Nasuni Blog

Beyond the Allure of 3PAR - How Massive Data Growth is Transforming the Storage Industry

Andres Rodriguez — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:31:57 -0400

Almost a decade ago I ran into the 3PAR team at a trade show. I was there with my previous company, Archivas. We were showcasing the capabilities of our brand new object-store: the Archivas Storage Cluster. Based on the same distributed computing principles that had allowed companies like Amazon and Akamai to scale to petabytes, our system ran on inexpensive commodity hardware — Intel-compatible servers interconnected with plain Ethernet. The object-store was a pure software concept that still managed to scale gracefully from a terabyte to petabytes by self-organizing into larger and larger clusters. The 3PAR team was demonstrating their T Series InServ Storage Server, an impressive rack of controllers that looked like it could crush a software guy by just blinking. It was hardware. It was the old world of hard drives, blocks and LUN reservations. It seemed to me ludicrous to compete with EMC in mid-range storage arrays where CLARiiON ruled supreme. Boy, was I wrong. I was approximately $2 billion wrong.

By the time HP and Dell are done ratcheting up their bids for 3PAR the purchase price may be close $30/share or about 10 times 3PAR’s annual revenue. The rational way to justify such a large revenue multiple is the belief that 3PAR will be an asset of strategic importance. Hence, this is not a bet about the present. It’s a bet on the future. To understand the future, it helps to look back at the market forces that gave rise to the storage industry and are still fueling its development today.

Industry standards, like Fiber Channel and later iSCSI, broke the vendor lock-in that had allowed companies like IBM to charge astronomical prices for proprietary computer systems. It gradually became evident that storage was harder to switch than servers and so it became the foundation for IT. Servers came and went but storage was forever. The shift in importance from servers to storage gave rise in the 90s to pure storage powerhouses like EMC, NetApp and HDS. While giants like IBM, HP and Sun struggled to find their footing in a world where IOPS mattered more than MIPS, the pure storage OEMs raced ahead by combining relatively cheap, commodity hard drives into the fastest, most reliable storage systems in the world. Customers gladly paid a premium to build their IT towers on high quality storage.

By the turn of the millennium, anyone who was involved in storage could feel that data growth, more than any other single factor, would fuel the next wave in storage. Data was accumulating at an impressive 60% compound annual rate as the digital revolution absorbed every business process in sight. Exponential growth generated a bonanza for the OEMs that had established themselves as leaders a decade earlier. Customers, however, were less and less willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money for storage that seemed to be getting out of control. Customers also felt that these high quality storage systems had not been designed for explosive growth. The user interfaces were hardly usable and required constant visits from the vendors. Information lifecycle and similarly vacuous marketing bumper sticker technologies were hurried into the market with little success. To be fair, very few things are designed to withstand a decade’s worth of exponential growth.

Here is what 3PAR did right. They took the old technology of virtualizing blocks to its limit by producing a highly symmetrical, modular design that could scale in a mesh. It was CLARiiON but redesigned for growth. If you want something to scale, the first step is to figure out how to build it into a mesh because, otherwise, any central point of control will eventually become the bottleneck. Then they improved caching to make sure that any one component in the array could fail without compromising the performance of the entire system. They were in essence introducing some of the high-end features of the EMC Symmetrix DMX but at a lower price point and, most importantly, designed to grow incrementally with a customer’s storage needs: utility storage.

Data growth is not showing any signs of a slow down and that is driving the latest string of acquisitions as the OEMs strive to upgrade their technology arsenal. Data Domain had EMC slugging it out with NetApp for their data deduplication technology to the tune of $2.4 billion. EqualLogic and LeftHand were acquired in quick succession, by Dell and HP respectively, for their highly modular, low-cost, mid-range iSCSI arrays.

Data growth is here to stay. A decade ago, I underestimated how much pain customers would be in and just how quickly data growth would render the best technologies of the day inadequate. I also underestimated the importance of using a legacy interface. Fiber channel can cause much pain when it comes to managing growth, but it is one of a handful of standards used to provision storage. The object-stores relied on a REST APl, widely used in the Internet, but almost never used between servers and storage. It has been the job of the next generation of technology companies, like Nasuni, to develop specialized gateway products to put a native storage API on the object-stores, now better known as cloud storage.

