Disk to Disk Backup, CDP and ILM
IT has been moving along the trend of installing Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) from a number of vendors, in additional to standard backup, recovery and disk-to-disk backup offerings from a variety of vendors.
Intransa's scalable, open IP infrastructure with 1 through 10GbE interface support and scalability of from 4 to more than 1,500 terabytes (TBs) of RAID protected, fault tolerant storage has proven to be an ideal platform for integration with many ILM, CDP and backup vendor solutions.
Many IT backup operations today still utilize tape as the underlying technology behind the scenes, and for good reason. Tape backup technology is proven, and while organizations often don't have time to test that the data was recorded correctly, the majority of time tape has been a dependable way to store off line data. Tape technology is inexpensive, although keeping large numbers of tapes in a secure location as well as the cost of the media itself often mitigates any saving, yet still offers limitless capacity and is fairly portable.
However, the ever increasing regulation of HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), EU Data Protection Act, and similar legislation, demands for data recovery, data protection, and rapid availability are requiring many IT organizations to lessen the role of tape in their infrastructures.
In addition, given today's common 24x7 IT operations, the backup window once available for tape backup of critical data has all but disappeared. Tape is of course significantly slower than disk storage, and backups to tape are not always 100% reliable. With this inherent lack of reliability comes risk in recovery, and being out of compliance with new standards, quality of service agreements and regulation. Unfortunately, very few IT departments ever have the time or resources to actually go back and test the tapes they back up... sometimes with disastrous results when the data is needed.
But now with the StorStac system from Intransa, IT can leverage their existing IP infrastructure to use low cost, low energy consuming SATA disk drive-based storage. This can not only reduce cost, by eliminating tape storage requirements and the cost of the media itself, but an Intransa-based disk-to-disk backup solution can deliver much higher performance than tape, extensive storage capacity, reliable backup and recovery, and do all of that an affordable cost.
The Intransa architecture used in our StorStac system leverages our proven, award winning IP-based infrastructure solutions to deliver independent scalability and capacity growth with high availability, yet affordably with true ease-of-use built in. This is further enhanced with the advanced DynaStac thin provisioning feature, built into all StorStac systems, that ensures ultimate performance and utilization of all storage in the entire system.
With our integrated StorStac GUI management system, Intransa solutions provide seamless, easy-to-use management that scales as your needs grow, without the cost and complexity of legacy solutions. And our StorAlliance technology partners deliver best-in-class solutions as part of a comprehensive answer to disk-to-disk backup and recovery needs, integrated into the Intransa solution.