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2. Summary .............................................................................................................................. 1
What are Disaster Recovery and Data Protection? ................................ 2
What are RPO and RTO? ............................................................................................ 3
The Contemporary DR / DP Landscape ......................................................... 4
When the storage selection goes wrong ...................................................... 5
What matters most? ..................................................................................................... 7
Building Blocks ................................................................................................................. 8
Choosing the right storage for your needs ................................................. 10
DR / DP in Today’s Datacenter .............................................................................. 10
Scalability and Flexibility .......................................................................................... 11
Data Efficiency .................................................................................................................. 12
Efficient Disaster Recovery as a Service Offerings ................................. 14
Ecosystem Integration ................................................................................................ 15
Automation ......................................................................................................................... 16
DR plan Testing ................................................................................................................ 17
Control ..................................................................................................................................... 17
When Storage Selection Goes Right ................................................................ 18
Create a Successful DR / DP Strategy ............................................................. 20
Veeam Software .............................................................................................................. 21
Contents
3. The available technologies for disaster recovery (DR) and data protection
(DP) are rapidly developing. It is of a paramount importance to understand
your storage options, so you can build a strategy that maximizes both flexi-
bility and control.
Means of disaster recovery and data protection (DR / DP) for the enterprise
are constantly changing in response to growing data volumes, faster recov-
ery needs and rising business demands. IT teams must make smart choices
to take advantage of the latest innovations and ensure they can keep their
businesses online all the time.
Contrary to the old more or less passive role, today’s Storage Systems are
becoming key players in DR / DP practices. If you’re in the market for new
storage, paying attention to a few key factors will help you address your DR
/ DP challenges.
Any storage solution you choose must include replication, snapshot and
cloning. Compression and inline deduplication are also crucial in helping
you conserve both network bandwidth and storage capacity. These tech-
nologies must operate at the right granularity to enhance efficiency and
control DR / DP costs.
1
Summary
Storage
Storage
Storage
Public Cloud
(AWS,GOOGLE CLOUD,AZURE)
PRIMARY SECONDARY
Native Replication
S3 APIs
4. 2
Primary storage must provide the tools you need to monitor and control
DR / DP processes and the elasticity to utilize a variety of secondary storage
targets. You may need to be able to recover and replicate to and from a
cloud service provider or public cloud, storage from the same vendor, or
secondary storage such as a backup appliance (virtual or physical). Your
storage must integrate with the DR / DP processes and tools you currently
use or plan to use in the future.
This guide will help you understand the storage features that are crucial to
modern DR / DP practices and provides detailed guidelines on what to look
for in a DR / DP storage solution.
What are Disaster Recovery and Data Protection?
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery is the process of restoring a failed service, application or
the operations of an entire datacenter to full operational status following a
disaster. This includes natural or human-caused disasters. Having a disaster
recovery setup in place is essential for ensuring business continuity.
Recently, there have been a number of high-profile outages in the industry
that are making the enterprise rethink DR planning:
• A power outage caused by storm at the Amazon Web Services (AWS)
cloud in Sydney causing up to 10 hours of downtime to a number of
large websites and online services.
• A Delta Airlines datacenter outage in august 2016 grounded over
2000 flights over 3 days and cost $150 million.
Methods of disaster recovery include replication (synchronous or asynchro-
nous) to a secondary site and recovery from offsite tape. Organizations
choose synchronous-replication to protect their most mission-critical appli-
cations.
Data Protection
Data protection, also known as backup and restore, is the process of pro-
tecting data from:
5. Loss, Corruption or accidental deletion.
Example of where data protection comes in to play include a user who
accidentally deletes an important directory or file, hardware failures that
result in minor data losses, or coding errors that cause a database table to
become unreadable.
Conventional methods of data protection include asynchronous replication
and tape backup.
3
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
RPO is a service level that specifies the target point in time to which a
service or an application can be recovered. A recovery point objective of
one hour means that you will be able to restore all your data for a service or
an application in no more than one hour.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
RTO is a service level that specifies the time needed to restore a service or
an application to operation after a disaster takes it offline. For instance, a
recovery time objective of two hours is a commitment to have a service or
an application back to online status within two hours of disaster occur-
rence.
