Virtualized Data Backup, Replication and DR, On-premise and in the Cloud

In a fast changing world where it appears that nothing we interact with on a routine basis is exactly what it is meant to be. The compute power in household goods scattered around our homes is beginning to raise questions concerning just what the end-game might look like. It also poses questions as to the real need for refrigerators able to communicate with automated floor cleaners or light switches willing to communicate with dishwashers. Smart appliances seem to be in vogue of late and many a present under the Christmas tree included computers of some sort or another. Then again, even with computers and communications sometimes a toaster is just a toaster!

When it comes to the data center there has been considerable market interest in appliances and for almost a decade we have been subject to marketing literature highlighting everything from remote access security appliances to storage appliances even monitoring appliances. “Appliances are evolving to offer businesses new ways to cuts costs and improve performance,” according to the article, The rise of the computing appliance, that appeared in ComputerWeekly.com. “The appliance is basically a self-contained IT system that can be plugged into an existing IT infrastructure to carry out a single purpose, making it comparable to a consumer appliance such as the toaster. The appliance is designed to address a specific IT operation from within a closed architecture that may contain an operating environment, storage and specific applications.”

However, just as a toaster is just a toaster and has been a stalwart atop kitchen counters for decades, as the article observes, “The computing appliance is not new in fact, home users were the early adopters of many appliances with such things as games consoles, the iPod, or TV set-top boxes.” Furthermore, according to Gartner VP and Research Director, John Enck, “IT managers should expect to be deluged with a new wave of server appliances offering everything from simple single-function operations – for example, file servers, Java Virtual Machine processing and so on – to completely integrated applications, operating systems and hardware systems.”

TSI has introduced the NonStop community to its latest product, Storage Director and with this latest offering, TSI can readily modernize NonStop backup environments with a multi-platform backup solution that can concurrently backup all your NonStop platforms, IBM PowerSystems and open environments (Linux and Windows) with a single low cost solution. Yes, an appliance – the Storage Director Appliance. As far as appliances go, it couldn’t be any simpler as it is yet another example of a commercial, off the shelf (COTS) Linux server. It could easily be an HPE DL380 G9 or a TSI configured “white box” depending on the vendor relationships existing at the site. As for the operating system, it is yet one more example of a special case SUSE Linux deployment. From a connectivity perspective, it relies solely on there being industry-standard Fiber Channel (FC) ports. And most important of all for the NonStop community, it is specifically designed for fault-tolerant, high availability computing environments, and already it is proving ideal for NonStop backup requirements.

Storage Director is a policy based backup solution enabling data from different applications and host servers to be placed into data pools with different retention, location and replication policies. When it comes to NonStop systems including the latest NonStop X family of systems, “virtualization” of the interface into the NonStop application is implemented such that a legacy tape interface to a NonStop system can be provided even when using more modern tape drives and/or libraries on the back end of the Storage Director appliance.

Storage Director® is a cost-effective, UNIFIED backup storage solution for all open AND proprietary server platforms and operating systems. These include Tandem/HP NonStop but also Windows, UNIX, Linux clusters in addition to IBM Power Systems (AS/400, IBM i, AIX, Linux), IBM Mainframe z/OS and z/Linux, HPUX, and HP Open VMS. Storage Director is a proven solution and is currently running production backups in multiple data centers in Fortune 20 corporations as well as numerous SMBs.

Storage Director leverages the speed of disk and flash and the cost effectiveness of tape by backing up data at high speed from multiple host servers into its disk or flash based Infinicache®, cataloging them and then archiving different data pools based on different policies specified by the customer. The different policies may include retention, location, type of media and number of copies of the data. It may very well be reminiscent of the venerable aforementioned toasters and it may just toast bread but when it comes to reliable, unified backup, perhaps the addition of such an appliance is all that we need to meet the pressing demands of our users anxious to protect their business critical data.

For further information about the Storage Director Appliance, contact me, Glenn Garrahan at ggarrahan@tributary.com or visit our website: www.tributary.com

Tributary Systems, Inc.
Attention: Customer Care Center
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