disaster recovery

How to Reduce DR Storage Costs

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IT professionals need to understand how to reduce DR storage costs to afford to implement this critical component of a disaster recovery (DR) strategy. If a cost-effective DR storage solution can’t be found, IT can only offer complete disaster recovery to a few mission-critical applications instead of the entire data center estate.

An affordable DR storage system also improves. IT’s capabilities to respond to more threats. Reducing the cost of DR storage means IT can have an on-premises DR storage system suitable for recovery from a ransomware attack and a remote system that protects against natural disasters.

Efficient Performance Reduces DR Storage Costs

Given the advancements in storage hardware, achieving high performance is no longer a challenge. If the storage vendor throws enough CPU power and dozens of high-end flash drives in their storage system, they will likely deliver the performance you need. This approach is costly enough in the data center; it is untenable for a secondary on-premises system or a remote DR system.

how to reduce DR storage costs

Efficient performance means extracting the maximum possible capabilities from each system component. Efficiency means that the storage system can deliver better performance using less powerful CPUs, less system memory, and fewer mid-range flash drives. To extract maximum efficiency requires leaving the legacy storage IO stack in the past and moving forward, as StorONE did, with a new single-plane IO engine that moves IO through the storage controllers to physical media with fewer operations.

Intelligent Media Utilization Reduces DR Storage Costs

To hide their software’s dependency on the legacy IO stack, most vendors today are myopically focused on delivering an all-flash array (AFA) as their sole solution for production storage use cases. This requirement means IT will have to purchase an all-flash array from the same vendor for their DR site. Some vendors offer a lower cost AFA for the disaster recovery site, but that system is lower performing and typically less reliable. And it is still an AFA, so its pricing is at a premium versus a hard disk-based system.

DR site storage is a perfect use case for hybrid storage. The replication process replicates data from the primary data center to the secondary on-premises storage system and/or to the system at the disaster recovery site. The DR storage systems receive this data on the flash tier for rapid ingest but then move the data as it ages to a hard disk tier. Hard disks are 10X less expensive than flash media.

Thanks to the replication process, the most active data is already on the flash tier during a disaster. If there is a need to access older data, it is readily available from the hard disk tier. StorONE’s efficient IO engine writes data sequentially to the hard disk tier during data movement, which means optimum read performance from the HDD tier.

Addressing the Auto-Tiering Elephant in the Room

The only legitimate concern that AFA vendors cast as an issue for auto-tiering systems are that auto-tiering systems users will experience inconsistent performance. This issue stems from when legacy auto-tiering (hybrid) storage systems move data to a lower tier. It happens at the worst possible time.

Most legacy auto-tiering storage systems operate only on a high watermark basis. When enough data is written to the flash tier so that the capacity exceeds the high watermark, these systems will immediately move data to the lower tier, which is made up of slower hard disk drives. The legacy auto-tiering system now must continue to ingest new writes while, at the same time, it is identifying and reading data most eligible for movement to the hard disk tier and writing this eligible data to that tier. These additional processes add significant latency. The result is a wildly inconsistent performance experience when high performance is needed most.

StorONE’s efficient IO engine also resolves the performance inconsistency problem using predictive auto-tiering. A storage solution, especially one powered by StorONE, has plenty of low resource utilization moments throughout the day. StorONE’s auto-tiering algorithm will take advantage of these moments and predictively tier data to reduce to a low watermark threshold. There is plenty of space to receive inbound writes and incredibly consistent performance.

Increasing Use Cases to Reduce DR Storage Costs

A final method for IT professionals trying to learn how to reduce DR storage costs is to increase the use cases for the DR storage systems instead of having them sitting idle until something goes wrong. The challenge is that because of the cost and inefficiency of using the legacy IO stack; most customers have to purchase a minimal system that can’t support other use cases.

StorONE’s efficient storage engine can support multiple use cases very cost-effectively. The efficiency of our engine and the intelligent use of storage media means that you can afford an isolated on-premises recovery environment to increase your ransomware resiliency and protect against micro disasters that don’t take down your data center but do impact operations.

