3 software enhancements offer enhanced data protection, performance, capacity and virtualization capabilities while designed to maintain up to 99.999 percent availability for these affordable, high performance arrays.
Data protection enhancements include dynamic disk pools that simplify disk management and improve rebuild performance by distributing data across all drives, decreasing significant recovery time of drive failures. In addition to current Fibre Channel replication capabilities, new IP-based remote asynchronous replication protects against site failures, improves application speeds, and increases distance support.
New PowerVault MD3 software application integration and efficiency capabilities include VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) support, which allows customers to offload certain storage related tasks from the server to PowerVault arrays. New thin provisioning capabilities enable arrays to automatically allocate storage as needed for simplified and cost-effective expansion of capacity.
Dell Boosts Data Protection Portfolio to Simplify Data Backup and Recovery
Dell’s growing data protection portfolio enables customers of all sizes to attain unmatched data and application protection and recovery capability times for virtual, physical and cloud environments. Dell provides complete backup, replication and recovery solutions designed to maximize data efficiency, improve IT agility and help ensure business resiliency. Additions to the Dell data protection portfolio include:
- Dell PowerVault DL4000 — Optimized for small to medium enterprises and remote offices, the first backup appliance based on Dell AppAssure software provides a fast and complete backup and disaster recovery solution for business-critical applications and data with seamless integration of software and system management. With 5.5 terabytes of internal storage capacity, this 1U turnkey appliance offers established snapshot, replication, de-duplication and compression software for efficient use of backup capacity. Users can benefit from hosting two virtual standby machines that protect critical applications for up to two servers, offering quick disaster recovery.
- Quest NetVault Backup 9.0 — New Quest data protection software integrates with NetVault Extended Architecture (NetVault XA), featuring a new graphical user interface and a set of shared services to unite multiple Quest data protection technologies for simpler management. The software enables mid- to large-sized organizations to simplify data protection while protecting critical applications in physical and virtual heterogeneous environments. NetVault’s cross-platform capabilities are expanded to Windows Server 2012 and Novell Open Enterprise Server 11, while Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere® enhancements offer improved functionality, performance and scalability. The addition of native replication to the NetVault SmartDisk deduplication solution helps streamline offsite data storage and disaster recovery.
- Dell PowerVault DL2300 — New enterprise-class data protection appliance combines Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers with CommVault Simpana 9 modern data protection software to offer large enterprises with data backup, recovery, replication, archiving and de-duplication for both physical and virtual servers in one easy-to-set-up, pre-tested solution. The new appliance incorporates latest generation processor and memory capabilities to optimize de-duplication database configurations for higher backup performance. Users can save administrative time with built-in, policy-based automation for managing backup and archiving.
Additional Quotes:
“Dell Compellent storage plays a critical role in our IT infrastructure, and we continue to look forward to new enhancements and features that help us meet enterprise level storage demands,” said Dan Marbes, Lead Systems Engineer, Associated Bank. “The opportunity to gain up to two times the performance when running our applications means faster access to important information when our users need it. We are also eagerly anticipating the integration of Active Directory authentication to more efficiently manage access to these resources.”
“We’ve relied on AppAssure for recovery and peace of mind for years on a variety of storage platforms,” said Michael Rapp, information security officer, Center for Information Technology in Education, College of Education, University of Houston. “Dell’s integration of this data protection software into a purpose-built platform could make it even easier for customers to deploy an AppAssure-optimized solution with a minimal amount of set up and configuration work.”
Availability:
- Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.3 has planned availability for beta in early 2013 and general availability in Q2 2013.
- Dell PowerVault MD3 software enhancements and Dell PowerVault DL2300 are now available.
- Dell Quest NetVault Backup 9.0 has planned availability in December 2012.
- Dell PowerVault DL4000 has planned availability in Q1 2013.
About Dell
Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit www.dell.com.
