5 Ways to Make Your Data Storage Easy to Manage

Transcription

1 5 Ways to Make Your Data Storage Easy to Manage Practical advice for taking the effort out of managing your storage Traditional storage management can be complex, confusing, and inflexible. The planning and configuration involved can be overwhelming. Scaling and replication can often be timeconsuming and frustrating, if not practically impossible. The time and complexity required can drive small and midsize businesses to engage expert consultants just to manage their data storage solution and optimize it for their application requests. You ve got more on your plate to manage than just storage. In this third of a series of informative e-books from Exablox, we take a look at the difficulties of traditional storage approaches, and offer simple, practical ways to make your data storage easier to manage.

2 #1: Easy Deployment Traditional storage solutions are notoriously complicated to install and configure. Even their Quick Start instructions can suggest first installing utility software, watching multiple videos, reading auxiliary help documents online, and filling out extensive planning and configuration worksheets. Then you ll still need to log in and create an account, configure the host device, guesstimate your capacity needs, define and allocate storage volumes, license keys and access permissions before you can actually store your data and start using the device. You shouldn t need a training video just to turn your storage appliance on. Exablox makes it easy for you to get your OneBlox ppliance up and running. Simply plug in power and Ethernet cables, pop in the drives of your choice, and switch it on. OneBlox appliances are compatible with all industry-standard drive components, allowing you to leverage your existing drives, or buy drive components at best market rates. Mix and match drive types SAS and/or SATA while avoiding the hassle of traditional raid striping. No need for lengthy video training. No need to download online help documents. No guesstimating capacity. No need to fill out excruciatingly complex worksheets. It is easy-to-manage, scalable storage, all implemented in under five minutes.

3 #2: Easy Ongoing Management Traditional storage makes ongoing management difficult in many ways. You usually have to hard code your storage allocation in advance, and then worry about whether you guessed correctly. If you haven t, then it is cumbersome and time consuming to make any changes to your configuration, if you are able to at all. Ongoing management doesn t have to mean ongoing headaches. Exablox makes it easy for you to administer and maintain your storage. Our storage approach enables all of your applications to share a single pool of storage as needed, simplifying capacity administration. Add, remove, or replace capacity with zero configuration. Automatically distribute capacity across multiple servers, applications, users, directories and backup targets as needed, without having to configure RAID groups.

4 #3: Easy Growth Management Traditional storage is inflexible, and doesn t let you manage capacity growth to reflect actual business needs. To scale, you often have to deploy separate isolated storage islands, or replace your storage with a forklift upgrade. What s more, you may need to deploy multiple dedicated servers to manage data capacity for individual applications. Don t let your storage become a stumbling block for business growth. Exablox makes it easy for you to manage capacity growth. Scale-out your capacity as your storage needs grow, from a few TBs to nearly 200TBs, without changing your applications or creating new storage islands. Add storage in just three minutes, simply by adding a new OneBlox. Your new device automatically joins your storage ring and self-populates non-disruptively, growing your pool of storage dynamically. What s more, with Exablox, as you increase your capacity, you also increase performance and availability.

5 #4: Easy Remote Management Traditional storage can require you to install management software on a dedicated server, and log in to that server locally onsite to manage your storage devices. Remote access is not typically included in the management server software. If you need to manage storage at distributed locations, or from home or a disaster contingency site, you are out of luck. You would have to configure a VPN connection on your own. Also, you get no global management view of all of your storage across distributed environments. You need to be able to manage your storage from anywhere, anytime. Exablox makes it easy for you to manage your entire storage environment from anywhere, via any standard web browser, using OneSystem. You can forget about having to go onsite to multiple locations to patch and maintain separate dedicated servers. There is no need to configure firewall ports or tunneling. Simply connect directly to OneSystem securely through any browser and configure access permissions to your storage.

6 #5: Easy Distributed Management Traditional storage makes it hard to manage storage across distributed environments. Replicating storage site-to-site requires painstaking planning and configuration. You are forced to create identical RAID groups then match volume capacity on both source and target storage devices. Planning can run into months in distributed environments, and misconfiguration can potentially lead to business downtime. Simplify storage replication between your sites. Exablox makes it easy for you to replicate storage over a Wide Area Network (WAN), in only three minutes. Just drag and drop OneBlox rings to have them automatically mirror each other. There is no need to match storage capacity in each location. Simply specify a firewall port and external IP address and you re done.

7 The Exablox Approach The Exablox OneBlox appliance is a powerful, re-imagined scale-out storage solution that any organization can afford. Exablox s cloud managed, scale-out, object-based storage appliance solves businesses common storage pain points: complicated installation, cumbersome storage management, lack of data security and forklift upgrades. Without the shackles of legacy storage architecture, Exablox s clean sheet approach combines the CIFS/SMB accessible OneBlox appliance with OneSystem, an elegant multi-tenant cloud-based management service. Re-imagine what your storage can offer to your organization. Learn More Find out more about how Exablox can help you overcome the challenges of data storage today. Visit our web site at call us at 855.EXABLOX, or us at [email protected].

8 About Exablox Exablox is the company re-imagining storage. Exablox solves businesses runaway storage costs and information management nightmares by providing a scale-out cloud-based management solution that is both affordable and easy to use. OneBlox is an inclusive storage offering that combines an elegant hardware architecture and integrated, enterprise-grade software, including continuous data protection, inline deduplication and disaster recovery. Founded in 2010, Exablox is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA and backed by leading Silicon Valley venture firms. Visit Exablox online at and join the conversation at Sonora Court, Sunnyvale, CA EXABLOX ( ) [email protected] Exablox and the Exablox logo are trademarks of Exablox, Inc. 01/14 EX006