What are RPO and RTO?
RPO:
Recover
Quickly
RTO:
Minimize
down�me
Last
Backup Event
Data
Restored
Time
6. 4
The players and the landscape of the DR / DP field are changing rapidly.
Keep your options open so you don’t get left behind.
In the past, DR / DP processes relied almost exclusively on tape media.
However, managing tapes was complicated and as the volumes of data
grew, restore times became longer. Applications could end up being down
for days if not weeks. To accelerate restores, shrink backup sizes and
improve service levels, IT teams turned to disk based solutions for protect-
ing their critical data and applications. Over time, superior backup appli-
ances that use compression and deduplication technologies to lower stor-
age capacity requirement and costs and enhance efficiency became
extremely popular in backup and disaster recovery strategies.
These days, it’s a common practice to have multiple copies of data on
different types of media: DR copies in remote locations for disaster, tape
or/and cloud copies for longer term retention, disk based copies for fast
recovery, and so on. There are also other several important trends affecting
the DR / DP landscape as well, such as:
• IT teams are being asked to shrink RTO and RPO even further at a
reasonable price.
• Deduplication and Compression – the enabling technologies that led
to the backup appliance, are now widely available in modern storage
systems.
• The use of snapshots as a first line of defense has become increasingly
accepted.
In order to navigate this challenging landscape, you need to choose a stor-
age solution for your datacenter that will keep your options open. The
following questions should be considered as you evaluate new storage
options:
• How easily will this storage solution fit into my current DR / DP strate-
gy?
• Will it allow replication to a variety of secondary storage targets?
• Does the storage support snapshots as a first line of defense?
The Contemporary DR / DP Landscape:
7. • Does it integrate with the public cloud?
• Does the storage integrate with the leading DR / DP vendors?
5
When the storage selection goes wrong
When tasked with DR / DP and production work together, the wrong stor-
age fails to deliver performance
Backup and DR interfere with virtual desktops at international firm
An international law firm was early to adopt a Virtual desktop infrastructure
(VDI) only environment with over 500 virtual desktops.
As the VDI environment grew, legacy storage failed to handle the load.
Users were constantly complaining about application lags.
To make things worse, due to performance, the IT team could never get
vendor replication tools to work properly. Every time the team tried to do
replication, it used too much resources and bandwidth that it further
degraded the VDI performance.
The Problem
Vendor disaster recovery tools were too resource intensive and complicated
to run in conjunction with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on the firm’s exist-
ing storage.
DR / DP too Complex With Conventional Storage at Leading Insurance
Company
A leading Insurance Company was struggling with all aspects of its legacy
storage setup including storage analytics, complexity of the backup envi-
ronment and overall performance. The company’s main concern was to
safeguard their large in-house CRM database, which contained thousands
of valuable client records and served as the backbone of the company’s
everyday operations.
As more demanding amounts of data resources were being processed, the
IT staff found that their current system became difficult to manage,
8. and even more difficult to backup their data. Their backup procedures
required multiple manual steps – one including backing up their data to a
tape storage device every couple of days – which completely exceeded their
backup time window.
Legacy storage lacked the flexibility they desired, especially when it came
to scalability. There was virtually no room for them to expand their storage
space with their current system alone. They had no option to network their
resources offsite and there was no assurance that their database would be
protected in the event of an onsite failover.
The Problem
Conventional storage lacked flexibility, performance and complicated man-
agement.
Conventional Storage fails to meet cyber-security laboratory backup
needs
A government cyber-security lab trains personnel and tests capabilities to
prevent and defend against network intrusions. Traditional storage using
Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) and volumes was not meeting their backup
performance needs. The lab needed to be able to provision hundreds or
thousands of VMs to safely and efficiently back up all event data during
exercises and support training events.
It was taking an entire day or longer to backup the entire site on the exist-
ing storage platform. And they had to stop all other functions, including
rollouts of other events, since it would effectively lock up the entire storage
system and use all available resources for the backup.
The Problem
The existing storage platform lacked the performance to handle production
workloads and backup at the same time.
6
9. 7
The primary storage you deploy in your corporate datacenters and other
locations can make a huge difference to the success of your DR / DP efforts.