Additionally, you can use our S1:Backup solution, which can meet all of the requirements of the DR storage system while spending most of its day improving your backup environment’s recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO/RTO). You can also use our S1:Archive solution as a disaster recovery storage target. These solutions can also be used as a secondary NAS storage area with our S1:NAS.

Most importantly, using StorONE initially as a DR storage system sets the stage for leveraging our Storage Engine and consolidating all storage workloads at a comfortable pace.

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Key Requirements for Affordable DR

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Many vendors claim to have data protection and disaster recovery (DR) features, specifically snapshot and replication capabilities, but do these features meet the key requirements for affordable disaster recovery (DR)? A DR plan must strike a practical balance between rapid recovery from any disaster and the realities of the IT budget.

Key Requirements an Affordable DR Solution Should Provide:

  • Granularity – Set snapshot and replication policies per volume
  • Tiering – Automated movement of DR data to the least expensive storage
  • Integrated – Snapshots and Replication included, no additional software needed
  • Flexible – Replicate from All-Flash-Array to a Hard Disk Array at the DR site
  • Cloud – Avoid cost of DR Site by replicating data to the Cloud.

Not All Data is Created Equal

The first step in achieving affordable DR is providing an organization with the ability to assign the appropriate level of data protection to specific workloads based on the criticality of the data they contain, ideally per volume. They also need a means to automatically identify and move “cold” data to less expensive storage tiers like hard disk drives (HDD). Additionally, for DR purposes, they need the ability to replicate data between dissimilar storage systems.

Data Placement is Key to Effective Protection and Cost Containment

Most modern organizations use all-flash-arrays (AFA) and solid-state drives (SSD) as their primary storage tier to insure maximum performance for their various application workloads. However, a flash-only strategy raises the TCO of primary storage while also dramatically raising the cost of the DR infrastructure since the organization now needs an AFA DR site.

Key Requirements for Affordable DR

Storing aging, “cold” data on flash storage, wastes precious premium capacity and forces organizations to prematurely purchase additional flash media for new data. In the overwhelming number of data centers, more than 80% of the data set falls into this “cold” category. Storing “cold” data on HDD storage can reduce primary and DR site storage costs by 10X.
The challenge is that most AFA vendors do not include any data tiering capabilities, not even between their performance and capacity solutions. The customer is left to identify and move this “cold” data to less expensive flash or HDD based systems, themselves. This is a difficult, time consuming manual task and the tools to automate it are very expensive and don’t integrate well with the existing storage systems. The lack of affordable, integrated data tiering and automated tools leads most customers to assume that all-flash is their only answer. For a closer look at why AFA vendors avoid tiering, see our article, “Are All-Flash-Vendors Afraid of Tiering?”

The lack of tiering obviously drives up the cost of primary storage but it also dramatically increases the cost of DR storage, since almost all of that data is “cold”, until a disaster occurs.

Data Protection Limitations

The main problem organizations face is how to effectively protect their data in a way that allows the organization to implement a comprehensive DR plan that can recover any and all data in case of a ransomware attack, hardware or system failure, or a natural disaster. Backup software, which only runs once every 24 hours, is no longer sufficient for data protection. To meet new requirements for 100% data availability 24/7, organizations are trying to augment their backups by using two important tools that the storage system usually provides; snapshots and replication. The problem is most legacy snapshot and replication solutions fall woefully short and force IT to continue to make compromises.

Legacy Replication Weaknesses

While replication is included “free” with modern storage solutions, many organizations are unable to use replication because of the cost, complexity and inflexibility of legacy storage arrays. The problem is that most storage system vendors usually require the replication target be the exact same configuration as the primary storage system. This forces organizations to purchase expensive AFAs, which sit idle until a disaster strikes, as replication and/or DR targets.

While third party replication software lets organizations avoid these limitations by providing the flexibility to copy any type of data to any type of storage media, these external solutions are not integrated with their current storage solutions and are expensive. It’s a separate process that must be learned and managed independently. To get a better understanding of the true cost of legacy based replication, see our blog, “The Total Cost of Storage Replication”.

