Managing enterprise disk storage is difficult. F5 is reducing this burden with the ARX Series, a family of appliances that abstract physical file storage from logical user access using virtualization.
Miami Florida -- Many IT professionals are wondering if the exponential growth of disk storage and the associated management chores will ever slow down. Regrettably, for those charged with the day-to-day administration of enterprise storage, the answer is likely no.
Several factors are forcing the growth of storage pools, ranging from basic drivers, such as robust applications, to more complex factors, such as "big data" analytics, compliance requirements and disaster recovery. Simply put, storage is growing with no end in sight, and management is becoming more complex and time-consuming. That all adds up to higher costs, reduced efficiencies and longer backup windows.
F5 Networks thinks it has an answer to that dilemma (and several others) in the form of its appliance-based ARX storage virtualization platform, which focuses on abstracting physical file storage from its native, closed, management tools and virtualizing it into a centrally managed, easy-to-control layer. With an entry price of around $30,000, ARX combines several capabilities that make it a welcome addition to any large enterprise network that is struggling with storage issues.
Of course, F5 Networks isn’t the only player in the storage virtualization game. Vendors ranging from FalconStore to RedHat to even Microsoft (with the forthcoming Windows Server 8) have products that can be classified under the storage virtualization realm. However, what makes F5’s product really interesting is that ARX does this without having to make any changes to the original storage devices or management software. It leaves well enough alone and raises virtualized storage to its own layer, which can be centrally managed with ease.
The real trick here is that the ARX works as an intelligent proxy, converting abstracted, generalized storage access requests into something that a native storage solution can understand. Operating like a file storage “router,” the ARX is able to provide universal access to heterogeneous storage without impacting performance or forcing changes to the underlying storage technologies. What’s more, ARX brings additional functionality to existing storage solutions by allowing the creation of dynamic pools, storage tiers and so on, says Brian McCarthy, CTO and Co-Founder of Cloud Caboodle of Lake Mary, Florida.
The F5 ARX Series of appliances is designed with one key goal in mind: to make enterprise storage easier—easier to manage, easier to provision, easier to secure and, most importantly, easier to use. The ARX Series is available as four different physical rack-mount appliances and the ARX Virtual Edition, a virtual appliance. The five solutions have the same functionality, but differ in performance levels and scale.
The ARX1500 is the entry-level physical appliance in the series and is designed for 3.2G bps of throughput, 3,000 users and 768 million files. Each of those specifications will prove to be very important for those sizing a file virtualization appliance. For example, since a storage virtualization appliance abstracts storage hardware and acts as a proxy for file access, file counts and user counts prove to be of critical importance, as does throughput, so adopters of the technology should choose carefully and consider future network growth and file storage needs.
The big iron in the ARX series comes in the form of the ARX4000, which is rated for 12G bps of throughput, can handle as many as 12,000 users and tops out at 2 billion files. The 4U rack-mounted unit also sports two dual, redundant hot-swappable power supplies, twelve 10/100/1000Mb Ethernet ports and a pair of 10Gb X2 (MM-SC) Ethernet ports.
I was able to perform hands-on testing of an ARX2500 appliance at F5’s Lowell, Mass., location. The ARX2500, which began shipping in July, is rated for 8G bps of throughput, 6,000 users and 1.5 billion files. It also supports GbE, although this specific device was attached via 10 GbE to a storage environment that consisted of several flavors of file storage, including NetApp, EMC VNX and Windows 2008 file servers.
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Tampa, Florida -- Analyst firm IDC places EMC at the top of the worldwide Purpose Built Backup Appliance market, with EMC claiming 62 percent share for the first half of 2011. EMC’s primary PBBA products include EMC Avamar, Data Domain and Disk Library for mainframe systems.
Market growth and the impressive lead over its nearest competitor bodes well for EMC. In its latest market forecast, IDC estimates that the market grew 65 percent in 2011 compared to 2010.
“As a result of our latest research, we have increased our full year 2011 worldwide PBBA forecast to approximately $2.8 billion—well above our initial revenue forecast of $2.1 billion earlier this year,” Robert Amatruda, IDC’s research director, Data Protection and Recovery, told eWEEK.
IDC also said it expects the total PBBA market to grow robustly with a 2010-2015 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.6 percent, totaling nearly $5.3 billion by the close of 2015.
