How to Reclaim Your SAN With Cloud Storage

Transcription

1 How to Reclaim Your SAN With Cloud Storage 2010 Nasuni Corporation. All Rights Reserved

2 Abstract The new cloud storage trend promises scalability, reliability, and offsite storage, but many organizations don t know if cloud storage can solve their problems or how, exactly, they can take advantage of the cloud. trend promises scalability, reliability, and offsite storage, but many organizations don t know if cloud storage can solve their problems or how, exactly, they can take advantage of the cloud. In this paper we explore the answers to these ing to add 5 TB of protected storage can save 90% relative to current solutions. through secure, virtualized cloud storage. The Challenge: File Growth today. Documents, presentations, messages, video, music, and more clog up storage, complicating provisioning and backup/restore. It s not unusual for written or worked on a few times, and then rarely if ever opened again. managing 10 or even 20 of them. Running Active Directory on 20 servers gets complicated. Some of these servers will be running at full capacity, while others lems increase linearly. Utilization gets more lopsided, access control is harder to track, and provisioning storage to servers takes far more effort. - storage, there still isn t enough room. VMware is a great way to consolidate being able to reduce the number of physical servers, but consolidation does put greater demands on the remaining physical servers. Best practices for server consolidation require that the storage layer be upgraded to a SAN to improve 2

3 reliability and performance across all the remaining physical hosts. In this environment, the virtual servers can be used to run the broadest possible set of Adding space to a SAN can be very pricey. You need to anticipate your storage needs and plan accordingly. means getting all the right permissions and directories coordinated. Even then there s no guarantee backup will work all the time. The more servers in use, the worse it gets. By consolidating servers with VMware, those backups will run from fewer hosts, but this can lead to other complications. Most backup applications jammed onto each host platform, processors and network bandwidth can become strained. Some vendors are making progress on this front, but virtual server backup is still not a simple, turnkey operation. Your First Instinct May Not Be the Best tional arrays can help expand the SAN. Unfortunately this strategy does have drawbacks. Adding space to a SAN can be very pricey. For some of the expansion, disks can be added incrementally to an existing array, but eventually you are forced to purchase costly expansion modules for the array controller. You need to anticipate your storage needs and plan accordingly. As an example, we looked at what it would cost for a company to add 5 TB of protected storage using Dell EqualLogic s SAN array, EMC s Celerra as a NAS head, and a mirror array: 1. New Storage Array To add 5 TB of raw capacity, the company would actually need to bring in a total of 7 TB. The extra 2 TB would be necessary for protection. Using Dell s Equal- Logic solutions, this would come to nearly $49,000. 3

4 2. NAS Head blade enclosure would cost almost $50, Mirror Array Fully protecting that data would require a mirror array. This additional 7 TB of storage would come to more than $29,000. Nasuni sticks to the proven principles of consolidation and management, drastically reducing costs, and introducing accomplish all this through virtualized cloud storage for 4. Mirror Site Costs Finally, the company would have to pay to lease space at the mirror site at an estimated $5,000 per month. The technology alone would add up to more than $128,000. Factoring in the monthly costs of the mirror site, the total outlay over a three year period would be $308,000. Alternative Solution: Virtualizing Cloud Storage At Nasuni, we have focused on solving these storage problems. Nasuni sticks to - accomplish all this through virtualized cloud storage secure, high-performance link to cloud storage, to allow organizations to reclaim cloud, while their on-site systems only deal with a subset of their data. Current - fast restore, local-like performance, and a choice of cloud providers. 4

5 What the Filer Does in the cloud: LOCAL CACHE What Nasuni Can Do For You: Efficiency, Performance, Savings 10%, or 1 TB, for your , database, and application block storage. If you protection would be more than $128,000 for the technology alone. But if you were to take half a terabyte and carve it out in a virtual machine for 45

6 need an additional SAN array because you would get back 8.5 TB of high performance, transactional storage. Filer, you could handle cloud. You wouldn t need an additional SAN array because you would get back 8.5 TB of high performance, transactional storage. Instead of that $128,000 outlay, plus the additional $180,000 in mirror site costs, one-tenth the cost of SAN expansion. upfront. In all likelihood, you will only need a portion of that, and a portion is all you will pay for. As your storage usage expands, your costs will increase. $350,000 $300,000 $250,000 $200,000 $150,000 $100,000 $50,000 $0 $180,000 $29,000 $50,000 $49,000 Conventional Solutions Mirror Site Costs Mirror Array NAS Head Storage Array The cost of the Filer assumes 1 TB usage in the first month and a 75% annual data growth rate, resulting in 5.3 TB of storage after three years. $22,700 46

7 What has this Nasuni deployment accomplished? , database, and applications just got easier and faster, since all those pushed to the cloud. won t need to expand protection performance Summary: Key Benefits of the Nasuni Filer and terabytes of storage in the cloud for unlimited growth. our customers receive a single invoice from Nasuni. up SANs and backup processes are out of the way. only to the customer. 47

8 Discussion This is only part of the Nasuni story. In all likelihood, this white paper has prompted a few additional questions. There are plenty of resources on com explanations of how the Filer works, added information about how we make cloud storage more secure, details about our cloud storage partners, and more. Check out nasuni.com, then test drive the Nasuni Filer yourself to see what it can do for you. Download our 14-day free trial and experience the future of storage. Nasuni Corporation, based in Natick, MA, was founded in April 2009 by storage industry veterans. the unlimited capacity of the cloud. The company designed and developed the Nasuni Filer, a NAS- Call or info@nasuni.com for more information. Sales: sales@nasuni.com, Support: support@nasuni.com, or 888-6NASUNI 2010 Nasuni Corporation. All Rights Reserved