by Maryna Frolova, PR Specialist, Dell Storage — September 08, 2011
When you run a 24/7 operation for a luxury jet service, an IT outage is something you can’t afford. The Flight Options IT team was finding that its legacy EMC storage system was running out of capacity. To keep up with data growth, the IT team started looking into different systems that would scale alongside its business, increase performance and reduce physical footprint and management time--until an unexpected disaster accelerated their decision making timeline. On Sept. 22, 2009, the Flight Options IT team discovered that a leaking air conditioner left its four-cabinet rack of database and applications servers and storage under water. The team needed to react quickly to protect its business systems. The backup data center worked as expected and the data was recovered. The next logical step was to get new equipment into the data center, quickly.
The Flight Options IT team spoke with EMC (the legacy vendor) and Dell Compellent about getting a new system quickly. The Compellent team was able to be agile, deliver the right product and act quickly. In less than a day, a Compellent system was ordered, shipped, installed and running. David Davies, CIO of Flight Options, said that in his long tenure as an IT professional he has never seen something like this done at such a rapid pace. It was a storage miracle.
As Flight Options deployed the new SAN, the company reaped the benefits of leveraging an efficient storage architecture to reduce the physical data center footprint by 80 percent, virtualize all applications, reduce costs, improve performance and cut management time to 15 minutes per week. To learn a bit more about the Flight Options story, check out the press release. David Davies is a great speaker who captivated an audience by presenting his story at SNW Spring in Santa Clara, CA. It’s not every day that you get to hear a story like David’s. He even joked that the marketing folks, like me, will love his story when we heard it for the first time.
Has your data center ever been stuck by an air conditioning disaster? What about any natural disasters? How did you recover? Please leave us a comment and tell us about it.
by Bruce Kornfeld, Lead, Dell Storage Alliances — September 07, 2010
Looking back in time, backing up data from desktops and servers to tapes made sense. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IT system; you’d be foolish not to back up your data. Having that insurance policy sitting on a shelf or at an offsite location was critical. If an “event” occurred, the clock starts ticking and it is IT’s job to bring their organization back online. How long? A few hours? A few days? A week? Looking toward the future, using tape as an insurance policy for bad things happening in the datacenter just won’t work for much longer. Data sets are too large, pipes from tape back to disk are too slow, and the time it takes to physically find tapes, ship tapes and restore from tape just doesn’t cut it anymore. The pace of information flow and business change will be too fast for restoring from tape in the future. (Are we already there today?)
Alternatives to tape backup
There are many technologies out there offering superior ways to ensure that operations can be back up and running shortly after any “event” or to avoid downtime completely—based on budget, of course. Many forward-thinking IT departments back up data to disk so that restores happen almost instantly. No more searching for the right tapes and waiting for tapes to spin in order to get back up and running. Some of the techniques that create backup sets on disk available today include:
- Increase the snapshot frequency on primary storage—manage those snapshots with the disk vendor’s user interface or a backup application. The data is already there ready to be used. These snapshots can also be sent to another physical disk system to provide extra protection.
- Use backup software (the way you always have) and write to disk instead of tape—a pretty common practice these days. The data could also be de-duplicated within the target disk. However, I suspect many are still ALSO writing the same data to tape—is this really necessary?
- De-dupe the data at the server and then send to disk—another method that is gaining momentum because less data needs to be sent to the backup disk—less to manage.
- Send backup sets to another location for disaster avoidance—bandwidth is a lot cheaper than it was 10 years ago and if you’re sending snapshots or de-duplicated backup sets the amount of disk needed in the remote location can be price competitive with sending, storing and managing tape after tape after tape...
What about accessing “old" data?
All of this discussion was about backup—being ready in case something bad happens. What about accessing all the old data that doesn’t really need to be accessed frequently? SEC filings from 3 years ago. Engineering drawings from the last product revision. Surveillance video. The CEOs keynote speech from the customer event 2 years ago. This is where an active archive comes in.
As a disk vendor, we’d LOVE to think that every organization would store their data on their primary storage disk forever. But that’s just not reality. Automatically tiering data within your primary storage is a great thing. But now there are techniques to create archives on secondary disk and tape systems so that your organization can have fast access to the information they need. It might appear that I’m suggesting that data never goes away. It just moves from fast disk to slower disk to tape over time—staying online and available the whole way. That’s the whole point. Archiving software is intelligent enough these days to help IT departments decide how long data needs to stay available so managing this process is getting easier. The key difference here is that these archives can now be on tape systems. Tape for archives—YES. Tape for backup—NO. Maybe the industry as a whole isn’t ready for this yet—but more and more will be moving there over time.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — June 17, 2010
As you may know, over the past several months Compellent hosted a series of Twitter chats known as #SANChat. #SANChat first started in March, and through these chats we’ve generated some great discussions on important data storage topics, including virtualization, unified storage, and risk vs. reward. Funny how much you can fit into a tweet.
I’m happy to announce that #SANChat will be moving forward with a dedicated schedule of monthly discussions, the first Wednesday of every month from 3:00 – 4:30 pm CT. Please join us and guest experts, end-users, and others interested in today’s most important data storage topics.
Our next #SANChat will be Wednesday, July 7, 3:00 – 4:30pm CT with John Troyer (@jtroyer) of VMware and Craig Miller (@craigwmiller) of Bioware, to discuss Virtualization and DR. It’s the follow on to last month’s discussion on virtualization 101 issues. We hope to see you there!
Below you will find some FAQs about #SANChat.
What is #SANChat?
#SANChat is an open Twitter chat on enterprise storage issues and trends such as virtualization and unified storage. #SANChat is vendor neutral, and invites a variety of moderators and guest experts on different topics.
Who participates?
Everyone with an interest in (an opinion on!) IT is welcome to participate—vendors, solution providers, end-users, bloggers, reporters, analysts and other independent observers.
Is it all about Compellent?
No. While #SANChat is founded and administered by Compellent, the purpose of the chats is to provide a Twitter-based venue for fun, informative, real-time conversations about storage and its role in enterprise IT. Everyone is encouraged to participate in the effort to create a well-rounded look at current trends and a collection of different opinions. It makes for much more interesting discussions!
When is #SANChat?
#SANChat takes place on the first Wednesday of each month, from 3:00 – 4:30 pm CT. Each #SANChat topic and participants are announced in the weeks leading up to the chat.
How do I participate?
To take part in the conversation, we recommend using the TweetChat application, which can be easily accessed by visiting http://tweetchat.com/room/SANchat.
What if I missed the previous SANChats?
You can visit http://wthashtag.com/sanchat for up-to-date information on our upcoming chats and past dates. Here are our latest #SANchat transcripts:
Data Center Risks, March 24 (Moderator: @johnddias, Guest: @bencredible)
Unified Storage, April 27 (Moderator: @liemnguyen, Guest: @esganalysttmac)
Virtualization, June 2 (Moderator: @justinbraun, Guest: @dconnor)
Can I become a guest or moderator?
We are always on the lookout for new topic ideas, moderators, and guests. If you would like to participate or have an idea for the next #SANChat, please contact me at Liem[dot]Nguyen[at]compellent[dot]com or @liemnguyen. If you’re a good fit for an upcoming topic, chances are we can arrange for you to moderate or be a guest.