Dell World
Join us at Dell World 2012 — The Power to Do More. Technology professionals will learn from one another and identify key challenges and opportunities connected to the top forces changing business today. Learn more at www.DellWorld.com or follow #DellWorld on Twitter.
| Dell, Compellent, PowerVault, AppAssure, Quest NetVault, and DX Object Storage are trademarks of Dell Inc. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.
[1] Source: Dell testing performed on dual SC8000 controllers running OLTP workloads using IOmeter with a 100% random 70/30 read/write mix and 4K sector transfer sizes. Testing using pre-release Storage Center code version 6.3.1 versus 6.1.2 code.
[2] Source: “The Business Value of Dell EqualLogic and Compellent Primary Storage Solutions,” an October 2012 IDC white paper commissioned by Dell. |
October 17th, 2012
Storcom, a leading Midwest solutions integrator, partners with both Nimble Storage and VMware to develop a VMware View RDP Appliance.
The VMware Rapid Desktop Appliance is a fully certified, converged and scalable solution. Each certified and validated appliance delivers predictable units of performance and user experience. With Rapid Desktop Appliances from VMware partners, your IT infrastructure can always scale with your growing business, from proof-of-concept to real world production.
Dave Kluger – Principal Technology Architect for Storcom said, “We are very excited to have started this process, we know this will be an on-going process internally to develop more configurations the meet different customer environments. The SC80-210-1 gives us a starting point and allows our customers to see what a certified configuration will look like. From there we can do additional testing of different configurations to find the right size for any environment.”
Getting started with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has not always been easy. IT administrators have had to master storage, optimize networks, ensure they have enough servers on hand and then provision desktops to pools of users across the organization. And this has all taken time, until now. With VMware’s Rapid Desktop Appliances, customers can take advantage of all-in-one VDI appliances that come fully loaded with storage, compute, networking and VMware software components. VMware’s Rapid Desktop Appliances take the guesswork out of VDI and allow small, medium and large-scale IT organizations to get up and running quickly and cost-effectively.
Dave Kluger again reiterated, “We see this as the building block for developing VDI solutions based upon VMware View that are successful from day one of the deployment rather than right-sizing after the fact. We encourage organizations that are in the process of investigating VDI to engage with Storcom to ensure success of their VDI project utilizing our LAB environment that is leveraging VMware planner for testing scenarios to match the customer environment as closely as possible.
To read more about this Rapid Desktop Program and Storcom certification see below:
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/desktop/rapid-desktop.html
September 20th, 2012
Storcom introduces a truly new approach to “recovery-as-a-service”
Chicago, IL September 19th 2012
RecoverSM by Storcom is a reliable, complete solution including disaster recovery and business continuity planning as well as structured, public and private cloud-based backups that allow for the recovery of any individual system or complete location outage. The Recover solution brings organizations comfort and peace of mind that your business will continue to run even after the most extreme of emergencies. During the initial review, on-site design architects utilize decades of experience, state-of-the-art tool sets and deep analysis providing a high level of planning detail, setting Recover apart from the failed processes of other solutions. Leading technologies include imaging and replication software along with Storcom’s implementation of best-of-breed corruption prevention technologies.Utilizing the highest-level data protection—private Tier 4, SAS 70 certified data centers—the Recover solution ensures that SLAs are met.
Storcom differentiates Recover from other services by offering a solution to serious backup and recovery issues while providing the planning, hardware and big protection for businesses of all sizes at an affordable rate.
Storcom has created a service that is accessible to any size company. Outsourcing all or part of backup and recovery frees up your IT staff to focus on projects relevant to your organization’s core business values while reducing the risk of data loss, preventing corruption and improving the ability to provide business continuance. Losing touch with your data can cause severe damage to your business, and because all businesses have big data needs, Recover by Storcom offers a service that is essential for any growing company.
Recover by Storcom has been desined as a solution offering to levrage the Storcom continuity cloud but can easily be adapted to provide the same set of functionality within your own organizations private cloud. In these senarios Storcom will still provide the same consulting capacbilities as well as the same levels of managed services. We understand that business continiuty is not a one size fits all solution.