At the current rate, data will grow more than tenfold in the coming decade. It is hard to design for this kind of growth. Vendors like 3PAR have won by pushing traditional array technology to its limit. While advanced array technology has undoubtedly helped, it fails to address the root cause of the problem. Files constitute the lion’s share of business data. Regardless of how sophisticated the underlying array technology may be, those files still need to be stored in a file system that can handle the growth, backed up and moved off-site for data protection. This is why the large Internet storage systems run by Google, Amazon and others, do not use storage arrays but instead developed their own object-stores.

I cannot help thinking that these big buys by the OEMs are akin to Polaroid doubling up on better chemistry just as customers were asking for simple digital cameras. The infrastructure of the Internet has shown that it can absorb exponential growth with ease while remaining economically viable. Cloud storage providers inherit their scalable and low cost architectures directly from the Internet. Customers still needing relief from the pains of data growth would be wise to look up, beyond the blinking lights, and into the vast potential of the cloud.

Disaster Recovery Planning and the Nasuni Hurricane Giveaway

Rana Ghahremanpour — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:40:01 -0400

Hurricanes sweeping through the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean have already begun to capture headlines. Swimmers and surfers are at risk due to huge waves, but these massive storms pose a significant threat to businesses too. Once they move inland, hurricanes can damage or even destroy offices and company data centers, and potentially cost enterprises tens of thousands of dollars or more. Disaster recovery planning is critical for any enterprise, but for companies in hurricane-vulnerable areas, this is especially true right now. That’s why we have decided to offer the free use of our cloud gateway technology, the Nasuni Filer, to companies in hurricane-prone regions for the duration of the storm season.

There are a number of offsite data backup solutions on the market today - most enterprises resort to disk, tape, or some combination of the two. But the reality is that when you evaluate these solutions in terms of downtime, data integrity, cost, simplicity, and security, they fall short. An effective cloud gateway technology, on the other hand, can meet each of these critical standards.

A hurricane could level your data center, but if you were a Nasuni client, you would be able to access your file system in less than 15 minutes. Critical business documents could be recovered almost instantly, and it would all be done securely, simply, affordably and without the loss or corruption of data that is common with other solutions.

We want to help companies plan for disaster during this particularly dangerous season, so from September 1 through November 30, 2010, we’re offering the Filer free to businesses in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Lousiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. (For more details, see here.)

Our goal is to help as many businesses as possible get through this already intense hurricane season without losing critical business data. But we also believe that these companies will see the benefits of affordable, simple, and secure automatic offsite backup, and stay with us beyond this period.

If you have any questions or would like to find out more about the offer, please call us at 508-651-0580 or write to us at feedback@nasuni.com.

Off-site data backup

Joseph D. Foran — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:54:40 -0400

Off-site data backup is a hot-topic for good reason. Traditional off-site data backup methods are aged. They are slowly being retired by advances in cloud computing and WAN optimization. This transition isn't without debate, with the tried-and-true methods bumping up against the newcomers - particularly vendors that sell off-site services. On the one hand, there is the traditional pick-up-tape / store-tape / return-tape method. Small companies do this via sneakernet and trunkware and big companies hire large retention companies. On the other hand, we have increasing amounts of bandwidth, data deduplication, and improvements in the security of data transfer between two separate points on the Internet. In the end, the advantages of an automated data recovery plan that does not rely on tapes is easy to verify and test and is just as secure (if not moreso).

The high-level choices break down as follows:

Traditional Backup and Off-site Retention - Data is backed up via whatever means are in place (tape, optical, removable disk, etc.), stored for a period, and then taken offsite. The typical example is backing up to tape and sending that tape off on a truck.

Pros: Tried and True, with lots of products from large, established vendors, and an excellent body of work surrounding best practices.
Cons: The media can be intercepted or lost. All media has a mean-time-between-failure rate. Human error can be difficult to detect and resolve.
Notable Vendors: Symantec (Backup), EMC (Backup), Iron Mountain (Storage), Recall (Storage), and many, many more.