Here are the Storage attributes to look out for:
Core Building Blocks
The storage solution must include replication, cloning and snapshots. These
technologies make the foundation of your DR / DP plan.
Scalability and Flexibility
With DR / DP landscape in flow, it’s important to choose storage solution
that leaves your future options open and can scale.
Data Efficiency
Deduplication, compression and other efficiency features are essential
technologies to save WAN bandwidth and storage capacities.
Ecosystem Integration
Your storage solution should integrate with all DR / DP elements including
other data, hardware, hypervisors, protection software, etc.
Automation
All DR / DP functions must be easily automated to enable DevOPs and
private cloud, save time and reduce errors.
Control
Visibility of all the storage functions and the DR / DP aspects can eliminate
unwelcome surprises.
What matters most?
10. 8
DATA EFFICIENCY
ECOSYSTEM INTEGRATION AUTOMATION CONTROL
SCALABILITY &
FLEXIBILITY
CORE BUILDING BLOCKS
+
These topics are explored in more detail on the following pages
Building Blocks
Several storage capabilities are essential in enterprise data centers. A Storage
solution should not be considered if it lacks these features.
Replication
A Storage solution with built-in replication allows you to make copies of
important applications, data and VMs regularly, providing multiple points of
recovery and protecting against disaster. There are two types of replication:
Synchronous and Asynchronous:
Synchronous replication guarantees that all data is written synchronously to
two separate locations. Even if one replica is destroyed in a disaster, no data is
lost. Synchronous replication may affect the rate at which data can be written.
Synchronous replication typically has a distance limit to minimize the effects
of latency on write performance.
11. Asynchronous replication is usually based on periodic snapshots. Once an
initial data copy is created, only the changes that have occurred since the
last snapshot are replicated, saving time and bandwidth. This significantly
lowers the burden on production storage systems and networks when
compared to full data copies. Asynchronous replication may be able to
support a variety of bidirectional topologies including one-to-one,
one-to-many, and many-to-one, giving you more flexibility in how and
where you want to protect your data.
Both types of replication (depending on need) can be performed across a
campus, within a datacenter, across greater distances, or within a metro-
politan area. The greater the separation, the greater the latency and the
greater the bandwidth costs.
Cloning
Cloning gives you the ability to create a writable or virtual copy of a storage
object such as a VM or LUN without requiring a full copy. Cloning is
extremely useful for data management functions such as disaster recovery,
data protection, and others. A failed VM can be quickly restored, in either a
primary or secondary location, by cloning a backup snapshot.
Use of cloning enables you to do DR testing without disrupting ongoing
replication. Cloning also simplifies many other functions including a variety
of development and DevOPs tasks such as making a test environment
identical to your production environment, creating multiple copies of test
data sets or creating identical work environments for developers.
Snapshot
A space-efficient and fast snapshot is your first line of defense in data pro-
tection. In many storage setups, snapshots are the foundation of most data
management functions and data protection. Only recently, has this tech-
nology been taken seriously as a first line-of-defense ahead of other data
protection solutions.
It is worth mentioning that there are significant differences in the imple-
9
12. implementation of snapshots between vendors. Some implementations
may still rely on time-consuming data copies. That’s not what you want.
New implementations track changed blocks. Some may use copy-on write
or COW algorithms that will decrease storage performance after a snapshot
has been created. The most efficient implementations use a redi-
rect-on-write or ROW algorithm.
Choosing the right storage for your needs
As you consider these features, it’s worth paying close attention to the
differences between implementations. The most important factors include:
• Performance.
Does use of the feature have a big impact on the storage system perfor-
mance either during or after the operation? Especially for production
storage.
• Time Delay.
How quickly does the operation execute? If it fails, do you get notified?
• Granularity.
At what granularity can the operation be performed?
• Space efficiency.
How efficiently does the operation use storage space? Greater efficiency
means less cost. VM, vDisk, LUN, volume, file? If your operations are
largely virtualized, you’ll likely be happier with storage that can operate
directly at the VM level.
DR / DP in Today’s Datacenter
In a modern datacenter, the IT team typically takes snapshots of important
data and VMs on primary storage as a first line of defense every hour or two.
