Intransa Intelligent IP SAN
Many IT organizations today are challenged with moving their online and nearline data to offline tape backup and archive. The requirement for 24x7 application uptime dramatically shrinks the 'backup window'. Yet the data volume on the multitude of servers, desktops and laptops continues to grow at a rapid rate. While tape arrays and incremental backup solutions help achieve shorter backup windows, they are often complex and costly both for backup and restore. Many IT organizations cannot afford such solutions. As a result, much of the data in many enterprises is not backed up regularly, if at all.
For the data that is backed up, the latency of restoring data from tape is usually long. If the backup log (i.e. the catalog) is maintained online and the data maintained in a tape library, restoring the data may take many minutes. Otherwise, it could take hours, and perhaps days to retrieve the tape from an offsite vault before data can be restored. Obviously, this takes too long for most organizations.
To address these challenges, IT departments are now deploying low cost, cost-effective ATA disk arrays as a staging area, either as a front-end to a tape library or as a stand-alone appliance on the network. However, this is only a band-aid to the overall issue, as it only addresses a piece of the problem.
Intransa has introduced a new architecture for an intelligent IP SAN which meets the demands for low-cost, reliable and efficient back-up and restore staging. The IntraStor® architecture is designed to heavily leverage the learning curve and economies-of-scale of state-of-the-art commodity networking, computing and disk technologies. It enables IT organizations to tap into the existing network and system management knowledgebase, thus minimizing the learning curve and reducing management cost.
Intransa's IntraStor architecture offers a low cost, block-level, networked storage that can be deployed anywhere on the IP network and managed centrally. Not only is IntraStor good for general purpose storage, its inexpensive disk storage pool can be used for backup/restore staging with either host-based mirroring or disk-to-disk backup. Existing backup servers and tape libraries back up data from the disk storage pool provided by IntraStor's software platform, StorControl. The virtual volume management and dynamic volume expansion capability enable the continually growing backup log files (i.e. catalogs) to be kept online, thereby facilitating quick identification of archived data for restoring.
This approach minimizes the impact on the application hosts and effectively eliminates the backup window issue. It also enables the backup servers and the associated tape drives to be consolidated, to achieve further cost savings. In a similar vein, the StorControl facilitates the backup of desktop/laptop user data, addressing one of the most significant challenges for today's enterprise IT organizations.
The benefits of the StorControl go well beyond serving the backup/restore staging needs. The solution's snapshot capability, StorSnap, allows many point-in-time virtual copies of data to be kept in the inexpensive, networked, disk pool. This obviates the need for daily incremental backup to tape. Instead, full backups to tape archive can be done on a weekly or even monthly basis. In addition to simplifying tape backup management, this approach also enables instantaneous restore from disk.
The strength of the IntraStor architecture enables backup/restore staging to form the basis for extending the networked storage services to encompass the online (such as remote mirroring and replication) and the nearline (large, distributed storage) needs of the data lifecycle.