Amatruda added “We believe this explosive growth will continue through 2015 and is a result of users’ desire for improved backup window timing, faster recovery times, effective virtual server protection and seamless integration with existing backup applications. We also believe customers are gravitating towards PBBA solutions as a way to control their data protection capital and operational expenditures.”
IDC observes that strategic IT transformation initiatives along with the need for faster backup and recovery, effective virtual server protection, more integration and better cost control are driving more customers to implement EMC next-generation backup and recovery products.
“Deep integration of the EMC backup and recovery products in its industry-leading portfolio allows customers to address a broad range of requirements and challenges as they architect new data protection infrastructures,” Amatruda said.
“For many years, we talked about a ‘tectonic shift’ in the backup industry driven by the availability of data de-duplication technology, Shane Moore, EMC APJ’s director of Product Marketing, Backup & Recovery Systems, wrote in an email to eWEEK. “ This shift has now given way to mainstream adoption of Purpose Built Backup Appliances by the IT community,” Moore wrote.
“EMC’s definitive leadership in the PBBA market is a result of our long-term strategy to integrate backup software and hardware to deliver advanced efficiencies to our customers—an outcome difficult for competitors to match,” Moore wrote. “Backup redesign based upon the right Purpose Built Backup Appliance is clearly an essential element of any successful IT transformation.”
According to Moore, the demonstrated ability of EMC to massively scale its systems, replicate efficiently and effectively protect virtual environments also gives customers a future-proof foundation for moving to cloud-based computing models. “By implementing EMC PBBAs, customers have achieved an 81 percent reduction in time spent managing backups, average payback periods of seven months and a return on investment of 450 percent over three years,” he said.
Of course, EMC is not the only provider of PBBA, many other companies, including some niche players, offer PBBA products. For example, Chartec offers an appliance-based backup and data recovery product, which leverages the hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) model, where customers pay a monthly fee for a PBBA, which is also replicated on a cloud storage service.
SonicWALL offers a PBBA in the form of the company’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) v6, an appliance that offers rapid backup and disaster recovery capabilities, along with an offsite storage component.
Arkeia is an up-and-coming vendor that offers both physical and virtual backup appliances with optional tape support for archival purposes. Arkeia’s products fit into a niche category, but have the potential challenge faced by many of the other PBBA vendors on the market.
Although EMC has shown impressive growth in the PBBA market as more competitors come to market and virtualized appliances hit the mainstream, it may become tougher for the company to maintain that growth and support its lofty current market share.
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Orlando Florida -- A few weeks after Los Angeles threw in the towel on a plan to move its police force onto Google’s cloud-based email platform, Pittsburgh announced that it had shifted 3,000 employees -- including city cops -- to the cloud. It took just four months and stayed within budget, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl said at a January press conference that featured him and Google executives dumping an old city email server into a recycle bin. The city says the move will cut annual email costs by 25 percent and employees will get 500 times more email storage.
Contrast Pittsburgh’s experience with L.A.’s announcement that it was scrapping plans to move 13,000 city police officers onto its Gmail system due to unresolved security and privacy concerns. In 2009, the $7.2 million deal was considered groundbreaking because it envisioned moving email for all 30,000 city employees offsite and onto Google’s government cloud. The December decision means that almost half of the city workforce will stay on the existing -- and very old -- city-run email system, with Google paying $350,000 annually to keep it running, says the Los Angeles Times.
So why can one city police department make the leap while another can’t?
I suspect there are a few issues at play, including politics, workers’ resistance to change and perhaps an incomplete understanding among cloud vendors of the rules that public safety agencies must follow. But the biggest hurdle to moving cops onto the cloud may be that many federal, state and local rules on the privacy and security of police data were written before the advent of cloud computing.
L.A. CTO Randi Levin said as much in October. “The real issue is the fact that the policies related to a lot of different areas in government are not matching the technologies that are coming out,” she told Governing’s sister publication Government Technology.
The relationship between Google and the city started unraveling sometime toward the end of 2011 when Levin asked the project’s integrator to refund money spent trying to move police and justice personnel to Google’s system. She told media outlets that Google hadn’t met security and storage mandates tied to use of data from the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, which lets local police access the federal storehouse of fingerprints and criminal histories. But Google claimed the city introduced new security requirements after the contract was signed.