Internet-Based Backup and Off-Site Retention - Data is backed up over the Internet (or a WAN), either to a dedicated backup storage provider, a cloud storage service, another location in a WAN, etc.

Pros: The storage media can't be lost, because there is no media. Verification is easy, and human error is easily discovered through a simple comparison.
Cons: Requires heavy bandwidth, data deduplication, and/or WAN optimization. Data over the wire can be intercepted. Some vendors require lock-in to their appliances.
Notable Vendors: Barracuda Networks, EMC, Iron Mountain, Novastor, and Zmanda, amongst a list of many, many more, most of which include traditional backup and off-site data retention companies that have diversified into this arena.

With both solutions, one glaring question arises whenever data goes offsite: How do you secure it? In both cases, encryption is the answer, along with strong retention and access policies. Security cannot be stressed enough, no matter what choice a business makes.

Because offsite data backup is transitioning to online data backup, the question shifts from "what's going to happen to offsite data backup?" to "what's going to happen after offsite data backup over the Internet becomes standard?" This is the next great area of convergence, with a few emerging companies like Nasuni stepping up to tackle the future head-on, ask that question, and come up with an answer. By moving primary file storage to the cloud, enterprises and small businesses alike can enjoy the benefits of cloud storage, traditional storage, and off-site data backup all rolled into one single (and secure) technology. With advances in CDP (Continuous Data Protection) and data deduplication making these technologies more affordable, and with the merging of traditional file servers with cloud services, it is inevitable that file servers - and then other servers - will see their storage needs split into a local cache and a cloud repository - versioned, snapshotted, and always available for recovery.

Joseph D. Foran is a contributing writer to the Nasuni Blog. Joseph is the IT director at FSW, Inc., and a contributor to various storage and IT publications.

The Road To Release – Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Azure

Jesse Noller — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:49:50 -0400

In this installment of our road to release series, I’m really proud to be able to unveil the next two features. We want the Filer to simply “work” for different virtualization platforms and we want customers to be able to choose from a range of cloud storage providers. It’s important that we support as many of these as we can, while still ensuring their quality.

Since day one, customers have requested support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V server/hypervisor. Hyper-V has been steadily gaining ground since Microsoft released it. It has been deployed to many Microsoft technology focused shops, many of which are potential Nasuni customers.

In the update coming this fall, Microsoft Hyper-V will be a fully supported virtualization platform for the Nasuni Filer. It works just like it would in our currently supported virtualization platforms. Here it is booting, and then running in the background:

Everything, as our users should expect, just works. When the release is ready, we will post Hyper-V specific images for you to download alongside our current offerings.

In addition to the newly minted Hyper-V support, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time testing our new Windows Azure Platform support. We’ve found that the functionality, performance and quality of the Azure platform is easily on par with the rest of our supported cloud storage providers.

Starting with the next release, users will be able to select Windows Azure during the first-boot wizard (install phase). They will also be able to create new volumes using either Nasuni-provided credentials or their own private credentials on Windows Azure:

And here is the wizard view. We’ve made a lot of improvements here since 1.0:

We will be supporting the three “Anywhere” regions (US, Asia and Europe) for Azure volumes initially. Support for other regions will come in later releases, as customers request it.

With these two exciting announcements, I’m wrapping up this series on the upcoming features. I have to admit to a certain amount of pride. It’s been fun to cast a spotlight on all the changes we’re releasing in such a short amount of time. All of the employees here at Nasuni work tirelessly on behalf of the company and our users, and it has been great showing all of you what we’ve been doing behind the scenes. Note, though, that there’s a lot more to this new release than the features I’ve covered. We’ve improved performance, scalability and a hundred other things along the way, and all of these changes will directly benefit our users.

So, in closing, thanks to all of you who have provided us with valuable feedback, bug reports and suggestions. Everything you tell us is discussed internally amongst people in development, sales and support. Remember, if you have feedback or questions, please email us – feedback@nasuni.com - or sound off in the comments in any of our blog posts.