This provides many potential recovery points versus daily backups. For some
data, snapshots are enough. More important VMs and data are replicated
to one or more secondary locations that may be: cloud, DR Datacenter,
10
13. 11
, or service provider at regular intervals. These secondary copies serve both
as backups and provide disaster recovery. Should a failure occur, and
depending on the severity of the outage, the IT team can:
• Restart the affected services or applications at the secondary location.
• Restore necessary data or VMs from a secondary copy.
• Restore necessary data or VMs locally from a snapshot.
Clones of VMs at the secondary location can be used for testing of DR pro-
cesses.
SCALABILITY & FLEXIBILITY
With the evolution occurring in DR / DP landscape, it’s crucial to choose a
storage that gives you the flexibility to update your strategy to meet business
needs, minimize costs and support scalability.
The key factor in ensuring flexibility is to keep your options open in terms of
where you will store your DR / DP copies of your critical data. There are three
main options:
• A backup appliance / other secondary storage device. If you already have
such a solution in place, your storage must be able to work with it. And you
want to be sure your storage integrates without making the environment
too heterogeneous. Sourcing a secondary storage solution from a different
vendor will likely require third-party software.
• Secondary storage from the same vendor. Using primary and secondary
storage from the same vendor has several potential advantages. It can
simplify management, since you don’t have to manage different storage in
the secondary role. A vendor’s native replication may eliminate the need
for third-party software and could deliver maximum efficiency.
• Cloud storage. Businesses today are looking at ways to utilize the cloud
to reduce disaster recovery and backup costs.
14. 12
How to choose storage with maximum flexibility
The following features should be considered when you’re looking for storage
solution with maximum flexibility benefits:
• Vendor limitations. Make sure to understand any limitations in a vendor’s
DR / DP tools. For example, how much flexibility do you have in choosing a
secondary device? You may choose all-flash storage for your primary stor-
age needs, but it will likely be more cost-effective to replicate to hybrid
storage or disk-based as the secondary target.
• Cloud. Be sure to find out which public cloud vendors the storage can
integrate with and find out how extensively each storage choice is used by
the cloud service providers. It can be advantageous to choose a service
provider that uses the same storage you’ll deploy in your datacenter.
• Synchronous replication. Even though you may not currently be plan-
ning to use synchronous replication, it may be wise to choose a vendor
that offers it as an option.
• Broad support. Make sure the vendor you choose has broad support for
the backup appliance / device, secondary storage and cloud storage
options. See the “Ecosystem Integration” section for more related informa-
tion.
DATA EFFICIENCY
Choosing the most efficient storage for your requirements can significantly
decrease your CapEx and OpEx costs—not just in the WAN bandwidth
expenses, but also in the amount of storage capacity purchased.
15. 13
Saving WAN Bandwidth
Whatever storage solution you choose should include efficient replication at
the right granularity. If you are moving or planning to move to a container
model, choose a storage solution that can operate at that granularity. There
are two ways replication can save WAN bandwidth and reduce costs:
• By decreasing the volume of data that must be sent. For instance, you
may want to replicate a single VM or set of VMs, however, LUN-based stor-
age requires that you replicate an entire LUN with many VMs—or re-archi-
tect your storage design.
• Data is always sent de-duplicated and compressed over the WAN.
Saving Storage Capacity
Modern storage systems, whether for primary or secondary storage, should
include a range of storage efficiency technologies to reduce the overall capaci-
ty you’ll need:
• Deduplication. This technology can reduce the capacity needed for
many common data sets. If your environment is virtualized, depending on
how it is configured it may contain a large amount of duplication in the
form of identical operating system and application files across many VMs.
Backup data often has a very high degree of duplication, though this can
depend on the backup methods you’re using.
• Compression. Data compression also does a good job of reducing capac-
ity requirements for most data types. Compression can reduce require-
ments for database storage where levels of data duplication are typically
low and deduplication may not be much help. Since the effectiveness of
compression is highly dependent on the data type, look for algorithms
optimized for colder backup data.
• Thin provisioning. Reduces the amount of storage you need to allocate
16. 14
to services and applications upfront, increasing storage utilization.