Either way, until policies are clarified, cloud computing’s compatibility with law enforcement data will be open to interpretation -- and L.A. won’t be the only city struggling. Privately, many police department CIOs say they’re reluctant to move their data to the cloud, and they grumble that cloud vendors haven’t met special public safety requirements. On the other hand, Google says several cities, including Des Moines and Orlando, already have transitioned successfully.
Pittsburgh appears to be another one of those cities. Officials there are satisfied the system meets police needs. In interviews after the announcement, Pittsburgh’s then-CIO Howard Stern cited Google’s federal security certification and said the company’s security capabilities exceeded what the city could do on its own.
Google Vice President Michael Lock, who attended the Pittsburgh announcement, pointed to the cloud as a way for cash-strapped cities to upgrade their technology. “This is a shining example of what city, state and national governments need to do,” he said.
For some cities, that may very well be true. But for jurisdictions contemplating a similar move, the best advice may be to study those privacy and security rules, and to talk to your lawyers.
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Tampa, Florida -- Snapshot-based backup systems can literally change the game for anyone interested in using them as their primary method for backing up and restoring critical data. Snapshots offer significantly easier and faster backups than any traditional backup system can provide, and they offer recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) that are also impossible with a traditional backup system. In this context, a traditional data backup system is one that backs up files by placing them into some kind of backup format (e.g., Symantec Corp. NetBackup image, EMC Corp. NetWorker saveset, IBM Corp. TSM aggregate), and then places that format on tape or disk. However, not all snapshot backup systems are alike, and not all of them have what it takes to completely replace a backup system. In the following, we'll help you understand the benefits and drawbacks of such a system and allow you to make your own decisions as to whether or not you might want to investigate using a snapshot backup system for your organization.
When discussing snapshot-based backup systems, there are a number of misconceptions that must be dealt with before beginning the conversation. The first of these misconceptions is that snapshots aren't backups at all -- they are point-in-time copies. There are those that believe that if a copy of data doesn't change form -- such as being put inside a tar image -- then it's not a backup. It's unclear where this idea came from, but changing form is not a requirement for something to be a backup.
How are snapshot backups defined?
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) defines a backup as "A collection of data stored on (usually removable) non-volatile storage media for purposes of recovery in case the original copy of data is lost or becomes inaccessible; also called a backup copy. To be useful for recovery, a backup must be made by copying the source data image when it is in a consistent state." The only part of this definition that snapshot-based backups might have trouble with is the "usually removable" part, but this is simply SNIA stating the obvious that most backups are placed on tape.
Expert response: How to use snapshot technology
SNIA's definition does bring up one very important aspect of snapshot-based backup systems -- a snapshot is not really a backup until it has been replicated to another storage system. This is because a snapshot is a virtual copy of the data, not an actual copy of the data. If something happens to the volume upon which a snapshot resides, the snapshot of the volume will be of no use -- unless it was copied to another volume via replication.
A Best Practice would be to first and foremore archive all file data that is older then 90 days since it's last update. Cloud Caboodle of Lake Mary Florida has developed a solution which auto tiers older file data to a data reduction device. By doing this 70 to 80% of your data is now protected for longer term compliance. This method will leave you with less the 20% of your orginal data that can be protected via snapshot technology. In a traditional backup system, backup software and tapes create the ability to restore multiple points in time. This is a critical function of a backup system, as data corruption or other factors may require us to restore the system to a point in time other than the most recent backup. In a snapshot-based backup system, the snapshots provide this functionality. Multiple snapshots -- each created at different times -- are used to present multiple virtual views of the file system as they existed at different points in time.