Third party solutions also have a tendency to be purchased by bigger companies, who are essentially admitting their replication capabilities were inadequate. A recent example is HPE’s acquisition of Zerto. Zerto customers who are not also HPE customers now must wonder about the future of a critical element of their DR strategy.

From a technology perspective, most storage vendors count on their snapshot technology to fuel their replication solution. As we’ve discussed before, the problem with this approach is first, their snapshot technology is limited. Second, counting on snapshots means that replication only occurs at specific intervals rather than continuously. Disasters don’t let you know they’re coming. The lack of continuous secondary site replication leaves your organization exposed.

Overcoming these weaknesses requires a new approach, not based on obsolete software, which can properly leverage the latest storage and networking technology to deliver a minimal TCO for the entire DR process.

Key Requirements for Affordable DR

A New Approach to an Old Problem

StorONE, founded in 2011, spent our first eight years rewriting all the obsolete storage algorithms and flattening the legacy IO stack used by all of our competitors, to create a new single layered, efficient storage engine. StorONE’s modern Enterprise Storage Platform enables customers to minimize storage TCO while maximizing data protection. This new platform based solution includes critical new features, like advanced snapshots (S1:Snap), advanced replication (S1:Replicate), and integrated auto-tiering, among others. These new features effectually overcome the shortcomings of legacy storage systems.

Key Requirements for Affordable DR

The main key to maximizing data protection is ensuring the organization can place data in multiple locations without increasing complexity or storage costs. An effective DR strategy means that data needs to reside in multiple locations and across dissimilar media types. StorONE’s S1:Replicate feature enables an organization to achieve 100% uptime by continuously replicating data from any type of storage system to another, dissimilar storage system with a DR failover plan in place. It also provides high-performance synchronous replication, for mission critical applications, asynchronous for less critical workloads and/or remote secondary sites, including the cloud, limited by latency or minimal connectivity. StorONE also includes cascading replication, allowing organizations to create multi-site (more than two) replication situations in either many-to-one or one-to-many configurations.

Conclusion

StorONE’s S1:Replicate feature solves one of the biggest problems of using primary storage for DR; the cost, but it does so while increasing, not compromising, data protection quality. When a disaster occurs, the DR site has instant access to production data in its original format and recovery consists of connecting applications to the volumes on the DR storage system and promoting it to production. S1:Replicate, along with the other new features of the StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform, maximizes data protection while minimizing TCO.

The Three Steps to Maximum Disaster Recovery Success

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The three steps to maximum disaster recovery success enable your organization to survive any disaster that may befall it. Recovery is the reason for the exercise. A plan and practice are critical but so is making sure you have the right technology. As discussed in our blog “Affordable Disaster Recovery,” keeping the TCO low is tightly intertwined with recovery success. If you can’t afford to execute the plan, you’ll be forced to make compromises, making the recovery effort more difficult.

These are three steps to maximum disaster recovery (DR) success

  1. DR Ready Primary Storage
  2. Advanced Snapshots and Replication
  3. Simplified Testing

1. DR Ready Primary Storage Maximizes DR Success

Disaster Recovery is not the place for backups. The backup capture process isn’t granular enough. In most cases, backups typically execute once per night. Even the most diligent IT professional only executes backup every four hours. In four hours, a ransomware attack can trigger and lockdown your entire environment. Additionally, IT needs to manage these as separate processes, increasing operational costs.

three steps to maximum disaster recovery

The right primary storage solution should provide all the protection you need. The concept behind snapshots and replication lays the groundwork for a full-proof backup and disaster recovery strategy. It should provide recoverability from even the most insidious of ransomware attacks as well as any natural disaster.

Most primary storage vendors build their systems on obsolete legacy storage software that is inefficient and doesn’t enable snapshots and replication to live up to their full potential. StorONE, because we rewrote the algorithms and collapsed the storage IO stack into a single layer, enables these features to effectively take their rightful place as your primary protection against data and site loss.