$
Efficient Disaster Recovery as a Service Offerings
If you’re a cloud service provider, maximizing resource utilization while con-
trolling costs is critical. To offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), howev-
er, you may have to over provision storage to satisfy customer needs in case of
a failure. And you may have to provision storage systems for each customer or
offer different levels of service.
Modern storage systems with per VM quality of service (QoS) can solve this
problem. Per-VM QoS allows you to establish tiers of service on a single array;
setting maximum or minimum QoS thresholds for groups or even individual
VMs.
Now you can consolidate data from multiple customers onto a single array
and guarantee that each customer will receive the QoS they are contracted
for. DRaaS is a fast-growing and increasingly important use case for cloud
service providers, but you need storage that can provide the policy manage-
ment and SLAs necessary to manage these advanced services.
DRaaS offerings allow companies to eliminate the complexity and expense of
maintaining a datacenter for DR and shift CapEx to OpEx.
17. 15
Because storage is a vital part of DR / DP success, your storage should inte-
grate with all the other elements of your environment including other data,
hardware, hypervisors, protection software, etc. Choose a storage solution with
wide integration from a company that understands data protection and can
support your business.
Make sure the storage you choose integrates with the other elements of your
DR / DP and datacenter environments:
Your storage solution needs to integrate with the hypervisors you run:
• Microsoft Hyper-V, including ODX support.
• VMware vSphere, including VASA and VAAI support.
DR / DP software.
• Look for vendors that work with DR / DP leaders such as Veeam software.
• In the best case, your chosen storage vendor should have a good relation-
ship with other vendors whose software you intend to use.
• If you’re a VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) user, check for integra-
tion.
Some storage providers offer plug-ins for direct access to DR / DP features and
greater levels of integration with the products above.
ECOSYSTEM INTEGRATION
+
18. 16
AUTOMATION
In order to meet your DR / DP requirements now and in the future, you will
want storage that is easily automated. This will facilitate DR / DP processes
and testing, offload IT staff, and enable you to better support DevOps needs
and private cloud.
IT teams recognize automation as a way to streamline tasks and eliminate or
reduce the chance of operator error. This is certainly the case with DR / DP
operations - most of which are highly repeatable. You want to be able to auto-
mate regularly scheduled backup and replication activities, as well as ad-hoc
functions. For example, it’s common to create a snapshot of a VM before
upgrading software or installing a patch. Then if something goes wrong, you
can immediately roll back to the last good working status. You will also want
to be able to automate DR testing processes as much as possible.
IT teams are being asked to provide private cloud services through self-service
portals with infrastructure resources such as VMs and storage capacity. Stor-
age should provide easy automation to make it possible to include DR / DP
choices through the self-service portal. For instance, a user might want to
provision a VM to run a new application and have snapshots of that VM creat-
ed every one or two hours with nightly replication.
Many enterprise IT teams are moving to a DevOps model that bridges the gap
between internal software developers and IT teams to deliver software fea-
tures more quickly and with higher quality. If your company is moving
towards DevOps, you’ll need to be able to incorporate replication, clones and
snapshots as part of automated testing and workflows.
Things to look for in Storage Automation
• Easy orchestration. Storage infrastructure that’s easy to orchestrate can
be a big advantage. Once again, it comes down to a question of operating
at the right granularity. In a virtualized environment, VM-level operations
will simplify the automation process. The same is true for container-level
operations, if your company is moving in that direction.
19. 17
• REST APIs. REST APIs are the key to storage automation in the cloud. To
automate all storage functions including monitoring, replication, clones
and snapshots, look for storage that offers a full set of REST APIs.
• Deeper Integration. Some vendors may offer specific integrations on top
of REST APIs to make it simpler to automate storage using popular tools
such as VMware vRealize Orchestrator, Python, PowerShell, and various
Microsoft tools.
DR plan Testing
Bringing up a DR site to make sure that everything is working properly inevita-
bly interrupts ongoing replication processes. That’s why most organizations
find it extremely difficult to effectively test a DR plan. Cloning solves this prob-
lem. You can clone everything you need for your DR testing to create writable
point-in-time copies. Replication processes can continue to write to the active
volumes while you carry out your DR testing using the clones. And since addi-
tional storage space is only consumed as changes are made, the whole pro-
cess is extremely storage-efficient.