Another important function of a backup system is to provide a copy of the data in case of disaster. A traditional backup system does this by sending tapes off-site via an off-site vaulting vendor such as Iron Mountain. A snapshot-based backup system accomplishes the same thing via replication. In fact, a snapshot backup system can place multiple copies of the data in multiple locations using replication. For example, operational recoveries may come from an on-site storage system that is physically different than the storage system being backed up, and disaster recoveries may come from an off-site storage system that receives a replication stream from the same system. This may be accomplished by having the primary storage system replicate to both systems, or having it replicate to the on-site storage system, and having that system replicate to the off-site storage system. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Curtis' backup best practices
The last part of the SNIA definition of backup is that the data must be in a consistent state when it was copied. With traditional data backup applications, this is usually done via file system and database agents, and snapshot-based backup systems must also figure out a way to make sure that data is copied in a consistent state in order for the backups to be worth anything. It's not acceptable simply to make a snapshot of the database and ask the crash recovery system of that database to make the image consistent during recovery. The snapshot must be created in a way that is supported by the database application. One example of this would be snapshot systems that integrate with Windows Volume Shadow Services (VSS), as it acts as an intermediary between a snapshot system and the applications that need to be placed in a consistent state. Before considering any snapshot-based product as the core of your backup system, make sure the product has a good answer to this particular requirement.
Another area where snapshot backup systems often fall short is the vendors that make them feel that since all you have to do is "cd" into a certain directory and grab the file you need, there's no need for any centralized backup catalog or index, the way traditional backup systems have. While it is true that a snapshot backup system is somewhat "self-indexing," it is also true that sometimes people don't know where the file they need to restore resides, and a backup catalog can help with that. With some products, this functionality may actually be provided by marrying a traditional backup product and a snapshot-based product, as some traditional products offer indexing of snapshot-based backups via NDMP.
Make sure your snapshot backup product can scale
Where the rubber meets the road is in configuration, monitoring and reporting. What works for a small shop with one storage system isn't going to work with an enterprise with hundreds or thousands of them. When examining this area of functionality, be sure to ask yourself how well a particular product's capabilities will scale if the size of your data center grows drastically over time. Some systems require you to maintain snapshot and volume relationships via the command line where others have sophisticated Web-based user interfaces to do that for you.
The most important question for any backup administrator to answer every day is "Did the backups work?"
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The most important question for any backup administrator to answer every day is "Did the backups work?" Larger shops may actually have a staff of operators watching backups as they are performed, and smaller shops may have a single person who checks last night's backups first thing in the morning. Either way, the monitoring functionality of the backup system must be able to answer this question quickly and efficiently.
Reporting is slightly different, as it helps to understand backup trends over time. Are there certain volumes that have difficulty backing up on a regular basis? Is there enough capacity for snapshots and production data? Are there any snapshots that are taking up significantly more room than other snapshots? These questions are answered by the reporting functionality of the product.
One final thing to consider if you are thinking about replacing your traditional backup systems with a snapshot backup system is that most of the former are host-based and most of the latter are storage-based. The significant increase in server and storage virtualization increases the difficulty of doing storage-based backups. In a world where a "server" can magically move from one physical server and its associated storage to a completely different server and storage resources with a single mouse click, host-based backups are the easiest way to ensure that that server (actually a VM) is backed up no matter where it resides. Storage-based backups need to account for this particular phenomenon.
It's possible under certain circumstances to completely replace a backup system and all of its functionality with a snapshot-based system. Just make sure you think through all of the things that your backup system does for you today, and make sure that your new system can do those things as well.
About this author: W. Curtis Preston (a.k.a. "Mr. Backup"), executive editor and independent backup expert, has been singularly focused on data backup and recovery for more than 15 years. From starting as a backup admin at a $35 billion dollar credit card company to being one of the most sought-after consultants, writers and speakers in this space, it's hard to find someone more focused on recovering lost data. He is the webmaster of BackupCentral.com, the author of hundreds of articles, and the books "Backup and Recovery" and "Using SANs and NAS?".
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Miami, Florida -- The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program technology provider companies, HP, IBM and Quantum, announced that two recently-released separate studies found that tape had significant TCO benefits over disk, including lower cost per GB, lower operating expenses and lower energy costs.
The two studies, from the Enterprise Strategy Group and The Clipper Group, evaluated the costs of long-term storage for various scenarios that included tape and disk as the primary storage medium. In each case, the studies found that tape had long-term cost advantages when compared to a scenario that relied on a disk-only solution.
"The notion that 'tape is dead' ignores the substantial evidence that favors tape as a lower cost, environmentally friendly removable medium that is well suited for offline data protection as well as high growth compliance, fixed content and archiving applications," said Senior Analyst Mark Peters who conducted the study by ESG.