If you’re excited about these features – why wait to start using the Filer? Sign up today you’ll get immediate access to all of the features discussed in this series the second we release. Sign up today and use the coupon code “Summer 2010” when subscribing, and you’ll get 10% seasonal discount off the subscription price!

Strategies for offsite data protection: using snapshots to merge backup and archive in the cloud

Andres Rodriguez — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 06:00:00 -0400

People are far more familiar with cloud storage than they think. Hundreds of millions of people regularly store their photos and videos in the cloud. Everytime someone posts a picture to Facebook, Flickr, or any social-networking or photo-sharing site, that photo is stored and protected in the cloud. The file is safely archived. This is a great use case for cloud storage - for reasons I'll detail below - but the cloud can be more than an archive. A snapshot-based cloud gateway can take advantage of the protection model of the cloud to transform its functionality for business.

Generally, people think of an archive as a structure or building, protected against weather and theft, that stores single copies of important documents or other items. The Declaration of Independence at the National Archives Building, for example.

Cloud storage systems rely on a very different method of data protection. In the cloud, newly stored data is tagged with an authentication signature, then copied. It doesn’t sit on one machine: Data is replicated to other servers, often in different geographic regions, so that it is always online and available to people who want to call it up, or machines programmed to copy it to another location. Because of the authentication signatures, these copies are all perfect. The effect is akin to creating indistinguishable clones of the Declaration of Independence and storing them in lock-down facilities across the country.

The cloud’s protection model guards against fallout from hardware failures and mistakes made when data is migrated from one server to another. Individual users benefit because they won’t lose beloved photos if they make an error moving their data from an old desktop to a new one. Businesses, on the other hand, pay cloud storage providers like Amazon and Rackspace to guarantee that their own critical data is preserved, and that multiple copies of archived data are being made.

Whether we’re talking about a satellite image, an X ray, or a final version of a critical business document, file archiving is a perfect use case for the cloud. You have a digital asset that you want protected, and you want to be able to pull back a perfectly accurate, pristine copy on-demand, whether that’s in ten days or ten years. The cloud does this so well because it is a system that is essentially designed to resist data modification. In most cloud storage systems, a modification of data is indistinguishable from data corruption. The system will fight to reverse the change. If a file is stored in the cloud, and a subsequent copy of that file is not absolutely perfect, it will be disregarded.

On the surface, this protection model might seem to limit the cloud’s functionality for business. The reality is that businesses don’t merely need archives. Files are constantly being modified. What constitutes a “final” version is often arbitrary – there’s no conscious decision to archive. Since it is so easy to make changes in a file system, businesses need to be able to roll back to specific points in time in the life of a given file in case a mistake was made, or unnecessary information added. That, of course, is why there is backup. Backup allows IT administrators to go back to previous versions and undo mistakes.

The cloud’s refusal to allow modifications to stored files doesn’t have to mean that it can’t be used for versioned backup. Originally introduced to the market by NetApp, snapshots capture an entire file system at a point in time. Snaphots can transform the traditional read/write file system into a series of file system archives that cannot be modified and are, therefore, perfect targets for cloud storage. A cloud gateway uses snapshots to merge backup and archive, delivering the best of both.

The protection model of the cloud might hate changes, but with snapshots, those changes can be stored as separate chunks of data. The altered chunks of data then become newly archived items. This way, when a user rolls back to an older version of a given file, the gateway will pull together the complete file from the separately archived pieces.

The Nasuni Filer uses snapshots to archive versions of your file system to the cloud. This eliminates the need for making backups even as the files are changing. The Filer ensures that critical files are stored unchanged in the cloud. Snapshots allow you to roll back to previous versions or points in time in the file system. (And it will get easier still in our upcoming release.) In effect, all versions are treated as critical, archive-worthy items.

Again, we have nothing against using the cloud as an archive. It is a great use case. But with the right cloud gateway technology, it can offer so much more to the modern data-heavy business.

Any questions? Email us at feedback@nasuni.com or write in the comments.