IT teams need to be able to simulate failures and test DR plans without
impacting ongoing production workloads.
CONTROL
Your Storage should give you the tools you need to stay on top of your DR / DP
aspects and storage functions.
In a dynamic IT environment, things are continuously changing. The right
storage should give you the control tools you need to make sure your DR / DP
processes are working as expected and stay on top of your DR / DP environ-
ment. Here are a couple of things you might need to do:
• Monitor all primary and secondary storage to ensure they have the perfor-
mance and capacity to keep up with the DR / DP processes and produc-
tion workloads.
• Monitor all DR / DP processes to make sure they are running as expected.
20. 18
• Troubleshoot any problems that arise.
The right control tools can greatly improve your ability to implement a suc-
cessful DR / DP strategy and save your team substantial amount of time and
trouble.
Choosing the right Monitoring and Troubleshooting Features
Make sure the storage you look for provides the following features:
• At the minimum, the storage you choose should provide monitoring and
alerting for all its core capabilities including backup and DR, so you
can easily verify that everything is operating correctly.
• The ability to monitor both primary and secondary storage and under-
stand the relationships with VMs, networks, servers and applications can
help you make sure that everything is receiving the correct level of protec-
tion. For instance, it is often difficult to identify all the VMs and vDisks
associated with a particular application.
• The ability to forecast your future capacity and performance needs so you
know exactly when to add resources. This can be extremely helpful.
• Most storage monitoring tools operate at the LUN or volume level. Con-
tainer level and VM level monitoring can speed up troubleshooting and
simplify interpretation.
• Integrate with other environment tools. Your storage should provide the
ability to access information through API calls. This is particularly helpful
for managing heterogeneous environments.
The right storage can help your DR / DP succeed.
Modern Storage Accelerates VDI, Enables DR / DP at Law Firm
Subsequent to talks with peers at other companies, viewing online demos,
and reviewing industry reports and blogs, the law firm chose a new storage
platform. Migration went quickly, and the IT team soon decided to upgrade
all its existing storage based on phenomenal results. With built-in
When Storage Selection Goes Right…
21. 19
replication solution and tight integration with Veeam, the team simplified its
backup and DR strategy and reduced the complexity of recovery. Given the
lower costs, they were able to expand DR to all virtual desktops and reduce
RTOs for many more systems.
Benefits
Vastly better DR / DP with no impact on VDI performance. Better security and
Lower costs.
Insurance Company Slashes DR/DP Complexity
The Insurance Company had several requirements for their new storage solu-
tion. Assuming application and general file storage duties, the solution had to
be implemented in stages. The solution had to take over backup responsibility
as well as specific point-in-time recoverability and meet undiscovered future
challenges. A Short phase one implementation also meant minimum training
and ease of use. After weighing all their requirements and considerable
market research, the company decided that StoneFly’s Powerful Voyager SAN
Cluster Appliances was the way to go. After consulting with StoneFly, the
company decided on a three stage implementation over the course of one
and a half year.
The company’s first phase was to migrate general files and to create a local
D2D backup plan using the new SAN Storage. Furthermore, with StoneFly’s
award-winning StoneFusion® Network Storage Platform (NSP), the insurance
company is able to effectively provision their storage resources to achieve their
business continuity objectives.
The second expansion assumed more application storage duties. This was
easily met with a half populated storage expansion unit holding its own RAID
6 protected data. When phase three rolled around, there was concern on the
Insurance Company's part that the subsystem would start to slow down with
the additional burden. Performance was critical. The patented StoneFusion OS
was flexible enough to add a second accelerated hardware SAS 6g RAID sub-
system to the ISC assuring the same outstanding performance not only for
this phase but down the road when required.
Today, the Insurance Company has finished their three phase plan and still
22. 20
have twenty-four disk slots to expand and the power and flexibility to drive
that future expansion.
Benefits
The StoneFly Voyager SAN Cluster Appliance simplifies DR / DP,
offers enhanced performance, redundancy, scalability, and high-
availability.