The TPC sponsored ESG study evaluated a common disk environment with an industry-standard deduplication system versus a tape library with LTO-5, with full nightly backups, over a five-year period. The scenarios included replicated systems and offsite tape vaults. In all circumstances, the TCO for VTL with deduplication ranged from about 2 to 4 times more expensive than the LTO-5 tape library TCO.
A separate study on archiving very large data collections by The Clipper Group also found that tape is much less expensive than disk, using significantly less energy when measured on a per petabyte basis over a 12-year period. In short, the TCO under The Clipper Group scenario found the disk solution for long-term archiving to be more than $67M, approximately 15 times greater than the cost to deploy a tape solution of $4.5M over the 12 year scenario with the cost of energy alone for disk at $4M and only about $18k for tape. In the end, The Clipper Group concluded that the vast majority of archived data should reside on tape.
"Tape continues to play an important role in the protection and preservation of an organization's digital assets," said Rob Clark, Senior Vice President, Disk and Tape Backup Product Group, Quantum. "These studies from leading figures further reinforce to the industry that tape is the optimal low cost storage medium for long term data retention. LTO UItrium generation 5 capacity and performance enable highly efficient archive and data protection solutions, with all the benefits that an open standard brings."
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Orlando, Florida -- Application delivery networking specialist F5 Networks announced the release of a hardware platforms for F5 ARX file virtualization solutions. With the introduction of the ARX1500 and ARX2500 appliances, the ARX product line expands to provide small to medium-size businesses with data management capabilities. For medium-sized storage environments, the ARX2500 platform includes support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet network infrastructures.
The ARX appliances are designed to help businesses simplify and scale their data management infrastructures by eliminating the static mapping between client and storage resources. With F5's file virtualization capabilities, organizations can access and migrate data between resources as demand dictates, without impacting users or requiring downtime.
With ARX's storage tiering capabilities, organizations can designate high performance storage resources for their most important or most frequently accessed data. In addition, intelligently tiering important versus low-priority data files delivers the ancillary benefit of reducing backup windows considerably. High-priority data can be backed up daily, while secondary and tertiary data can be done less frequently.
"The new ARX platforms address a real need in the storage market," said David Hekimian, CTO at data management and networking specialist Trace3. "Previously, ARX products have been a more obvious fit for large enterprises, given the scale and performance capabilities of the solution. By offering F5's substantial data management and file virtualization capabilities to a wider range of customers at an accessible price point, we expect to see a marked interest among smaller, growing organizations."
In addition to providing storage tiering capabilities, ARX devices enable IT administrators to automate labor-intensive processes for common data management tasks, including scaling storage infrastructures or performing data migrations. IT teams can also implement a policy-based approach to data management, meaning that standard tasks can be configured, automated and tailored in accordance with individual organizations' storage needs.
"In today's rapidly digitizing economy, small and mid-sized enterprises are dealing with exploding amounts of digital content and a growing range of data management challenges," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage and IT executive strategies at IT analytics firm IDC. "Solutions like F5's new ARX products take advantage of advanced file virtualization to help IT teams boost the performance and reduce the administrative burden of their file-based storage assets."
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Managing enterprise disk storage is difficult. F5 is reducing this burden with the ARX Series, a family of appliances that abstract physical file storage from logical user access using virtualization.
F5 Networks ARX Platform Removes Chaos From Enterprise Storage
Many IT professionals are wondering if the exponential growth of disk storage and the associated management chores will ever slow down. Regrettably, for those charged with the day-to-day administration of enterprise storage, the answer is likely no.
Several factors are forcing the growth of storage pools, ranging from basic drivers, such as robust applications, to more complex factors, such as "big data" analytics, compliance requirements and disaster recovery. Simply put, storage is growing with no end in sight, and management is becoming more complex and time-consuming. That all adds up to higher costs, reduced efficiencies and longer backup windows.
F5 Networks thinks it has an answer to that dilemma (and several others) in the form of its appliance-based ARX storage virtualization platform, which focuses on abstracting physical file storage from its native, closed, management tools and virtualizing it into a centrally managed, easy-to-control layer. With an entry price of around $30,000, ARX combines several capabilities that make it a welcome addition to any large enterprise network that is struggling with storage issues.
