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Deep Storage Solution Leverages Tape, NAS, and Cloud for Cost -Effective DRaaS August 2015 Adapted from Archival Strategies in Media and Entertainment: A Special Study by Amita Potnis et al., IDC #254651, and Disaster Recovery as a Service Builds Momentum as Businesses Reap the Economic Benefits of the Cloud Model by Phil Goodwin, IDC #254455
Sponsored by FUJIFILM Recording Media USA and Crossroads Systems Inc. Data protection, including data recovery and archiving, is a top concern for many CIOs and CTOs. Data protection strategies can be achieved through any or all of the following: on-premises, offpremises, and cloud-based solutions. Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offerings are emerging as a more comprehensive way to maintain business continuity by offering access to computing power, applications, and the relevant data. One solution that businesses are looking at is cloud-based data protection and DRaaS, in which a third party manages and delivers such services based on SLAs and customer-specific requirements. DRaaS offerings are actively growing in the marketplace to maintain business continuity. This paper looks at utilizing a hybrid disaster recovery approach with a gateway appliance as a stepping-stone approach to a more comprehensive data protection and data recovery strategy.
Introduction The inability to access or restore data when required is every IT administrator's biggest nightmare. Such events can suddenly shift discussion away from the need for IT infrastructure investment to painful questions about data loss. In today's world, businesses usually operate 24 x 7 by increasingly relying on IT infrastructure and planning. Any downtime means disruption of business activity and, in turn, financial loss. IDC estimates that the average cost of downtime is $100,000/hour, but it can go as high as $1.6 million/hour for large-scale financial institutions. Having a data protection and disaster recovery (DR) strategy in place ensures quick restoration of the data and services that allow businesses to be operational, saving money and preserving corporate reputation. Data protection has evolved from the nightly tape backup of mainframes where the recovery point objective (RPO) equals 24 hours and the recovery time objective (RTO) could be many hours. With storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS), organizations use RAID, snapshots, mirroring, synchronous/asynchronous remote replication, and tape backup to protect against any failure contingency. These interleaved technologies can reduce RPO and RTO to near zero but are expensive in terms of license fees and are complicated to manage. Fujfilm Dternity, powered by StrongBox, is a NAS solution that combines the economics of low-cost Linear Tape File System (LTFS) tape fused with the performance and accessibility of disk to provide protected storage for online, nearline, and archival data. With flexible onsite, offsite, or hybrid cloud configurations, Dternity provides on-premises and off-premises data protection capabilities and employs DRaaS to simplify data protection and recovery.
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Modern Data Protection and DRaaS Strategies Planning for existing data stores and future growth is a continuing challenge for any IT organization, but a management strategy that mitigates business risk is also a part of a CIO/CTO's operational game plan. In today's world, there is a continued threat to uptime from external attacks, disk or node failure, power outage, and so forth. Data protection, including data recovery and archival, is one of the top 3 concerns for many CIOs and CTOs across organizations of all sizes. While data protection strategies may be different based on the size and vertical of the organization, most businesses have some fundamental similarities as well. For example, any organization will have a finance and human resources department, which also has a need for data protection. No matter the size of the organization, the goal is the same: minimize business losses. Data protection drivers and use cases include but are not limited to:
Preservation and protection of a company's digital content, which is its greatest asset (For example, monetization for media and entertainment [M&E] companies is directly tied to the digital content that they own.)
Increasing regulation requiring governmental and legal institutions to store many copies of data and many types of data for an extensive time period
Media files collected and archived by the video surveillance and security industry on a daily basis (Much of this content is rendered inactive within a short period and is archived. It is only retrieved for legal investigation.)