2. Advanced Snapshots and Replication Maximizes DR Success

The limitations of the legacy storage solution’s dependence on the decades-old storage software stack mean that most customers use snapshots to “feed” their backup process. Every four hours or so, they take a snapshot and send it to the backup application. More frequent snapshot intervals will cause performance issues for these legacy systems. These vendors then leverage their snapshot technology to replicate data to the DR site, which means legacy vendors can only update the DR site at the interval of the snapshot, in this case, every four hours.

A replication strategy that is dependent on legacy snapshots is, by definition, a legacy replication technology. This technique, while expedient for the vendor, puts your data at risk. The gap between snapshot intervals is clearly an issue, and your flexibility is limited once the data is at the remote site. In most cases, you can’t perform any operations on the remote volume, further limiting flexibility. Also, the time between snapshots puts more significant stress on WAN connections forcing you to buy more bandwidth and raise DR TCO. Additionally, it also requires you to have matching hardware at the DR site, further increasing DR TCO.

StorONE’s advanced snapshot technology, S1:Snap, leverages the efficiency of the Storage Engine to enable our customers to take a snapshot as frequently as every three minutes and retain that snapshot indefinitely, with no performance impact. We’ve proven this in production, and you can see it yourself on our webinar “Storage Snapshots Are Useless, Learn how to fix them.” The snapshot frequency that S1:Snap provides, without impacting performance is critical to maximum disaster recovery success.

StorONE’s advanced replication technology, S1:Replicate, is integrated with the S1 platform but is not dependent on snapshots to operate. It continuously replicates data synchronously or asynchronously to the remote DR site no matter the snapshot schedule. This lack of dependency means the remote site is much more in sync with the primary site but requires less bandwidth. It also means that the volume on the remote site can have its own snapshot schedule. IT can promote any of these snapshots and operate on them.

3. Simplified Testing Maximizes DR Success

Anytime an analyst firm surveys disaster recovery confidence, the results are disappointing. Most C-level executives have very little confidence in their ability to recover from a disaster successfully. The DR Ready Primary Storage equipped with Advanced Snapshots and Advanced Replication, ensure you have a firm foundation for success. The next step is testing to make sure that your team knows what steps to take when the worst happens.

Testing is particularly a challenge with legacy replication technology. Remember, you can’t do much with the target volume at the DR site until you break or stop the replication process. While you are testing and practicing your disaster recovery strategy, you are actually putting data at risk.

With StorONE’s S1:Replicate, you can continue the replication process while testing your DR skills by simply taking a snapshot of the remote volume and restoring it to production. With StorONE, though, that restoration does not mean you will consume additional capacity. The restored volume does not consume capacity until you start making changes to it.

Conclusion

DR Ready Primary Storage, advanced snapshots and replication, plus simplified testing puts you on the path to success. They also enable you to continue to reduce DR TCO. The real power of the StorONE Enterprise Platform is as you extend it out of its initial use case and allow the platform to support more and more workloads, your DR strategy’s TCO continues to decline while your execution of that strategy continues to be simplified.

The Total Cost of Storage Replication

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The total cost of storage replication keeps customers from realizing the full benefits of this vital feature. As a result, most storage professionals use replication as part of a disaster recovery strategy and only for the most mission-critical applications. Driving down replication costs opens up a world of problem-solving capabilities that IT can leverage every day. 

In our Whiteboard Wednesday session, “Using Replication for More Than DR,” we discuss the benefits of driving down the cost of storage replication. You’ll learn how affordable DR can allow more mainstream applications to participate in the real-time DR process. Most importantly, you’ll learn how affordable replication can also enable IT to solve other, more day-to-day problems. 

Understanding the Total Cost of Storage Replication

Today, most storage systems include some form of storage replication with the base system or software licenses. As a result, what makes storage replication so expensive is not the software cost. Instead, it is the hardware costs that make storage replication so expensive. 

