Filling the storage gap: nearline innovations extend scope of existing enterprise storage capabilities - SAN - Buyers Guide

Computer Technology Review, Feb, 2003 by Michael Marchi

Enterprise storage is no longer relegated to back-office IT departments. Paralleling the rise of "business continuance" as a common topic at the boardroom level, the importance of strategically managing an organization's critical data is an emerging concern for companies focused on smart growth in an economy that demands doing more with less.

In today's information-intensive economy minutes of downtime can equate to millions of dollars of lost revenue. Disasters and interruptions to business operations do occur, and enterprises require a plan to recover their IT systems whether the problem is a corrupted file or the catastrophic loss of a data center.

A comprehensive approach to enterprise storage requires a continuum of solutions with various levels of availability, recovery speed and cost. But that's where IT specialists and executive boards alike run into a problem. There's a huge gap, in terms of both performance and cost, between highly available, online disk-based storage and the low-cost backup functionality of tape.

Compounding the matter is the rapid growth of storage that, even with a slowed economy, is doubling roughly every five to 10 months. New applications featuring rich data types such as CRM data, digital image medical records, and geographic exploration data stored by oil and gas companies are also burdening existing storage architectures that rely solely on traditional disk-to-tape technology.

Finally, the emergence of the realtime enterprise, where managers, customers and companies with a mobile sales force need instant access to a comprehensive data set, is bringing the storage gap to the forefront. With corporations focused on staying competitive while watching capital expenditures, getting the most out of their existing technology investment is a critical business imperative.

Increasingly, organizations are turning to new hardware and software solutions--known as nearline storage--to mitigate the risks associated with downtime while enabling enterprises to realize higher availability and greater returns on storage investments.

The Emergence of Nearline Storage

In today's data-intensive business climate, organizations need continuous access to mission-critical information. IT departments must not only manage the rapid growth of business information, but also keep this information available and protected.

Storage experts suggest the art of building a successful enterprise storage infrastructure lies in assessing the risks and achieving the right level of resilience without gravely impacting the bottom line. Nearline storage fills an important role between online disk-based storage and offline tape.

Online storage is best suited to applications that require constant, instantaneous access to data, such as databases and frequently accessed user data. This information is business critical in a call center, where the rapid ability to call up a record may be the only difference between a satisfied customer and a lost sale.

At the other end of the spectrum is offline storage such as tape, which is used primarily for applications where infrequent serial access is required, such as backup for long-term storage.

Between online and offline storage, falls a range of new nearline storage technologies such as Network Appliance NearStore R100; a network-attached storage appliance that spans a range of nearline-based applications, including backup and recovery, reference data, online archival, and remote disaster recovery. Such nearline storage solutions are for applications that require quicker random access of data compared with offline storage, but do not require the continuous, instantaneous access provided by online storage.

NearStore solutions are designed from the ground up for data protection and business continuance while enabling organizations to replicate more data at a more economical cost than ever before. Utilizing less expensive ATA disk drives instead of high-performance SCSI or Fibre Channel drives (hence the name nearline instead of online), these highly scalable appliances offer capacity at a lower price--roughly 2 cents per megabyte. ATA-based disk drives receive data faster than tape drives and can shorten an overextended backup window--a common problem that creates time sinks for IT staff in handling backup and recovery demands.

Nearline technologies are not intended as a tape replacement but as an intermediate step to accommodate increasingly complex storage demands. In fact, since a nearline device such as NearStore supports the most popular tape backup software, it acts as a repository of tape data for nearline recovery. Backing up to a nearline storage solution and then to tape enhances data protection management and improves primary storage and tape library performance. It's also faster and consumes less application-server CPU than direct backup to tape.

Backing Up the Three Is

Increasingly globalized and sophisticated, today's enterprises are demanding storage systems that provide bulletproof backup capabilities, near-instant restore functionality, and constant access and availability. Nearline systems complement primary storage solutions by streamlining backups to tape and enabling near-instantaneous data recovery.