Benefits and Tips about Off-Site Data Protection and Disaster Recovery for Nimble Storage SAN Customers

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1 WHITEPAPERS Benefits and Tips about Off-Site Data Protection and Disaster Recovery for Nimble Storage SAN Customers

2 Everybody s going to the cloud! My CEO read that on his last business trip and now I guess we re moving too. This is a standard reaction experienced by many IT leaders. The good news is that executive buy-n is normally hard to get and you ve already got it in this case. A top-down initiative is more likey to happen. It s time to start looking at options while the CFO is still anxious to move away from a capital expenditure model and shift to an operating expense one. If you are still reading, you know what we are talking about! Technology & IT disasters happen. The main causes of IT disaster incidents are extended power outages, IT hardware or software failures, network failures, human error, and natural disasters as shown in the Forrester Report below: Off-Site Data Protection and Disaster Recovery are the easiest path to the cloud, allowing organizations to leverage all the benefits of geo-redundancy, high availability, and enhanced security. 1

3 At this stage, we assume you either have a Nimble hybrid flash storage SAN to support major IT initiatives or you re looking at the Nimble storage option today. Our objective is to discuss in more detail how to tie your executive cloud initiative to your Nimble SAN initiative. We also will describe in detail the main benefits and key questions you should beasking when looking at Nimble Cloud Replication for off-site data protection or disaster recovery. Nimble Storage is the market leader in Hybrid SSD-based Flash SAN Storage and Virtacore is a market leader and the largest Nimble service provider hosting over 1000 TB s of Nimble SAN sotrage across our cloud platform and supporting thousands of organizations environments for production and disaster recovery. Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, Nimble Storage is a formidable beast which has helped Virtacore become a leader in VMware hosting and enabled us to build a unique product/solution that no one in the market has today Nimble Cloud Disaster Recovery. You may not know that Nimble Storage is architected with innate software-based replication abilities for disaster recovery. This means for no additional cost you can activate the replication software and replicate VM s to another Nimble SAN. Nimble s all-in-one storage price model includes software for replication to another SAN on top of many other great features including CASL, I/O, Encryption and Scale. Here s how it works: Disaster Recovery Leveraging customers current Nimble SAN built in replication powered by 2

4 Nimble Storage recently released a survey around disaster recovery and discovered 70% of respondents say more than half of all data is business critial, and that business-critial data needs aggressive RTOs and RPOs. 3

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6 Nimble Cloud Replication sounds like a great new project, but now I need to go through vendor selection and I need help to figure out what technical areas to focus on and understand what I m missing about cloud replication? Surely you have been in a similar situation and prehaps even been burned by not asking the right questions to uncover the gotchas in advance. Every IT person wants to eliminate surprises and noise and just be aware and prepared before on-boarding new solutions. Here are 4 tips to consider as you prepare internally and question your cloud replication vendor of choice: 1. Software Replication built-in software to back up your workloads and replicate them to another SAN. Often time Nimble customers budget for one hybrid flash SAN and plan on buying a second SAN in the future, but don t realize they have an easy cloud replication option prebuilt with high availability and all the functionality. 2. Disaster Recovery is more than Storage it is network, compute, bandwidth, support, fail-over, and replication...storage is one piece of the puzzle. 3. People/Support are Key have you ever declared a disaster and wondered if your replicationis working or going to work? Manuall mounting VM s is time consuming and you need all hands on deck to help your business get back online. Can I support my business objectives with the current staff, budget and infrastructure in place today? 4. Cost Savings Annual Corporate Revenue / Annual Hours Worked = Hourly Cost of Downtime (a big number)...in reviewing the cost of your Cloud Replication and DR solution, OpEx vs CapEx analysis needs to factor in data center costs, power, cooling, servers, bandwidth, maintenance, support staff, geo-redundancy, etc. That cost then needs to be factored against into the hourly downtime calculator to measure you financial tolerance for risk of an outage. 5

7 And if you already use Nimble Hybrid Flash Storage and want to build a DR plan, here are key questions to ask and key benefits of leveraging Virtacore s CoreREPLICATION solution for Nimble Storage: 1.) It s all about Networkiing! Let s look at some of the networking check boxes you need to nail down. No matter where you start or what option you choose, you need to know your internal networking components... Access: You must define how to access the Virtacore DR location. Will it be MPLS, Layer 2 point to point, or Public Internet VPN? Does my service provider support all these options and how involved are they in the set up? IP Addresses: You will also need to focus in your IP addressing - will I be re-iping my network for the mirgration? Firewall - will they provide or will i use my own? User Access Management - who is responsible for what? 2.) Seeding the VM s. Once you have the network solved, how do you get your data to the service provider? Over the Wire Replication-Seed SAN 3.) Bandwidth No matter how solid your networking is and how many VM s you have, you need to know: how much data will be coming in and out of your new hosting site? And does the service provider have the process to size the WAN and traffic? 4.) RPO s/rto s Nimble replication can support about 25 VM s within a 4-8 hour RTO window without automated orchestration and 1 hour or less RPO. Once you get over the 25 VM limit, you need to consider orchestration and fail-over to help automate the manual process of disaster recovery VM s. Now you are aware of the many benefits of Nimble Storage and key areas of focus during vendor selection for Nimble Cloud Replication. To learn more, please go to or reach out to a Sale Engineer at sales@virtacore.com 6