Clustered or Distributed?

August 19, 2009

When talking about the best high-availability configuration, it’s always best to know what your options are. Should we cluster? Should we have distributed file systems? I found this Enterprise Storage Forum article, which may be helpful to administrators in search of the best HA configuration for their storage architecture.

Want to learn more about clustering? Watch this short video.

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Posted by Shonal Narayan

Houston, we have no tape backups

July 21, 2009

Did man walk on the moon? Well if your are looking for original images of the first steps as proof, look again. It was recently discovered that NASA has lost the original footage of the Apollo 11 mission. Rumor has it that NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reused them to record satellite data (read the full story). Here is another case for tape backups (and actually keeping them). You would think important footage such as the first moonwalk would be kept under tight wraps– and at least backed up!

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Posted by Shonal Narayan

Advice on how to cut storage costs

May 15, 2009

Here’s some great advice from the Enterprise Storage Forum on cutting storage costs.

  • Try flash or solid state disk.  Amazingly enough, with the speedy performance on SSD, it is probably cheaper than adding more memory to your heavy duty database clusters.  I’d recommend trying an ISC with SSD, to save money and still have speedy performance.
  • Use tiers.  You don’t need to keep all of your data on high priced disks.  Mix it up.  Some data on SAS, some on SSD and some on SATA.
  • Use SATA as much as possible.  See the tip above.  I bet 65% of your data can reside on slower disks.  You’ll get more capacity for the money, and have more space to consolidate with.
  • Shop around for deals.  You shop around for your computers, gadgets and cell phone service.  Do the same for your storage.  Most vendors sell through the channel, and one of these channels will have a better deal for the same part number.  Ask your vendor if they have a trade-in program as well.  You might as well get credit for your old, out-of-date systems.
  • Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate.  It doesn’t make sense to have inidividual arrays for every application server, since as you increase servers, you’ll need twice the hardware.  Consolidate over the network with NAS, iSCSI or fibre channel.  Less harware = less ongoing maintenence costs.
  • Try Windows Single Instance Storage feature.  This is a way to dedupe, and make sure you only retain a single copy of each file.  (Ahem email attachments to your team.)
  • Lease equipment. Leasing is a great way to reduce capital expenditures and keep you from dealing with outdated equipment all the time.  Try it.  We all know how Moore’s law works:  next year your system will be outdated.
  • Go open-source.  Have you used Amanda?  It is a great open-source backup application.  Are there other ways for you to leverage opensource?  Look around.  You might be able to get away with FreeNAS for your developers.  No need to spend extra resources on test systems when you don’t need to.

Check out the full article here.

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Posted by Jame-Ane Ervin

Virginia Medical Database Gets Hacked

May 7, 2009

Did you hear about this one? Apparently, somebody hacked into Virginia Department of Health Professions’ website last week, and is holding state medical records for ransom.  The claims have not been verified as of yet, but the hacker’s note states that he/she broke into the state-run website and destroyed the original and created an encrypted backup file which would be handed over for $10M.  Here’s the note:

“I have your [expletive]. In my possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :( For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.”

A spokesperson from the Department claims that a few of the systems have been restored and complete restoration is due soon. If the statement is true, kudos to the IT department for doing what they should (keeping physical backups).

Here’s the full article. We’ll keep you up to date as more information is revealed.

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Posted by Shonal Narayan

Do drives come with that RAID?

May 4, 2009

This post is brought to you by the worst pickup line ever.

Prospective customers always ask…

Can I purchase your system without drives? They are available on the open market at a much lower cost.

And I agree.  It is always easy to find a low price on hard drives.  But what’s the cost of your time?  How much time do you spend finding the best deal?  And more importantly, how much time do you spend when you have a drive failure getting the replacement part?

From experience, we found it took far too long. And we have relationships with our drive manufacturers. Sometimes we wait 2 weeks for a replacement! I don’t know if you have two weeks to wait.  To solve the problem, or at least reduce its impact on you, we created our RAID certification process.With RAID Certified drives, DNF customers experience a 50% lower drive failure rate compare to standard and RAID edition drives.

So my short answer to the prospective customers…

We spend 120 hours testing each drive for you, so you won’t have to waste time replacing one.  

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Posted by Jame-Ane Ervin

Storage Strategies: Things to keep in mind

April 27, 2009

What do you look for when you’re shopping for storage?

We probably all look at price, performance, and reliability, right? But how much time do we spend looking at other factors like total cost of ownership (TCO), security, automation, and compatibility? Probably not as much.

Here are some other things to consider when making your next visit to the enterprise storage aisle:

  • Tiered Storage- Save on the cost of drives by moving inactive data to low-cost drives  
  • Data Security- Think about disk encryption
  • Automation- Look for software, hardware, or managed services that allow for a level of automation and streamlined management
  • Data Recovery- Look into recovery and retrieval options
  • Interoperability- See if the system plays well with others

These are just a few pointers, if you’re looking for more tips, check out this article by Processor on making purchasing decisions.

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Posted by Shonal Narayan

WAN optimization for DR

April 10, 2009

A recent Byte and Switch research survey shows that implementing a disaster recovery plan is top priority for organizations (see chart below).

dr-chart

With data moving from one location to a remote location(s), optimizing your wide-area network (WAN) bandwidth becomes essential. Check out this four-part report from Searchstorage.com that offers practical tips for evaluating and understanding WAN requirements for your DR plan.

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Posted by Shonal Narayan

3 data recovery tales

March 9, 2009

Found this interesting article from Network World about three unusual data recovery cases.

Lessons:
1) Backup, Backup, Backup!
2) Encryption is necessary.
3) Some data is better than no data.

Any unusual backup/recovery stories you’ve dealt with? Drop a line.

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Posted by Shonal Narayan

I’d like ??TBs of storage please..

February 23, 2009

Would you like RAID 5 with that?

Planning storage configurations is hard, there are a lot of choices:  RAID levels, drive types…each with a different impact on storage capacity, performance and bandwidth. We designed a Storage Capacity Calculator that allows you to enter your desired hardware configurations to help you determine the number of disk drives you’ll need.

Give our calculator a test-run and leave us your thoughts in the comments.

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Posted by Shonal Narayan

Discerning the six myths about movable storage

February 19, 2009

Is the data on your laptop or movable media secure? If you answered “Yes!”, you may be buying into one or more of these myths:  

1) Tapes are obsolete.
2) Protecting tapes and laptops is a job for technical people.
3) Losing a tape is primarily a security problem.
4) There are no technology solutions; it’s all about tight controls.
5) Encryption is a silver bullet.
6) If you protect your tapes and laptops, you can feel secure.

Read the full article from InfoWorld.

How do you go about safeguarding your movable media? What other myths have you heard about? Drop us a line.

2 Comments | DNF Storage, Storage, backup | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Shonal Narayan

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