Healthcare and research images and data, a rising tide of data that must be stored/archived per regulations
For any successful data protection strategy in the hyperconnected world, service-level requirements and understanding are extremely important between the IT department and business community. Downtime directly translates not only to financial or productivity losses but also reputational loss. Stringent business requirements in many markets require an immutable copy of the data at any given point in time. Many different technologies can be deployed for data protection including RAID, snapshots, replication (asynchronous and synchronous), mirrors, and backup and recovery (copy data to disk, tape, and purpose-built appliances). Data protection strategies can be achieved through adoption of any or all of the following: onpremises, off-premises, and cloud-based solutions. Many businesses are beginning to adopt storage services offerings that would shift the IT spending from a capex to an opex strategy. One solution that businesses are increasingly looking at is cloud-based data protection and disaster recovery services (DRaaS), in which a third-party manages and delivers such services based on SLAs and customerspecific requirements. Traditional disaster recovery and business continuity options for businesses have often been limited to the large businesses that could afford the significant expenditure required to either build an internal IT DR strategy or work with a managed services provider. Large enterprise recovery options typically required remote or colocated datacenters, dedicated bandwidth from a communications service provider, and potentially significant capital expenditure on additional storage hardware. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) were often priced out of the market because of initial acquisition costs, and typical disaster recovery strategies were fragmented around data backup and server reimaging. A DRaaS is defined as having a capacity-optimized offsite disk repository (direct, hybrid, purposebuilt backup appliances or disk to disk to cloud) with on-demand compute/network/storage services to recover data along with added services such as runbooks, personnel plans, and test/plan execution. 2
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Alternatively, archive as a service (AaaS) is capacity-optimized offsite storage that may include tape and search/discovery and litigation services.
The Reincarnation of Tape with LTFS Tape-based storage has long been implemented as a long-term backup and archival target. Before the introduction and adoption of the Linear Tape File System, data stored on tape had limited access and was dependant on proprietary applications; more importantly, it did not hold any file metadata that would enable easy access and make tape "self-describing." LTFS has been a game changer with the combination of LTO tape media that lasts for many years. However, the latest generation, LTO 6, also offers 6.25TB (with 2.5:1 compression) of storage in one cartridge and it is expected that LTO 7 will more than double this capacity in 2016. Simplistically, LTFS is a format that makes tape media look like network-attached storage. Instead of mounting tape in a tape drive to access data sequentially, it is accessed randomly using standard tools such as Windows Explorer or Mac Finder to navigate to specific files via a directory structure. It is also a software mechanism that is used to present a file system interface to data stored on tape. This file system view makes accessing files stored on the LTFS formatted media similar to accessing files stored on other forms of storage media such as disk. Providing a NAS-like interface to tape using standard network protocols such as NFS and CIFS presents a real opportunity to expand the use cases for tape. Dternity is a turnkey data storage solution that provides customers with a standard NFS, CIFS, and S3 object-based interface to their tape libraries. Thus data is stored, and the Dternity software balances disk performance with tape economics to deliver a single solution with usability just like disk, making a truly transparent use of LTFS media.
Dternity by StrongBox for Onsite Data Preservation Dternity NAS, powered by Crossroads StrongBox, is a network-attached storage solution that provides cost-effective storage for unstructured data. Combining user-defined policies for capacity optimization, Dternity NAS blends disk and tape into one cohesive storage tier to deliver both nearline and archival storage. Available as an appliance or a software solution, Dternity provides a simple-tomanage solution for on-premises data protection through a combination of the following key components:
Dternity NAS, now in its second generation, comes in two configurations: S10 and S30. File transfers are managed via standard protocols such as NFS, CIFS, and S3. Applications can write directly to the appliance like any other NAS storage, or users can just "drag and drop" files with Windows Explorer or Mac Finder or use the native Access Client for accelerated file management. The internal nearline disk storage on the S10G2 can scale up to 16.1TB, whereas the S30G2 can scale to 65.2TB. Both support external disk for expansion of the nearline capacity, and both can scale from terabytes to petabytes of total storage. The Dternity NAS is compatible with LTO 5 and LTO 6 LTFS and IBM TS1140/TS1150 tape drives and will support LTO 7 later this year.
Dternity NAS makes a tape library behave like an "unlimited capacity" NAS. It is compatible with any tape library with LTFS-compatible drives. Connectivity to the tape system is through SAN (8GB Fibre Channel) or directly through SAS, and connectivity to the host is via Gigabyte Ethernet or 10GbE. Since data is stored in the open standard of LTFS, no changes are made to files or metadata. Thus tapes written through Dternity can be ejected and read from any LTFScompatible drive.
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The solution also offers built-in Aspera support for asynchronous replications between Dternity NAS systems or an offsite tape library, which is ideal for second copy, central archive, and multitenant use cases.
Dternity's intelligent storage management (ISM) enables organizations to optimally use existing storage resources by balancing performance and cost efficiency. For cost savings as well as to maintain a secure protected copy, Dternity NAS moves all data to tape. Dternity's ISM determines which datasets should stay on the performance tier to meet user workflow requirements. This helps organizations to use just the right amount of disk.