The Road to Release – Taking Control of the Cloud (Credentials)

Jesse Noller — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:15:28 -0400

Some of the best features of the Filer are possible because we have established strong relationships with the cloud storage providers we support. When customers select a cloud storage provider (CSP), we automatically provide the needed credentials. In addition to the simplicity (you do not need to establish relationships with the cloud storage providers) this gives us the ability to provide an incredibly simple bill from a single company – Nasuni.

Our bills only include the Nasuni Filer charges and the charges for storage at your chosen CSPs at their current rate. What you will not see on bills from us are all the extra fees the CSPs add like bandwidth fees, per transaction costs, etc because Nasuni has included all those charges in the Filer fee. It’s a win for customers, simple, secure and we pay for fees incurred beyond the storage amount.

All of this has been supported since day one – from the first day of your trial to the point at which you become a loyal Nasuni customer.

Despite the simplicity, however, users have also been requesting the ability to provide their own credentials. For some users, this level of control over the cloud provider account is required. Others might have a preexisting relationship with a cloud provider or another vendor that they wish to leverage.

This is why I’m pleased to unveil support for bringing your own cloud credentials. This support will be released with the other features I’ve written about, and more, when we push the service update at the end of summer.

From an implementation perspective, the ability to provide your own cloud credentials starts in the first-time setup wizard:

Here, we see that the one-time setup wizard will now provide users the option – at install time – to provide a set of their own credentials. The actual form where you input the data is also simple:

The credentials you provide in this phase will be used for your initial cloud volume – something a lot of users have expressed interest in.

Moving on, there’s a new section in the UI called “Cloud Credentials” under the configuration tab:

Here, you can see a complete inventory of all of the credentials you have uploaded, and what they are used by. You can also edit existing credentials, add new ones, or delete sets using this page.

Once you’ve uploaded credentials, you can associate them with the volume you’re creating:

And, of course, you can see what credentials are associated with the volume when editing the volume itself:

There are some other interesting aspects as well. You can change cloud credentials after you’ve uploaded them (however we test edits to make sure the Filer can still access your data in the cloud). And all credentials are stored locally, but they are encrypted and backed up with the rest of your configuration for speedy disaster recovery.

At no point does Nasuni have direct access to your credentials. Nor do we want it. At the point at which you are providing your own credentials we treat them as if they are akin to your encryption keys: They are your property.

When the update ships at the end of the summer; customers will be able to supply their own credentials for all supported cloud providers, including Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files and Nirvanix SDN. Obviously, this also sets the stage for our long-term support of – you guessed it – private clouds.

This is easily one of the biggest changes we’ve made to the product since we released earlier this year, and it was completely driven by feedback from you, our users and customers. We appreciate all of the feedback, and again – we’re listening.

If you have feedback or questions, please send email us – feedback@nasuni.com - or sound off in the comments.

If you’re excited about these features – why wait to start using the Filer, if you sign up today you’ll get immediate access to all of the features discussed in this series the second we release. Sign up today and use the coupon code “Summer 2010” when subscribing, and you’ll get 10% seasonal discount off the subscription price!

Online Backup Solutions and Cloud Storage Gateways: How Do They Compare?

Rana Ghahremanpour — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:37:33 -0400

We’ve dedicated a few posts recently to different disaster recovery solutions, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tape, disk or some combination of disk and tape are the most common solutions when it comes to disaster recovery planning, but there are significant downsides to each. One option we haven’t discussed yet in detail, online backup, meets several of the main criteria for effective disaster recovery planning. Online backup is, in a way, the predecessor to the cloud storage gateway. The question is: How do they compare?

If we look at our top 5 considerations for disaster recovery planning – data integrity, simplicity, security, cost, downtime - online backup does fairly well. Data integrity is preserved through versioning and redundancy: Online backup creates multiple copies of data and can guarantee storage in different geographic locations. Online backup and recovery are simple. And as for security, if it is properly addressed, online backup can be more secure than tape or disk.

From a cost-perspective, it is more expensive than tape, but you generally only pay for the storage you use. The main potential flaw of online backup is downtime. The more data protected online, the longer it will take to restore. Bringing back 100GB of data over a T1 connection will take almost a week. As a result, online backup is really best-suited for small data sets, not complete file servers.

