Breaking Boundaries: Overcoming Traditional Backup Limitations with Innovative Solutions
- 1. Stonefly is the innovator of worldwide storage standard protocol Overcoming Traditional Backup Limitations Stonefly Inc. 26250 Eden Landing Hayward, California, USA StoneFly Backup Appliances
- 2. Whitepaper Introduc�on Market trends are driving new requirements for backup and disaster recovery solutions. There’s more data in more places: cloud, social media, IoT, analytics etc. New generation applications and consumption models are constantly emerging and continuously evolving. Virtualization is being implemented across the enterprise globally. Enterprises deal with additional data on a daily basis. For operational integrity, enterprises cannot tolerate the loss of this data. That is why backup is so important. Considering the ever evolving data requirements, enterprises need to employ backup solutions that can effectively deliver and are reliable. Traditional backup architectures have limitations that prevent it from doing so. Due to the layered architecture of a traditional backup infrastructure, enterprises have to endure excessive workloads that consume necessary resources. Traditional infrastructures also present a risk of entire system failure due to a single point of failure within the system. And the cost aspect of traditional infrastructures is also overwhelming. This whitepaper covers what traditional backup architecture looks like and the different layers within it. It provides insight on how StoneFly’s solutions innovatively address enterprise data backup requirements. And what makes StoneFly qualified to be your backup solution provider. 1 Figure 1: Traditional Backup Infrastructure.
- 3. Whitepaper Traditional backup infrastructure has a layered architecture as depicted in the above image. The first layer is the Command and Control (CnC) System. This layer is responsible for scheduling backups and managing catalogs. The challenge with this layer is that a single point of failure means that the entire system fails. There are no autonomous elements in the entire environment, one depends on the other therefore, if one goes down; the entire system goes down. The other challenge with this layer is that you have to provision the hardware resources and storage resources needed for the system excessively. Any change in the existing system, in a year or two, will cost a lot and will be a difficult process. The second layer (layer number 2) is the data mover layer. This is where data movers are connected to dedicated storage systems and are responsible for data migration, as the name suggests. The challenge with this layer is that this environment creates islands of storages. There is no global data reduction and there’s no storage optimization across this layer. And to add to this, is the fact that they don’t serve single points of failure for the clients that are being protected by those data movers. The third layer in the architecture (layer number 3) comprises of agents. There are two major prob- lems when it comes to agents. The first problem is that these agents are heavy and they tend to consume most, if not all, the resources dedicated for production. To cope with this, IT departments have to schedule backups in a way that they don’t cause downtimes and interfere with primary operations. The other problem is that these agents are complex to maintain. If an enterprise com- prises of thousands of systems, then it is very challenging to manage them. IT departments have to install and manage these components individually; incurring additional costs and consuming precious time. These are the three essential layers in a traditional backup infrastructure. There is also another layer that sits on top of all these layers. The examples of systems that constitute layer zero are monitoring, reporting systems and indexing systems. These layers add more value to the data being protected. 2
- 4. Whitepaper There have been some innovations in the architecture to simplify the complexity. Some architec- tures combine the compute and storage together to create an Integrated Backup Appliance. Consider layer 3 in figure 1, some architecture combine individual units (i-e a data mover and stor- age) into a single unit. This single unit replaces the data movers and storage, in an attempt to reduce complexity. Other architectures fuse all the secondary storage systems to create Hyper-Converged Secondary Storage systems. Consider layer 3 in Figure 1, this time the storage units are combined into a single unit. Instead of selecting storage, data movers reduce latency by moving data into the single unit of storage. This too simplifies the system and attempts to optimize backup. 3 Innova�ons in Tradi�onal Backup Infrastructure
- 5. Whitepaper StoneFly’s backup appliances are different from traditional backup infrastructure because they compress all the above mentioned layers (from 0 to 3) into a singular flat architecture. The other benefit of StoneFly Backup appliances is that they are cloud native. These appliances are designed to leverage your storage space in a way that it utilizes all available resources efficiently. And all of StoneFly’s appliances are scalable to infinite potential. You acquire the capability to scale-out and/or scale up as per your requirements. Cloud Backup Connect for Off-site Backup All StoneFly Backup appliances come with a Cloud Backup Connect, enabling organizations to fully utilize their existing backup software or existing backup appliance’s disaster recovery features, to implement offsite backup inexpensively. The StoneFly Cloud Backup Connect is compatible with any existing enterprise backup software or backup appliance you might already be using (including Symantec Backup Exec, Acronis, Commvault, Veeam, EMC Avamar, Net NetBackup, ShadowProtect, hp data protector etc.). StoneFly provides a backup connector to your choice of private, hybrid or public cloud. You can implement a quick and simple disaster recovery plan while storing your backups off-site in Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, VMware vCloud, VMware vCloud Air, StoneFly Cloud Business Center, or your remote private or hybrid cloud. StoneFly Backup Infrastructure & Appliances 4
- 6. Whitepaper 5 Compliance and Industry Cer�fica�ons StoneFly understands that to realize the benefits of the cloud, you must be able to trust the cloud. StoneFly has been leading the industry in establishing clear security and privacy requirements and then consistently meeting these requirements. StoneFly backup appliances meet a broad set of international and industry-specific compliance standards, such as ISO, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC and many others.
