What is snapshot, why do I need it?

Currently, most storage providers use this technology called Snapshot. This technology uses a method called “Copy On Write” which means that, if a location is changed, old data from the time snapshot for that location is stored in a repository called SnapSpace. The consequential snapshot will look like an actual volume, containing data at the time of snapshot taken.

Snapshot is also called Shadow Copy in windows Terminology. But the difference between windows based shadow copy and storage based snapshots are that windows based shadow copy will take the CPU cycles of the server, but storage snapshot does not.

Why do I need it?

Below listed are some usages of Snapshot.

–       Backup: Take a snapshot, backup the snapshot.

–      File Recovery: In case a file is deleted accidentally, it can be retrieved by going back to the snapshot.

–       Take a snapshot, give that to one or more other groups to work on it, while live volume is changing.

For more details on StoneFly’s Snapshot, Visit StoneFly’s  iscsi.com

Also refer the link given below:

http://www.iscsi.com/news/pressrelease_detail.asp?id=265

 

MDA switches to StoneFly’s IP SAN to expand and revamp data backup procedures

Medical Doctor Associates (MDA), involved in providing quality medical staffing to the healthcare community recently faced issues as their entire data center was dependent on a FC- SAN.  Large amounts of data being processed on a daily basis demanded much superior data backup as well as storage procedures.

The problem: Apparently, MDA’s IT department deliberated a switch of their data from their fiber channel network to a backup tape. This process was inadequate and could not meet time constraints. Another issue that cropped up was the insufficient options offered by fiber channel storage, making data storage less scalable. All this led them to switch to a three phase plan to achieve their expansion in data storage.

Approach used to get the desired solution used the three phase plan to transfer data, explained in simple terms below:

Phase 1.  Migrate pre-existing files by creating a disk to disk (D2D) backup. – uses StoneFly’s ISC 2402 S-    Class IP SAN.

Phase 2.  Achieve scalability by using StoneFly’s ISC- 2402E S- Class Expansion unit, using RAID 6, for storing data involved in applications.

Phase 3. Performance enhancement, using StoneFly’s ISC -2402 E S- Class Expansion Unit with SAS 6g RAID architecture.

StoneFly’s IP SAN storage is a good choice in providing a solution to MDA’s problem due to the following key factors:

1. Versatility of appliances.
2. Ease of data management
3. Advanced features that could not previously be achieved with Fiber channel storage.
4. Reasonable pricing.

For more details about the products used for this type of storage, Please go to StoneFly’s IP SAN products.

Link: http://stonefly.com/products/ipsan/isc-6gs/

It’s All About Restore

Peace of mind comes from knowing your backed-up data can actually be restored quickly and reliably. Backups can be easily verified, but there is high anxiety associated with confirming
the reliability of a restore.    In most cases, knowing that a restore actually works usually occurs after data is lost. Keeping your fingers crossed should not be an integral part of a data recovery program.

High profile events, such as recent natural disasters, provide harsh reminders of the many ways information can be lost. Among the most common are hardware and software malfunction, human error, computer viruses and natural disasters.There are three main quantifiable costs associated with each incident of data loss:  the cost of technical support in the recovery effort, lost productivity due to user downtime, and the possible cost associated with data that is permanently lost.

Visit StoneFly Whitepaper Library to learn all about cost-effective restore suggested by experienced StoneFly experts.

Enhanced Professional Services For Data Storage – We deliver

As data needs become more complex and onerous for in-house IT staff, DNF’s Professional Service Engineers  can assist in data services without disrupting business operations of an enterprise.

We offer a full range of expert services from requirements gathering and evaluating the existing environment assessments to technology selection, deployment and monitoring.

The DNF Professional Services engineer determine the best tailored services to fit your needs and ultimately a successful storage implementation. The services fall in below categories: 

1. Training  – We work with your team to train them  about nuts and bolts of storage technology.
2. Remote Management ­ – Our Professional  services include fully managed services for monitoring and managing  your storage and backup environments.
3. Disaster Recovery Planning –Our team can help you recover data from literally any type of media from external disk drives, storage arrays, networked storage and internal disks.
4. Data Replication – We offer a unique, guaranteed, and simple plan to deploy data replication to our data center assuring you data availability at all times.
5. Data Security & Protection – Based on your business process, our experts will provide appropriate security recommendations that will be perfectly aligned with your business needs and industry security best practice.
6.  Data Migration – Highly qualified consulting engineers will guide your organization through the migration process with the least amount of disruption to your end-users and your overall business environment.
7.  Performance & Reliability Testing – Our team of experts will help you get the best possible performance from your existing servers and storage by making suggestions on ways to tune the system for best performance.
8. VMware Consulting & Installation –  DNF is a VMware Alliance Partner and has certified VMware engineers on our team to help you with VMware Server and ESX Server design, implementation and configuration.
9. Storage & Server Consolidation – Our professional team will help you sort through and understand the hottest topics in IT, including storage and server consolidation.
10. Requirement Review & Assessment –  Our experts will work with you to evaluate your existing environment and come up with an effective strategy and solution that will meet your business requirements, budgets and redundancy needs.
11. Installation & Configuration – We will work with you to allocate space strategically and forecast future needs for initial setup and configuration of your storage.

 So what are you waiting for? Call DNF Professional Services and never worry about your data needs again!

Comprehensive Data Continuity: StoneFly’s SCVM™ Certified Hosting Partners Program

StoneFly is proud to announce the launch of the SCVM ™ Certified Hosting Partner’s Program. We will be partnering with top-notch datacenter hosting providers, to provide a comprehensive off-site data continuity and disaster recovery solution to our customers.