The Cost of Inflexibility

Most storage vendors require that you use identical storage hardware in both locations to support replication. For example, if your primary storage system is an All-Flash Array (AFA), you must replicate to an AFA at the DR site. While AFAs are becoming more affordable, being forced to buy two is always expensive, especially considering that the DR site system won’t be used for production data unless there is a disaster. The inflexibility to support alternative storage targets takes replication off the table for organizations looking to build an effective DR strategy. To learn more about creating a disaster recovery plan, read “A Real-World Disaster Recovery Plan“.

There are, however, options to get around the cost of identical hardware. For example, you can use a third-party replication solution. These solutions will often enable you to replicate from anything to anything. The problem with these solutions is the separate software itself is costly. It is also not integrated into the storage system and becomes yet another process for IT to learn and manage. As a result, most customers don’t choose this path. 

Cost of Storage Replication

Another option is to leverage backup software, which is continuously improving its recovery speeds and certainly should win most DR price battles. But even with the improved recovery times, the recovery process is still prolonged and complicated. In most cases, organizations store their backup data on inexpensive hard disk storage, which isn’t production quality, to keep costs down. That means that IT has to recover data from backup storage to production storage. The process is time-consuming and may require waiting for additional production storage to arrive. Consequently, despite its massive shortcomings, backup is the most common disaster recovery strategy by far, which means that many DR strategies can’t achieve their primary goal of a rapid and seamless recovery. 

Driving Down the Total Cost of Replication 

Storage systems or software need to support multiple types of disaster recovery targets with their built-in replication software. An All-Flash Array in the production data center should replicate to a Hybrid or even an all-HDD array located at the DR site. For most DR situations, a small flash tier, coupled with a large hard disk tier, is ideal. It allows for a low-cost DR hardware solution that can still provide production class performance and enterprise features if a disaster presses the system into service. 

Another way to drive down the replication cost is for the storage system to consolidate multiple production workloads onto a single storage platform. The platform approach to replication means that IT can protect all workloads, Block, File, and Object, from a single source, with a single operation. The cost and complexity of having multiple storage silos increase exponentially when IT planners factor in DR’s cost.  

Replication with the Enterprise Storage Platform

StorONE includes both synchronous and asynchronous replication as part of the core license. With synchronous replication, since acknowledgment of writes has to occur on both the primary and target systems simultaneously, it can use servers and media from different manufacturers. Asynchronous replication has even greater flexibility. The replication target system can be dramatically different from the primary. An All-Flash Array, for example, can replicate to an HDD system. 

Cost of Storage Replication

Granular replication is another way to lower replication costs. Volumes supporting mission-critical applications can synchronously replicate to a system with similar IO capabilities, while less critical workloads can replicate remotely to a hard disk only system. Still, other workloads that are semi-critical can replicate to a hybrid volume (flash and HDD). The point is that the choice is yours. As an IT professional, you can perfectly balance the cost and recoverability of your environment’s workloads. 

Do More with Storage Replication

The downside of traditional, expensive replication features is the cost of the capability limits how broadly organizations can leverage it. The high price means they can only use replication for DR and only for the most critical workloads because of the expense. Isolating replication to the DR process means the organization only sees value in the investment if disaster strikes, which doesn’t happen every day unless you are very unlucky. 

The ability to drive down replication costs enables IT to leverage the feature to solve various other IT challenges. In addition to solving their DR challenges, our customers leverage our replication capabilities to augment and eventually replace backup, move workloads between S1 clusters for load balancing, and even migrate workloads to the cloud. 

To learn more, register for our Whiteboard Wednesday. In this interactive virtual whiteboard session, we cover replication basics and using replication to create a cost-effective yet bulletproof disaster recovery strategy. Then we go through how to use replication to solve other storage challenges like the ones discussed above.

Better Storage, Better Protection, Better Pricing

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Storage shouldn’t be so hard or so expensive. It is time for better storage and better pricing. The StorONE Q3-2020 release continues our assault on storage complexity by delivering critical new features that improve our customer’s ability to protect their data while lowering storage costs. 

Better Storage Pricing

Earlier this year, StorONE put the industry on notice with its TRUprice configuration tool, enabling IT professionals to configure and price a storage solution to meet their exact needs. Thanks to the success of that program, StorONE is receiving new, lower hardware costs. Because we are primarily a software company, we are enabling our customers to benefit from our unique positioning. 