David Kluger , CTO Storcom inc. says, “Recover by Storcom sets itself apart from all of the other offerings to date available to the small to mid tier enterprise customer in that we have looked at all of the moving parts that are necessary to make business continuity in a public or private cloud a reality and bundled them into one solution using the best technologies. We can say, with this solution that we are not just getting your data off-site but actually bringing all aspects of your business that are critical in a disaster into motion, that’s where the competition has failed up to now.”
Learn more at recover.storcom.net
About Storcom
Storcom specializes in understanding the latest technologies- from public cloud storage solutions to solving the performance demands of today’s key applications with emerging technologies in the storage industry & data protection industry. Visit www.storcom.net to learn more about all of our complete offerings.
Media Contact:
Garret Wood
Garrett.Wood@storcom.net
312-532-6579
August 22nd, 2012
Stocom Partner Dell Inc. this week said it’s adding hybrid solid-state arrays tailored for the high IOPS required for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments to its high-end EqualLogic iSCSI SAN PS6500 Series.
The company’s new EqualLogic PS6510ES and PS6500ES arrays are the first hybrid systems within the PS6500 Series, which is Dell’s highest-end iSCSI platform. The new models scale up to 84.8 terabytes (TBs) of raw capacity, and can hold seven 400 GB solid-state drives (SSDs) and 41 2-TB nearline-SAS hard disk drives.
August 6th, 2012
Groundbreaking Scaling Paradigm Allows Enterprises to Individually Scale Performance and Capacity at the Lowest Incremental Cost to Accommodate the Requirements of Diverse Workloads and Applications
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Aug 5, 2012 – Nimble Storage, the leading provider of flash-optimized, hybrid storage solutions, today announced a new scale-to-fit storage architecture that enables enterprises to scale the capacity and performance of their storage arrays individually according to their exact needs and budgets, and as their storage requirements evolve.
Today’s scale-up storage architectures are inflexible, requiring upfront forecasting of performance needs over an array’s three-to-five-year lifespan and creating separate storage silos that complicate management. Scale-out cluster solutions provide upfront flexibility, but tie performance and capacity together, requiring customers to incur higher incremental costs every time they add a storage node.
Nimble Storage addresses these challenges by allowing customers to purchase exactly what they need up front and by providing the industry’s most flexible scaling options. Customers can thus protect their existing investments while growing their storage at the lowest incremental cost without downtime as their needs evolve. Nimble Storage offers three flexible paths for scaling:
(1) Scale capacity only: a new line of ES-Series storage expansion shelves allows customers who do not require additional performance to add capacity at the lowest incremental cost without downtime.
(2) Scale performance only: a new line of extreme-performance CS400 series arrays is ideal for customers running performance-intensive applications such as OLTP and VDI. Existing CS200 series array controllers can be nondisruptively upgraded to CS400 arrays without downtime. Customers can also upgrade to higher-capacity flash SSDs without downtime to accommodate workloads with larger active data sets.
(3) Scale capacity and performance: a powerful new operating system upgrade, Nimble OS 2.0, allows customers to cluster arrays together, providing linear scaling of both capacity and performance, as well as unified management. Nimble scale-out clustering allows users to grow or shrink their storage environments seamlessly, and to easily perform data migrations and upgrades, all without downtime.
Enterprises can mix and match these approaches to scale to hundreds of terabytes and hundreds of thousands of IOPS in a single storage cluster.
“Traditional scale-up systems and more modern scale-out systems are rooted in an era when storage capacity and storage performance were tethered together,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO of Nimble Storage. “Our scale-to-fit architecture delivers an unparalleled ability to independently scale the controller performance, cache capacity or storage capacity of any node while also allowing multiple nodes to become part of a cluster. Starting with a small footprint, our customers can continually and nondisruptively scale and evolve their infrastructure in small, granular increments across the widest range of workloads.”