While the process of creating a namespace sounds complicated, the GUI makes it straightforward and provides ample help. It only took me a few minutes to set up a virtual volume, and share it so that it was available to users. That is the magic provided by the ARX’s wizard-based setups. Of course, a lot goes on behind the scenes to make virtual volumes work properly, but the ARX appliance handles all of that heavy lifting. IT managers just need to provide the appropriate information to make everything work. Volume creation is probably one area where the most care should be taken. However, if you do make any mistakes, it is comforting to know that the ARX does not change anything on the physical storage device, allowing you recreate virtual volumes, virtual file systems and most anything else with ease.
At this point, it’s probably worth a note on how one would actually deploy the ARX appliance. For this test, I created a namespace from scratch in a test environment. It was easy enough; however, most people already have a storage environment with existing users, file data, file shares and storage devices. They will be happy to know that the ARX provides an option that minimizes deployment headaches, which F5 refers to as a “namespace takeover.” Here, the ARX appliance actually takes over all of the identifying details of the storage environment it’s virtualizing, from storage device IP addresses and fully qualified domain names (FQDN) to the individual share names. The ARX can provide a virtual IP address for each device it takes over to make the environment after virtualization appear identical to the one before.
Naturally, ARX does a lot more than just provision virtual storage for use by end users. The ARX platform also provides additional capabilities, ranging from simplified storage migration to intelligent storage tiering to extensive management tools and policy controls. According to F5, this is where the real value of the solution lies. I had the chance to play around with some of the policies. Although I was obviously in a small test environment, even this limited experience was intriguing.
Similar to name-spaces, creating a policy on the ARX is a relatively straightforward affair using a wizard-based setup. The ARX applies policies at the volume level to control the movement of files between the various physical file systems within each volume. I’ll talk about how this plays out in each of the ARX’s primary use cases below.
The first use case that F5 talks about is data migration—essentially, the movement of files from one physical file system to another. I performed a simple test that simulated a migration between two storage devices. I started with an ARX volume presented over the network as a CIFS share and comprised of a single physical file system on a Windows file server. After creating some files in the CIFS share, I verified that they were in actuality created on the Windows server. I then used the ARX’s GUI to provision a second physical file system into the volume, this time from a NetApp device. In the policy wizard, I selected the Windows device as the source and the NetApp device as the destination, initiated the migration and watched as the files simply appeared on the NetApp device. During the entire process, the files were visible to the user in the CIFS share, regardless of whether they were physically located on the Windows or NetApp device.
See Part 2
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Orlando Florida -- After about a minute, they were moved down to Tier 2 as expected. The second tiering test involved what F5 called a “placement” policy. Here, files are placed on the designated tier as they are created, instead of being moved there after a period of time. Using a common example, I created a policy that automatically placed all MP3 files on Tier 2. Next, I created an MP3 file on my desktop and copied it to the CIFS share, watching it get placed on Tier 2. Files in both tests were always visible in the CIFS share, regardless of whether they were physically located on Tier 1 or Tier 2.
In the final test, I created a capacity-balancing policy to balance utilization across several file systems. Here, I created several 500GB physical systems across both a NetApp and EMC device. Then, I created a new ARX volume comprising these file systems and presented it on the network as CIFS share. As expected, checking the properties of the CIFS share on my PC showed the aggregate storage capacity of the physical file systems. The next step was to create the capacity-balancing policy to balance new file creation. Then, I created several files, watching as the ARX automatically placed one file in each of the physical file systems. F5 says that this is a growing use case for its customers, as applications become more and more data-intensive. Some applications require very large file systems beyond what is capable from a single device. This capacity-balancing capability allows you to construct a very large virtual file system comprising capacity from multiple physical file systems or storage devices behind it.
While my testing didn’t simulate disaster recovery in the test environment, F5 did point out a couple of interesting items regarding data protection. The first was with backup. F5 says that the storage tiering and capacity-balancing policies can actually help their customers reduce the amount of time required to perform a full backup of their data. For example, a “last modified” tiering policy essentially separates changing and unchanging data among different physical file systems. You could back up these different physical file systems at different intervals—changing data on a weekly basis and unchanging data less often. And if you have multiple physical file systems (such as in the capacity-balancing test), you can back up each of the physical file systems in much less time than it would take for the virtual file system.