Cloud storage offers many of the same benefits as online backup, but until the recent introduction of cloud storage gateways, it also suffered from that downtime drawback. The more data you stored in the cloud, the longer it would take to bring it back in the event of a disaster.

The cloud storage gateway – a relatively new technology - capitalizes on the reliability and scalability of the cloud and simplifies disaster recovery. Restores can be virtually instantaneous – with the Nasuni Filer it takes a mere 15 minutes.

This doesn’t mean that every last file and chunk of data is locally available. The best cloud storage gateways use advanced caching algorithms to ensure that the most frequently accessed data is available locally, while the rest is ready to be called back from the cloud upon request. In the event of a disaster, if the local system fails, a gateway like the Nasuni Filer works quickly because it restores metadata first. This way, to the end-user browsing for a file, everything looks to be in its place. And when that end-user opens a particular file, the data is immediately called back from the cloud and reinstantiated locally. The only delay is the time it takes to download that data from the cloud. The file is then reinstantiated locally, and the delay from that point forward is nil.

A cloud storage gateway like the Nasuni Filer is not merely a better disaster recovery and backup solution. Advanced caching algorithms and superior security make the Filer suitable for primary storage. As a gateway to the cloud, the Filer delivers storage, backup and offsite protection in a cost-effective, all-in-one solution.

The new generation of cloud storage gateways is still a young one – this is definitely still an evolving space. If you’re interested, you can test drive the Nasuni Filer for free for two weeks and enjoy 24/7 tech support and no capacity restrictions. And if you have any other questions, please comment below, or send us a note at feedback@nasuni.com

The Road to Release – Taking Control of your Cloud Storage Bandwidth

Jesse Noller — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:11:02 -0400

Continuing with my new release preview series, I thought it would be good to move to all the network-related improvements we’ve added. Much like the UI changes and the Windows integration enhancements, we’ve left no stone unturned (much to the chagrin of our QA team).

First up we’re going to support HTTP Proxy configurations. Customers will be able to tunnel all Filer traffic through the SSL-enabled HTTP proxy of their choice. This is a big time feature requirement for companies working in more restricted environments, and we’re happy to be able to release it. Users will be able to access it via the “HTTP Proxy” link under configuration in the Filer admin UI:

As you can see, we support authenticated proxies and offer a “Do Not Proxy” list of hosts (for, say, internal hosts that do not require proxy access).

Next, I wanted to show off the fact that we’ve added network performance/utilization charts to the UI. This is another one of those features frequently requested by our users, and since we are a networked appliance, it just made good sense to add this information:

As you can see, by default it shows you the last hour. But you can “zoom out” to the full day as well:

Finally, we’ve added a feature that we can’t take a screen shot of. In the new release, all of the home page data, such as the charts and sidebar widgets, are AJAX enabled. This means that they will automatically update on a set interval of every five minutes.

With that, we wrap up this group of features coming in the next release. These might not seem as significant as the other features, but they’re really going to help us round out the Filer as it exists today.

If you have feedback or questions, please email us – feedback@nasuni.com - or sound off in the comments.

If you’re excited about these features – why wait to start using the Filer? If you sign up today you’ll get immediate access to all of the features discussed in this series the second we release. Sign up today and use the coupon code “Summer 2010” when subscribing, and you’ll get 10% seasonal discount off the subscription price!

Disaster Recovery Planning: Is Your Business Doing Enough?

Rana Ghahremanpour — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:20:25 -0400

Hurricane season has arrived. Homeowners near the coasts are undoubtedly getting ready to board up their windows and prepare for violent winds and rains, and businesses should be considering the unthinkable too. Losing access to critical data can be crippling for enterprises - in some cases it costs $18,000 per hour. Granted, data center disasters are often far more mundane. Instead of a hurricane, a water pipe might break in the building, or critical software may become corrupted. When it comes to disaster recovery planning, is your business doing enough?

To protect against such disasters, most enterprises are doing backups. The most basic form is the simple backup, in which the system makes regular, additional copies of data. The next step is versioned copies. In this case, there is one full backup of a given file, then incremental ones that add up to the most recent version.