Nimble’s scale-to-fit technology is built on the groundbreaking Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout Architecture (CASL). CASL is architected from the ground up to leverage flash and high-capacity disk to deliver affordable performance and capacity. In addition, CASL delivers highly efficient snapshots and WAN-efficient replication, dramatically simplifying backups and disaster recovery. Operation of the arrays is simplified across their lifecycle through deep application integration as well as proactive wellness and management.
“Enterprise storage requirements are continually and rapidly in flux,” said Roger Cox, research vice president at Gartner. “Consolidation of diverse workloads means that higher demands are placed on storage. Because most enterprises can’t predict their storage requirements even one year down the road, they need assurance of elastic performance and capacity in their storage platforms.”
Scale-Out Clustering
Powerful scale-out clustering with Nimble Storage allows enterprises to size their storage to current requirements, eliminate the need to forecast future requirements and eliminate storage silos:
- Scale performance and capacity linearly with the seamless addition of new arrays
- Automatically “stripe” storage volumes across multiple arrays in a cluster
- Create storage pools in a cluster to segment applications and workloads on different arrays
- Migrate data nondisruptively across pools in a cluster
- Add arrays to a cluster or remove them with full, uninterrupted data access. The Nimble operating system automatically redistributes data across arrays in the cluster.
Furthermore, scale out is compatible with all existing and new Nimble Storage arrays, and any arrays can be mixed and matched within a scale-out cluster. Nimble makes scale out available at no cost to all customers with current service and support contracts.
“With the expansion of our operations, it was imperative that we build a storage architecture that could scale performance and capacity to accommodate staff additions, significant growth in our data and a range of new applications, including VDI,” said Derek Schostag, systems engineer, Lindquist & Vennum P.L.L.P, a business-oriented general-practice law firm. “With Nimble Storage we have achieved that objective, and we’re extremely confident of investment protection, even for scenarios that we can’t envision today. No other storage provider can give us that confidence.”
CS400 Series Extreme-Performance Arrays
Nimble’s new extreme-performance CS400 arrays are designed to host an enterprise’s most demanding applications and workloads, supporting hundreds of virtual machines or thousands of VDI users on each array.
“Nimble’s CS400 provides a single storage server that can meet the requirements of virtualization on a large scale, allowing enterprises to support their core applications, workloads and users, while also providing room to grow,” said Raj Mallempati, director of product marketing, VMware. “End users using VMware View™ solutions are looking for uncompromising performance at scale. Nimble CS400 and VMware View provide a high-performance, scalable desktop-virtualization solution that can meet the ever-growing capacity requirements of enterprise users.”
Availability
The CS400 series arrays, ES-Series expansion shelves and flash expansion options will be available in the third quarter of 2012. Nimble OS 2.0, which supports scale-out clustering, will be available in the fourth quarter of 2012. For additional details on Scale to Fit, visit www.nimblestorage.com/products/scale-to-fit.php or the Nimble Storage blog at:http://www.nimblestorage.com/blog/two-years-since-we-launched.
About Nimble Storage
Nimble Storage solutions are built on the idea that enterprises should not have to compromise between performance, capacity, ease of management, and price. Nimble’s patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture, designed from the ground up to effectively combine flash with high capacity drives, makes high performance affordable, simplifies and enhances disaster recovery and backup, and delivers stress-free operations. Nimble Storage solutions are available through a global network of world class channel partners. For more information visit www.nimblestorage.com.
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The names Nimble Storage and CASL are trademarks of Nimble Storage. VMware is a registered trademark and VMware View is a trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Other trade names or words used in this document are the properties of their respective owners.
Media Contact:
Gary Good
Trainer Communications
nimble@trainercomm.com
707-837-1718
July 24th, 2012
Dell SSD strategy includes plans for flash in storage and servers
BOSTON — At Dell Storage Forum earlier this month, Carter George, the vendor’s executive director of storage strategy, outlined plans for Dell’s flash-based Fluid Cache technology roadmap.