The second item was what F5 calls “virtual snapshots.” Many enterprise IT organizations have come to depend on the snapshot capabilities of their NAS systems for disk-based backup and recovery. But what happens when you virtualize those NAS systems? F5 took me through the ARX virtual snapshot capability, which essentially does the same thing for snapshots that the namespace does for file systems. To test the virtual snapshots, we added to the setup left over from the capacity-balancing test with a third file system from a Windows file server. We then created a snapshot rule on the ARX for the virtual volume. The snapshot rule is what tells the underlying storage devices—in this case the NetApp, EMC and Windows devices—to take physical snapshots of these file systems at a specific schedule. After the first snapshot was performed, we went to the snapshot directory and verified that we could see all of our files in the same directory, despite the fact that they are on different physical file systems and, hence, different physical snapshot images on three devices.
Conclusions
While the F5 ARX series proves to be a significant investment, the truth is that an ARX device reinvents the organization's relationship with storage. In other words, the new storage paradigm offered by ARX reduces management overhead, increases flexibility and brings ease to building storage pools that can be dynamically reshaped, instantly, to meet the elastic needs of any organization. What’s more, ARX leverages existing storage solutions, which may preempt the need to buy more storage. Another notable fact about ARX is that it does not “get in the way” of performance. The device's ability to handle all the processing at line speed means that network performance is not affected.
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Orlando, FL -- With StrongBox Crossroads has built a NAS head for tape libraries that combines disk access speed with tape's low-cost and longevity, and can cut file storage costs by 90 per cent.
That's Crossroads' boast, although the NAS head is our term, and Rob Sims, Crossroads' president and CEO clarified it by saying: "It's a NAS head on top of LTFS storage."
The arrival of LTFS (Linear Tape File System) [1], which adds a self-describing file system interface to tape and software which talks LTFS can present an LTO-5 tape through a file/folder structure with a drag-and-drop method for adding or retrieving files from it. Crossroads has built StrongBox to take advantage of the LTFS tape interface.
StrongBox and LTFS
Crossroads Strongbox 3U enclosure
The background to this, in Crossroads' view, is that tape is the lowest-cost long-term storage medium for data but is complex to use, with its lack of a file/folder access structure and offline nature of cartridges in a tape library, amongst other things. Disk on the other hand is great for being online but expensive when bulk data has to be stored. Enter LTFS and the situation changes.
Crossroads has reacted to this by building a combined disk and tape archive facility, actually a dedicated filer appliance with archive software and an LTFS method of talking to an attached tape library. Supported libraries include HP's MSL2024, MSL2048, and ESLG3 libraries, and IBM's TS3100, TS3200, and TS3500 products. The set of supported libraries is being expanded and we're told that StrongBox should work with most LTO-5 supporting libraries.
StrongBox hardware is a 1U or 3U rack enclosure running on a Xeon sever and supporting 5.5TB (T1 small box) or 14TB (T3 big box) of disk storage, meaning 200 million or 5 billion files respectively. It talks NFS or CIFS to app-running servers. The little box connects to its tape library by dual 6Gbit's SAS ports while the big box offers 4-port 6Gbits SAS or 8Gbit/s FC to the back-end tape library.
File I/O
The software makes StrongBox provide a caching facility. The first part of a file can be stored on disk with the latter part on a tape cartridge. When a user requests the file it can be transmitted from disk initially, while the tape cartridge is fetched, mounted on a drive in the library, and the file located. Then the rest of the file can be streamed from the tape through StrongBox to the user, making it appear as if the file was online all the time. Files are read in from tape at full tape speed and sent out to the requesting user at the speed of the link.
When a file is written to StrongBox it is written to disk, into an ingest buffer sized at 1TB by default. A copy is written to tape, with perhaps a second copy for surety, according to settable policies, which can also specify replication to a remote StrongBox. When the file has been written to tape the disk copy's size will be reduced to the amount needed for read caching. This is set at 512KB by default. Files are aged out of the disk cache, as it fills up, on a least-recently-used basis.
LTFS-format tapes can be ingested into StrongBox and made available on a network share. Any LTFS-format tape exported by StrongBox should be readable by any receiving LTFS-capable library. This represents a way of transporting very large volumes of data, volumes that would be too slow and/or costly to send across a network.
