With all the options out on the market today it is no wonder every shop is doing something different, and everyone has a different opinion on technological solutions for backup, virtualization, storage, and recovery.
Meeting with executive teams on thing resounds in the marketplace, if a system is not key to revenue generation within my organization and does not have a clear billable path it is time to get rid of it. Systems, budget, political exposure, and many other reasons exist behind this move, but at the core people are realizing that wasting time and resources on systems and operations that is not core to their business is essentially a waste and causes a drag on the business and revenue.
Service based providers with a true quality of service are able to provide organizations services far beyond what the singular business structure could ever obtain budget or reliability for. That includes ideas such as the service provider being focused on the service as their business is able to invest, train, and expand more proficiently than someone who is not in that service. Above and beyond the business metrics is the quality of service. It is next to impossible for singular shops to deliver SLA's equal to google with limited resources and budget.
Where do these providers go when they need to accomplish tasks or objectives under or above the capacity of certain service providers?
What if their business doesn't fit into a service providers mold?
Enter Virtual Management, Appliance based automation, Modular API universal gui controls.
Enterprise organizations with as much as 5000+ systems have been able to consolidate and multi-manage environments or outsource the base SLA to a provider while the unique aspects have been able to be put into function easy to use GUI's for level 0 and level 1 outsourced support.
Small organizations with limited budget and small to no teams have been able to establish enterprise systems in Managed Service Hosting with very high SLA's and minimal interface and management thanks to GUI based appliances.
I will lay out some of my current favorite combinations in the market today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cloud Backup / Storage?
For small to large organizations I have seen extremely successful implementations of a cloud or virtualized backup solution at an enterprise level with full SLA's and support backing releiving teams and subsidiaries of the burden of management and the cost of systems.
Example 1:
NetBackup, VMWare/Xen, FalconStor
In companies with limited budget for resources, and large companies who deal with simplistic warehouses, shipping sites, or subsidiary sites that range from several thousand employees to the couple person team out of a garage, NetBackup and FalconStor have provided an amazingly flexible solution.
There are many configurations you can achieve, but I will give you an overview of 2.
The components of the large enterprise:
Home Office
Production Data Center
Recovery Data Center
50+ Subsidiaries ranging in size dramatically (or 50 mobile sites)
The production facility handled a typical production virtualized environment. A VMWare farm comprising of of over 50+ VMS, an AIX PowerVM Oracle DataWarehouse. All SAN attached storage for ease of replication and recovery.
The SAN replicated sensitive LUNs with 8 hour to 1 hour or less RTOs
A FalconStor Storage Appliance (*VTL) was used as the backup storage system to replace tape for the production environment.
The recovery site consisted of the necessary networking, plus a minimal SAN imprint, and the FalconStor target device for long term archiving.
The unique aspect of FalconStor is that is has always been a multithreaded open source system. What that means is it is truly "cloud scalable". Just add Memory, Disk, CPU to expand the system. The physical or VM system is also able to host a NetBackup server and replicate all the Master and Media server catalog information as well as handle LDAP and Active Directory replication.
This is not something they advertise, but it is production supported, and a truly amazing cost saving aspect in my opinion.
With this infrastructure in place the only thing that truly has to grow is the archive VTL.
Now what do we do about the 50+ subsidiaries?
Easy.. Install ESX on a server (*2 if you want failover - we will cover a powerful automated failover option later)
Load up the required NetBackup components (*VM Master/Media) with an Enterprise, Puredisk, or OST License. Download the FalconStor Virtual Machine from Falconstor. The VM has all the capabilities of the FalconStor VTL because it is the same system (Cloud based remember?). Asynchronous replication and deduplication via most methods including IP/VPN Tunnel.
The FalconStor licenses for an extremely cheap one time license fee. It supports between 1.2 and 2.2 TB of RAW storage. (*wait.. thats only 1 or 2 SATA drives.. whats the deal?)
The FalconStor system conservatively achieves a 10 to 1 deduplication ratio. In reality much more. This gives you local backup VM 12 to 22TB of backup space in one VM. Now what if I have more RAW storage needs. Do I have to keep saying it?.. Cloud/Elastic system, we simply add another VM to double the storage. Imagine, 100TB of storage with 5 VMs with a price point I guarantee you can not beat.
Their new HyperFS Cloud File System promises to drive up interoperability and drive down cost by an order of magnitude.
These VMs are now aware of the target VTL and inter-operate to replicate deduped information via the WAN for long term archiving at the recovery site.
Systems can be recovered to a MSP's cloud, On-Demand recovery hardware, standby colo, etc.
Whatever you do at the recovery site. I encourage you to keep as much as you can powered down or offline. The less you have running, the less maintenance, the less management, and most importantly the less hardware and licensing refresh and costs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Example 2:
Small business implementation of the above:
2 Servers running ESX/Xen/Applogic etc at two separate locations.
Similar installs - Netbackup with OST, FalconStor VMs.
The system will deduplicate and replicate over the WAN providing you with an enterprise supported backup or storage strategy.
If you host this environment with a Managed Service Provider or their Cloud like SunGard's Enterprise Cloud, you truly have the ability to provide the business with an SLA as a service.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well this is all well and good, but what about Appliances? Automation? AI Control?
Well I will answer that one in the next post. ^___^..
I know mean, but I have to start driving to the Austin Data Center.
In the meantime for those that like to educate themselves and want to pre-learn some of the content of the next section take a look at the following products.
Novell Platespin Forge, Nasuni Storage Gateway, Emulex E3S, Veem, and EMC's Recoverpoint product.
No comments:
Post a Comment