- 7. Whitepaper 6 Industry Certifications Technology Partners
- 8. Whitepaper 7 StoneFly Backup Appliances DR365-VS™ The StoneFly DR365-VS is a purpose-built appliance optimized with integrated hyperconverged enterprise Veeam Backup, Replication and disaster recovery solution. The DR365-VS™ includes backup and failover of any physical and virtual server with automated business continuity on prem- ises to any remote data center, private or public cloud. With LiveSpin feature, you can spin up your Replicated virtual machines in seconds – Just One Right click and failover. Every DR365-VS node can accommodate any combination of Enterprise SAS and SSD storage, Microsoft Azure Blob and Amazon S3, or Glacier Storage - achieving the performance needed for your requirements. Z-series Backup & DR Appliance StoneFly’s new Z-Series provides you with a total backup solution for all of your physical and virtual servers and workstations in a single box. Manage all of your backup operations for your datacenter or office with a single central management console. Z-Series appliances are available in integrated solutions of 4 to 24 drives or modular configurations with up to 128 drives per appliance. An option- al embedded hypervisor allows backed up VMs and new user-created VMs to be spun up directly on the Z-Series appliance.
- 9. Whitepaper 8 M-series Backup & DR Appliance StoneFly’s new M-Series provides you with a total backup solution for all of your physical and virtual servers and workstations in a single affordable mini-tower. Manage all of your backup operations for your datacenter or office with a single central management console. M-Series appliances are avail- able in storage capacities up to 32 TeraBytes. DR365™ Fusion Cluster Backup & DR Appliance Gone are the days where you had to invest heavily in setting up physical and virtual backups for your critical data. With DR365 Fusion – DR Site in a box, you can consolidate all your data in a single high-availability box with active-active hot-swappable cluster nodes with failover and failback in a single chassis, and it can all be managed from a single centralized backup management console. Each DR365 Fusion Cluster appliance can provide anywhere from a few TeraBytes all of the way up to 640 TeraBytes of backup storage capacity for your business. Every cluster appliance can accommo- date any combination of nearline SAS, enterprise SAS, or enterprise SSD storage tiers as required, achieving the performance needed for your requirements.
- 10. Whitepaper 9 About StoneFly Headquartered in the Silicon Valley (Hayward) California, StoneFly Inc. was founded to deliver upon the vision of simple and affordable enterprise-class products. StoneFly pioneered the creation, development and deployment of the iSCSI storage protocol. Beginning with its registration of the iSCSI.com internet domain name in March 1996, StoneFLy shipped its first iSCSI storage appliance in 2002 and subsequently made iSCSI into the established storage standard which is used by IT profes- sionals around the world. StoneFly provides physical, virtual, cloud, software as a service (SaaS), consulting, enterprise man- aged services, cloud migration services, public/private cloud infrastructure, backup, disaster recov- ery (DR), cloud file/sync collaboration and office in the cloud. StoneFly Cloud Storage has been deployed in all the Microsoft commercial and government data- centers worldwide. StoneFly products have been deployed on US Navy Litteral Combat Ships (LCS) and Virginia Class Nuclear Submarines. StoneFly’s the innovator of powerful, cost-effective IP storage products for departments, mid-teir workgroups, and enterprise organizations. The heart of StoneFly’s innovative products is the award winning software called StoneFusion ™ Intelligent Network Platform. All of StoneFly’s physical and virtual SAN appliances are protected by StoneFly’s storage virtualization patents as certified by the United States Patent and Trademark office (Patent #: 7302500, 7555586, 7558885, 8069292). StoneFly is a subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory (DNF) Inc, and is a member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the founding member of the IP storage institute (IPSI), a VMware TAP Elite Partner, a VMware Professional Solution Provider Partner, a certified Azure Market- place Partner, a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner, and an Amazon AWS Technology Partner. Company Contacts For more information, contact us: Sales@StoneFly.com & visit our website www.StoneFly.com