Data security and StrongBox implementation
The StrongBox software generates and verifies a hash code for every file so that users can rely on file content integrity. There is also ongoing monitoring of the storage drives and media, with files on at-risk media rewritten to known good media automatically.
David Reine, a senior contributing analyst at The Clipper Group says of StrongBox: "[It] presents a paradigm shift in the use of tape that is cost effective and energy-efficient, lowering the TCO of the storage infrastructure for the enterprise. It separates tape from its legacy relationship with backup applications. By using LTO-5 and LTFS, StrongBox has the capacity, scalability and flexibility required for use as an active archive."
Crossroads says no agents, backup software or application modifications are required when you install StrongBox, and organisations gain a persistent view for all files on tapes stored in the library. Customers can use an existing tape library and dedicate it or a partition in it to StrongBox.
Crossroads channel partners are also extending their ability to offer all-in-one bundles of StrongBox plus a tape library. Sims said: "CIBER, for example, is a value added reseller that works with Crossroads. We also have strategic partners that will provide the complete package. Those are not yet announced."
Capgemini has deployed StrongBox in its Netherlands data centre to archive data for one of the largest Dutch department stores. An existing optical storage-based archiving system was replaced by StrongBox, which also expanded Capgemini’s managed data vaulting services and SAP archives. Capgemini is also developing a new StrongBox-based archival service.
Frank Huiskes, Capgemini's global chief technology officer of infrastructure transformation services (and a man with-a-very-long-title) , said StrongBox: "clearly provided the most compelling pricing per gigabyte, while also offering a new set of ‘always online’ capabilities that have the potential to greatly expand our archiving services."
Sims says StrongBox is: "priced by Terabyte: StrongBox T1 is approximately $21,000 and StrongBox T3 approximately $31,000, and [it] can scale."
You can stick StrongBox in front of an existing LTO-5-supporting library and get LTFS advantages that way, bringing a caching, disk-based filer front end to it. Or you could install a new StrongBOx/tape library combination to replace ageing optical archiving and provide online access to tape-based archiving that should be cheaper, substantially cheaper, than retaining the data on disk. The Capgemini example clearly speaks to possibilities for cloud service providers.
In this era of ever-proliferating unstructured data growth, giving tape libraries a NAS head transplant, and so cutting demands for increasing disk array capacity, could be a really smart move.
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111 or click info@cloudcaboodle.com
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VMX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Datacenters, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government
SAN JOSE, CA, Dec 12, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Quantum Corp. QTM -6.67% , a proven global expert in data protection and big data management, today announced that the company's vmPRO 4000 integrated solution for protecting data on virtual servers was named "Storage Virtualization Product of the Year" at the 2011 Storage, Virtualization and Cloud Computing (SVC) Awards. The award recognizes Quantum's commitment to building on its data protection expertise by combining innovative technologies and adding unique value to meet customers' evolving storage needs.
Quantum's vmPRO(TM) family of products, which includes the vmPRO 4000, provides an innovative way to protect virtual machines (VMs) simply and cost effectively within an organization's larger backup, disaster recovery (DR), and retention process. vmPRO technology operates as a virtual appliance integrated into VMware vCenter for streamlined management. Its progressive optimization reduces the amount of data to be protected by up to 75 percent and pre-conditions data to make deduplication more effective for faster backups and greater utilization of storage, server, and network resources. It also stores the virtual machines in their native format for fast recovery of whole VMs and individual files and supports third-party backup applications.
For more information call us at: 877-904-4347
"We are grateful to our customers, partners and peers within the storage industry for recognizing the innovation and value of the vmPRO family in this year's SVC Awards," said Gabriel Chaher, vice president, EMEA/APAC Marketing, Quantum. "We believe that it validates the technical and business benefits IT departments can expect from our unique combination of VM protection and industry-leading deduplication."
"These awards recognize the users, manufacturers and suppliers of storage, virtualization and cloud solutions in the European market and are voted on by the readers of our wide range of print and online publications," commented Bill Dunlop, CEO of award organizers Angel Business Communications. "The selections are made by IT professionals with a practical understanding of the challenges facing them. Quantum was the clear winner in its category: Storage Virtualization Product of the Year."
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111 or click info@cloudcaboodle.com
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VMX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Datacenters, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government