In an interview with SearchSolidStateStorage.com, George explained the Dell SSD strategy, including the motivation behind the server-based Fluid Cache PCI Express (PCIe) card as well as aFluid Cache appliance, which he said would emerge late in the first quarter or second quarter of next year.
George also supplied details about another Dell SSD project, code-named “Big Iron,” that could lead to an all-flash array in Dell’sCompellent product line. George said the all-flash array is currently “under investigation.”
SearchSolidStateStorage.com: Do you view Fluid Cache as Dell’s answer to what EMC has been doing with server-side flash?
George: Yes, part of it. I mean, EMC’s doing a lot of stuff. EMC has so far announced three flash things: [Project] Lightning, orVFCache, a host cache; [Project] Thunder, a cache appliance; then,XtremIO, which is a flash array, and that’s not shipping, either. I think people will find you need to do all three. The only one that could be optional is the [cache appliance], but I actually think there are good reasons to do it. An appliance is a great way that you could go stick a bunch of flash in the network and use it as a cache without having to touch your servers.
This is a really big deal, the transition from disk to flash. In three years, all active data is going to be on flash, or some kind of memory-based storage, and that means fundamentally new array designs. It’s not just sticking SSDs in your existing disk array. It just doesn’t work.
I think EMC correctly saw this as a legitimate threat to their franchise with Symmetrix.
When we first started talking about this, we were thinking, ‘Hey, here’s the opportunity to go knock EMC off their throne.’ But, they saw it just as clearly as we did, and they’ve been investing like crazy. They paid almost $500 million for a company with not a single dollar of revenue [XtremIO], and that tells you that they’re not leaving anything to doubt in this space.
So, if the opportunity isn’t there for us to destroy EMC, too bad. But, I do think there’s an opportunity for Dell to be the other company that gets this right. I think Dell is well ahead of everybody else but EMC in this flash space.
SearchSolidStateStorage.com: How so?
George: We have two things: Fluid Cache and an appliance that, for now, let’s call the Fluid Cache appliance. Thunder and Lightning are both read-only caches, and ours are read and write. That seems like a simple difference, but it makes all the world of difference. There are two things you do in storage: read and write. They’re only doing one, and we do both.
To get things like snapshots and replication to work correctly, if you’re a read cache, those things are easy. But, if you have a write cache, you have dirty data — new data sitting up here in the cache — that’s not down [in the storage array]. If I take a snapshot, that’s a point-in-time consistent image of my data that needs to include that dirty data. We’ve done all this coordination to have snapshots be aware of where the dirty data is and flush it or include it, one way or the other.
Same thing with replication. If I’m replicating Compellent to somewhere else, it’s going to replicate not only what’s here [in the array], it’s going to replicate what’s up there [in the cache], because it knows about it. That’s where all the hard work is, coordinating all those things.
SearchSolidStateStorage.com: What else has Dell done to address challenges with server-side flash?
George: To have it in the server, it has to be reasonable for you to be able to put the flash in there. If you’re buying a new server, great. Put it in the server. It’s the right place for it to be. It’s on the same bus as the CPU. Access times are better.
But, if you have an existing server that’s in production, putting PCIe cards in is a pain. You have to bring the server out of production, take it out of the rack, put a card in and hope that all works out, and then put it back in. People don’t do that with production servers.
We did a bunch of things just a couple months ago. We launched 12th generation servers, and these servers have a bunch of stuff in there specifically for this. Dell and Intel cooperated on a new standard called NVMe, non-volatile memory express. This both defines a software driver standard and a physical connection.
In a server, you have front-facing drive slots. The NVM connector lets you put something in that drive bay that is hot pluggable like a disk drive but is actually a PCI device. It sits directly in the PCI bus. If you have one of these servers, you can go in and just stick one of these [NVM devices] in the front of the server.