Cyber-security Lab Solves Data Protection struggles
When their existing storage failed to meet backup and performance needs,
the government facility found storage that could keep up. Replication
between production and DR storage takes just minutes, compared to a full
day previously and backups can now be done behind the scenes without
affecting production workloads. Deploying the hundreds of VMs needed for a
customer event can now be completed quickly. Additional benefits include: a
50% footprint reduction, reduced cooling and power, reduced training needs
and QoS to guarantee performance at the level of individual VMs.
Benefits
Simplified management, guaranteed performance and ability to run DR / DP
production workloads.
Create a Successful DR / DP Strategy
keep the following guidelines in mind, as you compare the storage vendor
options in terms of functionality and cost:
Scalability and Flexibility
Your storage solution should provide you as much flexibility and scalability to
grow your DR / DP plan in the future. Look for storage that offers diverse sec-
ondary storage solutions including cloud storage, backup appliances and
storage from the same vendor.
Data Efficiency
Deduplication, compression and thin provisioning can significantly reduce the
primary and secondary storage capacity needs and reduce WAN bandwidth
23. 21
requirements. That sums up to significant cost savings.
Core Building Blocks
Be sure that the storage solution replication, cloning and snapshot features
operate at the same level of granularity as your operations.
Ecosystem Integration
Your storage must integrate with other aspects of your DR / DP environment
including your existing secondary storage, backup and DR software, orchestra-
tion platforms, hypervisors and so on.
Automation
DR testing processes and DR / DP functions – you will want your storage solu-
tion to automate that for you. Also the incorporation of automated DR / DP
functions in your DevOps practices and private cloud offering.
Control
Predictive analytics simplify capacity planning. Storage solution should pro-
vide tools that simplify management and monitoring of all DR / DP processes.
This will make sure you are getting the data protection right and allow you to
quickly fix any problems that may arise as you map from the storage to the
VM to the application.
Veeam Software
Veeam Software Company develops backup, disaster recovery and VM man-
agement software for Hyper-V and VMware virtual environments. To enable
24.7.365 availability for the Enterprise, Veeam pioneered a range of availability
softwares to help organizations meet Recovery Point and Time objectives
(RTPO™) of less than 15 minutes for all data and applications. Veeam
Backup and Replication leverages storage, cloud technologies and
virtualization to enable the modern datacenter help organizations reduce
risks, save time, significantly lower CapEx and OpEx while always support the
current and future business objectives.
24. 22
All of the StoneFly Voyager SAN Cluster Storage appliances offer support for
Veeam Backup and replication software integration with all the features to
ensure high availability and business continuity. A powerful, easy to use and
affordable Storage with all the modern features the enterprise needs for DR /
DP for all their data and applications. Some of StoneFly Voyager SAN Cluster
Storage appliances DR / DP features include:
- RPO and RTO of less than 15 minutes for all data and applications
- Fully integrated with any private or public cloud platform for repli-cation,
DP & DR
- Simple cloud backup and replication
- 100% automated backup and testing
- Proactive visibility
- Designed for the modern datacenter
And much more!
25. 23
Thanks for reading
We hope the Data Protection and Disaster Recovery essential guide got you
thinking. Now’s the time to ditch legacy storage and switch to StoneFly! Learn
more about products built specifically for the modern enterprise. Just visit:
www.stonefly.com/products
So you can see how easy it is to guarantee performance, replicate, scale-out
and more.
The StoneFly Voyager SAN Cluster appliances are designed to offer the ulti-
mate in high-availability with redundant Storage Concentrators and “No
Single Point of failure”, StoneFly active / active clustering services with seam-
less failover and failback operations, active/active RAID controllers, and redun-
dant high-performance interconnects. The Voyager appliances implement the
StoneFly patented StoneFusion® platform to deliver modular, highly scalable
iSCSI & Fibre Channel SAN configurations. Trusted by US Navy in LSC combat
ships for a decade.
Organizations including; US Department of Defense, National Institute of
Health, United States Army Research Laboratory, Ecker Enterprises, LifeCare
Assurance and others have said “No to LUNs & legacy Storage”. With StoneFly
they manage only virtual machines, in a fraction of the footprint and at far
lower cost than traditional storage.
For more information, visit www.Stonefly.com
& follow us on Twitter @StoneFlyInc