Need of a backup solution but don’t have the time, money, or manpower to manage another storage or server? Or maybe you want an off-site backup solution? Our SCVM™ Certified Hosting Partners are there to provide a complete storage solution built to satisfy your disaster recovery and business continuity objectives.

By combining their secure hosting services with SCVM’s advanced asynchronous remote replication and snapshot technologies, our hosting partners are ideal for protecting your mission-critical information.

Here’s what our hosting providers can assist you with:

• Hybrid Cloud Backup
• Data Protection
• Business Continuity
• Disaster Recovery

Find out more about the SCVM™ Certified Hosting Partner’s Program on our website. Also if you’re interested in learning more about the program, contact StoneFly sales at (510) 265-1616 or Sales@StoneFly.com.

StoneFly provides Business Continuity and DR for Industrial Packaging Company

We all know the importance of implementing a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan, but what happens when you don’t have one? In our latest StoneFly case study,  we provide a sound BC and DR plan while exceeding RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) for a Utah-based professional industrial packaging company.

By implementing StoneFly’s high-performance Voyager-TSC IP SAN with SCVM (for asynchronous replication), the company was able virtualize their IT environment by 95%, reduced server space by 80%, and now has the option to  scale up their storage for the future.

To learn more about how our Voyager-TSC and SCVM achieved this on this case study.

Top 5 things you need to know about StoneFly’s SCVM™

This week we launched the Storage Concentrator Virtual Machine (SCVM™), StoneFly’s first IPSAN software appliance. We are excited to bring this new and innovative product out to the market, which is why we compiled the top 5 things you need to know about the SCVM™. So here they are:

1. SCVM™ is a virtual IPSAN, which can be used on your existing virtual server
2. Currently SCVM™ can be used on VMWare and Hyper-V environments, and soon Xen (which will be available on Q1 of 2011)
3. It is ideal for your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans
4. This appliance lowers operational datacenter costs and increases RTO
5. You can download a FREE trial version of SCVM™ on the StoneFly website

Learn more about SCVM™ and what it can offer you, check out our latest Press Release or call us at (510) 265-1616.

What is the latest on Disaster Recovery and what really works?

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning is essential in small, medium or enterprise sized business. Why is that? For one thing, safeguarding your data in the event of disaster can save you time, money, and not to mention your sanity.

Please join us on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 10am Pacific/ 1pm Eastern and learn the essentials of effective Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning.

Register here for more details: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/238483347

Sidekick Failure: Another case for SAN Backups

Here is yet another example of what can happen if you neglect to backup your data. For all you T-Mobile users out there, you probably know that the Sidekick stores all of your critical data in a network datastore and not within the physical device. If something were to happen to any of those servers holding your data, you would lose your data. Scary thought, huh? Well, that is exactly what happened.

Michael Sheehan believes that during hardware upgrades, there was a failure that occurred. Since the upgrade of the SAN proceeded without data backup the result was thousands of Sidekick users stuck without their data. Here are five tips he presents in his blog post, that are critical for any IT department to remember:

Backups – Back up often. Set up automatic as well as manual backup procedures. Store your data locally AND somewhere completely geographically distinct from your infrastructure.  *Check out the SAN backup features on the StoneFusion OS.

Redundancy – Physical servers AND virtualized servers do encounter issues. You would never put all of your eggs in one basket so why do it with your infrastructure! You should ensure that you set up a “high availability” (HA) infrastructure where you have 2 (or more) of everything, whether they be all active or as hot or warm standbys. *Check out the fully redundant, HA Voyager IP SAN.

Failovers – Most people, unless they are hugely successful, decide to put off setting up a Disaster Recovery (DR) environment due to costs and the time it takes to do so. That is, until their primary site goes down for hours or days, then DR suddenly moves to the top of the list. *Learn about StoneFly’s Data Continuity.

“Hybrid Hosting” – By setting up your front-end environment using the cloud (scalable, dynamic, elastic, etc.), you can optimize your web server environment for traffic and redundancy. Using physical boxes in the backend allows you to have additional services (like managed backups or security enhancements), thus making your infrastructure more secure and reliable. *Stay tuned for more info on this coming soon.

Due Diligence – Regardless of your infrastructure, datacenter or hosting environment, take some time right now to figure out your IT strategy and Best Practices.

RAIDML: Multi-Level Data Protection

What does “No Single Point of Failure” (NSPOF) really mean? If you read it at face value, you may conclude that it is the highest level of data protection.  There are several ways to achieve NSPOF on your volumes: mirroring ( RAID 1); mirroring and striping (RAID 10 or 0+1); complete subsystem mirroring (RAID51 or RAID61); or host based applications that manage mirroring. With these conventional NSPOF methods, you are only doubling the disk count, and essentially doubling the entire subsystems cost.

With StoneFly’s new RAIDML configuration, you can create NSPOF volumes and purely RAID5 or 6 protected volumes, and do it in a single storage unit or across multiple storage units.

Here is a highlight of the benefits:

• Flexible expansion at RAID and iSCSI volume levels
• Targeted NSPOF iSCSI volume(s) coexist with standard RAID5 and 6 iSCSI volumes
• Auto fail-over and fall-back protection
• No 100% drive count penalty
• Advanced StoneFusion volume management

To learn more, read the RAIDML tech brief.

Interested in a technology demo? Contact our sales team.

Use our new RAID calculator to help choose the RAID level that’s right for you.