Dternity can serve as a storage gateway to provide seamless data movement to and from the cloud (or cloud-based applications) using the standard S3 protocol and a RESTful API.
Dternity also supports writing data to two separate tape libraries, thereby eliminating the need to manually ship copies of tape to a secondary location. Support for multilibrary, called "touchless," tape enables organizations to provide its users multiple copies of LTFS media in separate locations in a cost-effective manner.
Dternity Media Cloud DRaaS for Offsite Data Protection Dternity can deliver on-premises solutions. But when combined with the Dternity Media Cloud, it also provides seamless offsite data protection for online preservation and protection of digital data content. The Dternity Media Cloud features a two-tier storage approach that customers with an active deployment of on-premises Dternity NAS can benefit from:
Active Tier, which serves as a higher-performance, nearline cloud-based archive platform
Deep Tier, which serves as a low-cost, second-copy offsite data protection service
Customers can copy and retrieve data to the Dternity Media Cloud in two ways:
Dternity NAS can replicate directly to the Media Cloud. Content can be retrieved much the same way through a secure VPN or SSL. Customers have 24 x 7 access to their content through their on-premises NAS that can seamlessly recall data copies. Dternity also provides a portal for browser and mobile-based file access or customers can order file copies that are delivered on tape.
For large data transfer or initial seed load or retrieval, customers can also choose to ship copies of either Dternity NAS tapes to Fujifilm's Dternity Media Cloud datacenter. The service includes two copies of data and periodic health checks to ensure long-term preservation.
Once data is replicated either through the online approach or by shipping copies of LTO tape to the Dternity Media Cloud, Fujifilm will make a second copy for data protection.
Opportunities and Challenges Opportunities
Exploit the growing DRaaS market: IDC expects the DRaaS market to grow to $383.6 million in 2018 at a CAGR of 21.4%. By comparison, AaaS is expected to grow to $397.8 million in 2018 growing at a CAGR of 9.0%. Fujifilm's Dternity powered by StrongBox is in a unique position in offering a DRaaS solution based on low-cost LTFS tape with the choice of either replicating online or sending copies of tape to the datacenter.
A hybrid approach: This strategy based on a single solution offering on-premises, off-premises, and cloud-based storage for data protection and disaster recovery is a comprehensive strategy. 4
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Leveraging a backup appliance approach provides an additional layer of data protection and access to the most recently replicated data. The focus with this approach moves from recovery time to online all the time.
Challenges
As organizations look to move to the opex model for data protection and disaster recovery, it is important for any vendor to not only have a good solution in place but to have a clear and extensive portfolio of added services such as runbooks, personnel plans, and SLAs. A recovery point objective and a recovery time objective are critical for any disaster recovery strategy.
For businesses choosing on-premises and/or off-premises or cloud-based storage, it is imperative to calculate the cost of downtime, identify the causes, and more importantly understand the sensitivity of data that needs to be protected when choosing a solution and finalizing SLAs.
Conclusion Market trends indicate that suppliers are responding to demand from the business side and increasingly offering recovery as a service. Cloud adoption was put on hold in the past due to security concerns, but current spending expectations for disaster recovery offerings will likely up the demand for more comprehensive strategies. Most businesses today are still in a state of cloud transformation: 62.3% are in either the early or the middle stages of transformation, according to IDC's Enterprise Storage Services Survey. Many of these companies choose to have an on-premises/off-premises data protection strategy while also implementing DRaaS. As such, the acceleration and maturity of recovery as a service are aligned with the time frames required for companies to figure out their cloud strategy. As businesses become more comfortable with data encryption and cloud-based security and find that their offsite data is indeed secure, these alleviated concerns will help drive the various models and price points for disaster recovery services. IDC believes a hybrid recovery as a service solution using an on-premises appliance is likely to be the predominant choice of businesses that adopt a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy. The backup appliance offers local access, provides the fastest recovery option, and alleviates fears that larger-scale data recovery from the cloud may take too long. The appliance approach also provides added consistency for data replication. The Fujifilm Dternity on-premises and off-premises solution offers customers an affordable, reliable, easy-to-use-and-manage set of storage solutions for data protection and recovery. This solution has an advantage in this space not only because it spearheaded the use of a low-cost, reliable LTFS tape-based NAS solution but also due to the various ways in which the solution can be offered and tailored for customer requirements. It offers an easy-to-use and cost-effective approach to data protection and recovery as a service.
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