Versioning is a necessity. Without it, businesses would be backing up full copies every time. That means they’d be storing – and paying for - far too much excess data. But versioning also has problems of its own. If disaster does strike, the restore time with standard disaster recovery solutions is far too long. The backup software has to go back to the last full version of the file, then add all the versions to it to get to the most recent, complete file. This is time-consuming even when the data is just being pulled back from local servers.

The reality, though, is that businesses shouldn’t be doing purely local backup because this doesn’t protect against massive corruption, pipes bursting, or floods. That’s why most enterprises back up to tape. Once a week they ship the backup tapes off-premises. Iron Mountain and others offer this service, and it is easy and affordable.

The problem is that it only compounds the restore time.

Think of it like cleaning up a workbench. Imagine you’ve got all your tools spread out on the table – screwdrivers, drill bits, saw-blades, hammers, etc. Now, you can easily shovel them all into a few boxes, close the lids, and enjoy the satisfaction of a visually-uncluttered workspace. But what happens when you need a specific tool? It will take you forever to find it.

With tape-based restores, business-critical data is safe from local disasters, but it is extremely inconvenient and time-consuming to get that data back. All those tapes need to be shipped. Then all the files need to be restored to their most recent, accurate versions, which doesn’t always happen. This is too much risk for most enterprises, too much wasted time, and too many impatient employees, who want their system up and running ASAP.

The benefit of cloud storage is that there is no need to worry about these time-consuming, error-prone disaster recovery solutions. The storage system and the backup are the same creature.

For example, with the Nasuni Filer, file systems can be restored in just 15 minutes. End-users will have complete access to their data - that data will then be called back from the cloud and reinstantiated locally as needed. This is the key: End-users get immediate access to the data even if the data isn’t there. That’s why cloud storage gateways are so fast.

We’ll be going into more detail on these and other disaster recovery planning issues in a forthcoming white paper. But if you’re interested in learning more soon, please join our CEO, Andres Rodriguez, for a disaster recovery webinar today - Thursday, August 12^th - at 12:00 PM EDT. Andres will be reviewing a few of these ideas, and going into more detail on the pros and cons of various disaster recovery solutions.

Any questions? We’re always happy to hear from you: feedback@nasuni.com.

Cloud Storage Webinar to Explore Pros and Cons of Leading Disaster Recovery Models

Rana Ghahremanpour — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:24:56 -0400

Effective disaster recovery planning is critical for businesses - catastrophic data loss can be crippling. Only 6% of companies that experience major disasters survive, and 51% close up shop within two years, according to researchers at the University of Texas*. Disaster recovery planning is hardly a new concept, but the apparently tried and tested methods do have significant flaws. This Thursday at 12:00 PM EDT, our CEO, storage industry veteran Andres Rodriguez, will be hosting a webinar to explore the pros and cons of the leading disaster recovery models. Andres will help participants understand the disaster recovery tools out there today, and show you how to protect your mission-critical data from potential catastrophes.

Whether you’re talking about actual natural disasters, software corruption, hardware failure, or simple human error, traditional disaster recovery (DR) planning techniques – tape, disk or a combination of tape & disk – don’t always protect against irretrievable data loss. Disks fail. Tapes can be lost in transit. Data can be corrupted or take far too long to restore.

This Thursday’s webinar is part of a larger effort here at Nasuni to help businesses explore some of the realities of disaster recovery models, and take a look at more effective solutions. Last week we released our list of the top 5 factors any enterprise should consider when choosing a DR model. We also discussed the many benefits of using the cloud for DR – a subject Andres will review in detail in the webinar - and we showed just how easy it is to set this up with the Nasuni Filer as your gateway to the cloud.

Interested in protecting your business data? There’s still time to sign up - the webinar will take place this Thursday, August 12^th, at 12:00 PM EDT. All you need is an Internet connection and either headphones or a set of speakers, so reserve your spot now!

*University of Texas Center for Research on Information Systems, as cited in Datamation, June 14, 1994