Better Storage Software means better storage pricing
Better Storage means Better Pricing

Starting today, StorONE offers a 1PB All-Flash Array for $499k and a 500TB system for $249k. Additionally, because StorONE isn’t afraid of data tiering, we also provide hybrid configurations. Our 1PB Hybrid system, which includes a 92TB flash tier is $249k, and a 646TB hybrid system which includes a 46TB flash tier, is $162k. All of these configurations are readily available and include the StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform software. 

Better Storage Innovation

The lack of innovation in storage software has led many IT professionals to assume that all storage features are the same. StorONE, however, is unique. We use new, superior storage algorithms to deliver better and more efficient capabilities. For example, our DirectWrite feature provides extremely high-performance but doesn’t require using risky write caches. Our software confirms all writes on persistent media before acknowledging the write to the application. 

Our snapshot technology enables you to execute snapshots every three minutes while also retaining those snapshots indefinitely. StorONE can maintain millions of snapshots without impacting performance in any way. The S1 Platform delivers all of these capabilities without compromising performance. Our systems still provide hundreds of thousands of IOPS and maximum bandwidth, even with millions of active snapshots. 

Fastest RAID Rebuilds

Better Storage means faster RAID rebuilds
Fasted RAID Rebuilds!

In StorONE’s new Q3-2020 release, we’ve raised the bar on data protection even further than before. vRAID, our high performance, erasure coding-based media failure protection capability, now offers even faster RAID rebuilds. StorONE can now rebuild flash-based volumes within two to three minutes. Other all-flash systems often make their customers suffer from double-digit hours rebuild times. S1 can even rebuild high capacity hard disk-based volumes within four or five hours. Our customers, with competitive solutions, tell us they experience days to weeks of recovery times with high capacity hard disks. The ability to quickly return to a protected state not only saves time and reduces risk, but it also enables you to reduce the number of drives you must set aside for failure protection, which can further reduce costs. 

Better Data Protection

Building on vRAID, the Q3-2020 release provides a new capability, vRACK, to protect against total rack failure. vRACK extends our erasure coding algorithm so that customers can eliminate JBODs, JBOFs, and entire racks as failure points. vRACK provides similar protection to a synchronous mirror without the 100% capacity overhead. 

Further building on our passion for data protection is vReplicate, an extension of our S1:Replicate technology, a snapshot independent replication technology that provides customers with full protection from a disaster. vReplicate enables customers to replicate synchronously to an S1 cluster in another building while simultaneously replicating asynchronously to an S1 cluster thousands of miles away. 

vReplicate can allow a volume to simultaneously send data to up to sixteen DR targets around the world. Most importantly, IT professionals have full control over the replication process. They can replicate from an Optane-powered All-Flash Array.next system to a hard-disk-based system. A single S1 cluster can have some volumes set to synchronously replicate to a local S1 cluster while others replicate asynchronously. 

Better Storage Platform

At StorONE, we want to help you solve today’s problems while creating a platform for a long-lasting storage consolidation project. The S1 Enterprise Storage Platform is extremely cost-effective upfront, and we prove it with TRUprice. The same storage controllers can start as small as 46TB and scale to 15PB. It also provides supports for all storage use cases, including block, file, and object. The Q3-2020 release makes the platform more robust than ever by adding support for attaching hosts via NVMe-oF. Customers are also using the S1 Platform as a replacement for NetApp and Isilon deployments. As a result, the Q3-2020 release adds specific capabilities to our NAS capabilities to make those transitions easier. 

Learn More

On Thursday, October 15th, at 1:00 pm, ET, StorONE will be hosting a webinar to discuss these new capabilities. When combined with the rest of the S1 Enterprise Platform feature set, it enables IT to eliminate separate backup and disaster recovery processes. Join us live for “Learn the Five Levels of Protection Required to Eliminate Backup and DR” pre-register today and receive a copy of our white paper “Reducing Backup Costs with Better Primary Storage” soon after registering.

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