SearchSolidStateStorage.com: Will solid-state cache be the main Dell SSD play?
George: Yeah. These cards do 250,000 IOPS each. That’s really fast. That’s about as fast as a Compellent [array]. And I can have four of those in a single server, so that’s a million IOPS. That’s faster than our biggest storage array. I could have 256 servers with a million IOPS of cache each. So, that’s hundreds of millions of potential IOPS.
This doesn’t get you out of wanting to have a flash array. It gets you into it, because if I start going really fast, and I’ve got a bunch of dirty data up here in the cache, and I had a snapshot point or a replication point, this cache wants to be able to flush down here [to the array] to get consistent. And, if there’s a huge difference between how fast your cache goes and how fast your backend storage goes, you’re going to have weird performance, where you go really fast for 30 seconds and then sort of slow for 10 seconds, and then really fast for a minute, and then slow for 20 seconds.
People aren’t going to want that. They’re going to want consistent, even performance. So, as this cache goes faster and faster, you’re going to want this [array] to keep up. That’s why I said you need to have all three pieces, [host cache, a cache appliance and a flash array].
SearchSolidStateStorage.com: Do you think Dell needs to make an acquisition to achieve its flash vision, or can the company do the work internally?
George: We can do it internally, and it would take about two years. There’s a project called Big Iron to design an all-flash, scale-out Compellent using [technology from Dell acquisition] RNA [Networks] in the Compellent head to help with the scaling out and make changes in the code, optimize for flash, and do the wear-leveling and all those things you need to do, the in-band dedupe, not the post-process dedupe. Four or five pretty fundamental things we’d have to do to Compellent to make it an all-flash array. By the end of this year, we will have to make the decision if we can wait two years. Is two years too late? Two years might be too late. If we thought it would be the best thing, but the market will have been settled by the time it happens, we’re going to have to do something else.
Related Topics: Solid state cache appliance implementations, SSD array implementations, Server-based SSD implementations, VIEW ALL TOPIC
July 24th, 2012
On June 28, 2012, Dell awarded MHEC status to Storcom. This status provides the Higher Ed community with many benefits. The agreement provides the volume purchasing power of MHEC with leading edge Dell product all with expertise of a dedicated Storcom team to help pull it all together.
MHEC (
www.mhec.org) is charged with promoting interstate cooperation and resource sharing in higher education through its three core functions: cost savings programs, student access and policy research. MHEC leverages its multi-state purchasing power, via the RFP process, to get discounted pricing from Dell.
Storcom is Dell’s exclusive MHEC integrator for IL.Here is how it works:
- Client contacts Storcom to assess needs and requirements.
- Storcom will then provide recommendations, solution options, architectural consulting and if needed, quotes & SOW’s
- Order is place with Dell via MHEC Contract
- Installation/Integration services are provided by Dell and/or Storcom inc.
Storcom is a Chicago based full services IT solutions provider and exclusive MECH integrator for Illinois, Let us help you IL higher education!
July 12th, 2012
Online businesses like Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix recently learned the hard way that the cloud is not invincible during the second Amazon cloud failure in a month. Although other cloud providers may be tempted to enjoy a little schadenfreude, the latest outages underscore some of the disaster recovery (DR) challenges and opportunities all providers face.
Two of the data centers in Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) US East-1 region — located in Ashburn, Va. — suffered significant outages June 29 after a large electrical storm tore through Northern Virginia and Washington D.C., knocking out power throughout the region. The two data centers were supporting one of Amazon’s “availability zones” in that region. Amazon defines these availability zones as “distinct physical locations [that] are engineered to isolate failure from each other,” but offers no further clarification for how the zones are set up.
For all its redundancy, the cloud is still based on physical equipment — and physical equipment fails. And even if cloud providers can’t control the weather, they must still have a Plan B in case of a cloud outage.
