Tributary Systems and Texas

Tributary Systems headquarters are located in Bedford, Texas. Bedford is a small town about halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, very close to DFW Airport. So it’s only natural that we keep up with local news and events. Sometimes local Texas news can have national if not worldwide significance, after all Texas has the largest landmass of the 49 contiguous states, and the second largest population (after my home state of California).

The Texas Tribune recently published an article titled “Texas lawmakers look to the “cloud” for storing sensitive government data”. Take a moment and read the article at:

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/19/texas-lawmakers-cloud-storage-sensitive-data/

Interesting, but what’s the logic behind this investigation? Well, to summarize:

• Texas established two new data centers in 2005. Together they store quadrillions of bytes of data containing some of Texans’ most sensitive information, including health and education records
• But since 2005, state government programs have churned out more and more electronic information about health care, highways, public schools and other key services, dramatically increasing data warehousing costs, from $278 million in 2008 to $479 million today.
• Lawmakers, therefore, are considering an overhaul of how the state uses its data centers, with an eye toward Public Cloud based data backup options such as AWS.

Along with cost, there’s another major concern with Public Clouds, however, and that’s data security of course. Tributary Systems realizes that all potential users of Public Clouds for sensitive data backup share the security, as well as cost concerns that the folks in Texas do.  Our flagship product, Storage Director, has been specifically designed to address these concerns. But how?

Storage Director provides AES 256 bit data-at-rest and data-in-flight encryption capable of working with both an enterprise key management systems as well as generating its own keys.  Tributary continually conducts extensive vulnerability tests, updating the base Linux kernel is updated when security vulnerabilities are identified. Working with our customer base, Tributary engineers design security measures tailored to individual datacenter environments. Tributary leverages the security features provided by public cloud vendors such as AWS, Azure, and Google. For IBM Cloud Object Storage, Storage Director fully supports Information Dispersal Algorithms (IDA), otherwise referred to as Erasure Coding, probably the most unique security protocol available today.

“Turbocharging” Cloud Backup Performance

Object storage, whether it is on-premise solutions, like IBM Cloud Object Storage or Hitachi Content Platform or public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google and IBM Cloud, offer the lowest cost, most scalable, and most secure backup storage options for massive unstructured databases.

Realizing that throughput is critical to meeting today’s shorter backup windows, the Tributary team designed Storage Director to be the turbocharger for cloud-based object storage.  When Cloud Object Storage is implemented, either on-premise or in a public cloud, backup and restore performance is significantly improved with Storage Director as the gateway to the cloud. When compared to similar solutions available in the marketplace today, the unique algorithms built into Storage Director allow for a 5x to 10x improvement in throughput without modifications to either the host server or the cloud object storage target.

Putting the remarkable performance benefits aside for a moment, there’s a hidden cost savings available when Storage Director is implemented with Public Clouds. Most Public Cloud providers charge for data ingress and egress, minimizing data movement minimizes costs. Here again, Storage Director excels. With a built in cache layer and the Policy Based architecture, customers can retain critical data in Storage Director, while simultaneously archiving the same data in a Public Cloud. So if data needs to be restored, it can be retrieved directly from the Storage Director cache, avoiding the Public Cloud. Not only cheaper, but faster too!

As always, if you’d like additional information on Storage Director, visit www.tributary.com, or contact our Sales Director, Matt Allen, at 817-786-3066 (office) or 713-492-7434 (cell). Matt can also be reached at mallen@tributary.com

Storage Director allows NonStop professionals to “augment what they have and use it in creative new ways!”