While it’s common for large, pure-play cloud providers to divide resources among different availability zones and separate physical data centers, many customers — especially those that rely on the cloud to provide Web-based services to their end users — are beginning to have reservations about reliability.
As customers begin to consider a multi-vendor cloud environment for their DR needs, cloud providers must figure out how to support them. Highly publicized outages like Amazon’s cloud failure may provoke customer anxiety across the market, but it also affords cloud providers the opportunity to learn from those mistakes andprepare a better DR plan.
Latest Amazon cloud failure: What happened?
Large-scale cloud outages continually hit the news, and this is not the first time an electrical storm and power outage has crippled part of Amazon’s cloud. Its Virginia data centers were battered by electrical storms in 2009, suffering power outages and service disruptions in June and December of that year. Lightning was also blamed in August 2011 for taking down Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in Dublin.
The latest Amazon cloud failure also follows a comparatively minor outage it suffered in the same region June 14, which was triggered by power failures as well.
During the most recent AWS outage, one of the two data centers affected by the storm did not successfully fail over to generator power after the data center’s electrical switching equipment was overcome by a large voltage spike, according to a recent statement from Amazon about the incident. The subsequent combination of EC2 instances going offline and the discovery of a bug in the Elastic Load Balancer control plane triggered an Amazon cloud failure lasting six hours for customers in that availability zone.
Amazon competitor Joyent later tweeted it had not experienced any service disruptions that night, despite being located in the same Virginia data center where Amazon suffered the outage.
Can cloud balancing save the day during future cloud outages?
The ability to load balance across a heterogeneous cloud environment, also know as cloud balancing, can help providers prevent a cloud outage or any unexpected spike in traffic, enabling them to promote redundancy and even cost savings for the customer, said Apurva Dave, vice president of product marketing at San Francisco, Calif.-based Riverbed Technology, a wide area network (WAN) optimization vendor.
MORE ON AMAZON CLOUD FAILURE
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Amazon cloud failure: Cloud views must get realistic
Amazon cloud outagecaused by hardware, not hackers
“[Cloud] failure isn’t always just an outage, like AWS experienced — it can come in shades of gray, like when webpages are loading too slowly,” he said. “For applications that are mission-critical and cannot suffer downtime in the cloud, cloud balancing is a good insurance policy for customers.”
But everything comes at a cost, noted Sam Barnett, directing analyst of data center and cloud for Campbell, Calif.-based Infonetics Research Inc., and not all customers may be willing to pay a premium for cloud balancing.
“Having a way to interconnect or workload mobility does cost extra, and it’s really up to the customer to determine those costs and benefits,” he said.
Amazon cloud failure: Are customers flocking to multi-vendor cloud strategies?
Because of the inherent vulnerabilities in the physical components of the data center, cloud failures are unavoidable, Barnett said. As customers become more aware of this, cloud providers should not be surprised when more customers that heavily rely on the cloud to deliver Internet-based services no longer want to be tied strictly to a single facility.
Nirvanix Inc., a cloud storage provider, is seeing momentum for this trend. Nirvanix hosts petabytes of customer data in its own cloud, and many of its customers also maintain a copy of that data in another provider’s cloud, said Steve Zivanic, vice president of marketing for San Diego, Calif.-based Nirvanix.
It’s not that customers want two copies in different locations in a single provider’s cloud, he said. Rather, they’re replicating the data across several geographic locations and multiple cloud providers to ensure continuous data accessibility for the customer, he said.
Then again, not all cloud providers should expect a surge of DR business. Customers that are happy with their cloud provider tend not to move or consider another provider’s offering, Barnett said, noting that cost savings may also drive customers to stay with one provider.
“It really depends on the business need, and the application supported in the cloud,” he said.
Cloud providers should strive to design their data centers in areas that geographically make sense, and learn from the mistakes of cloud providers like AWS, Barnett said. Balancing redundancy and reliably for customers, while keeping costs low, will be mission-critical for cloud provider to stay competitive moving forward.
