Dell Storage: Dual protection of data and investment

Today's storage infrastructure has created a vast island of storage and data, with the exception of San, NAS, Das, and other storage architectures for different data types, even within the San architecture, storage and data islands are still prevalent due to differences between vendors and different generations of storage systems.

Inefficient, inflexible, and continuously increasing complexity of the storage infrastructure makes it difficult for enterprise data architectures to continue to grow, while the need to continuously expand storage is growing. From an initial point of view, increasing the enterprise IT budget is the easiest job, in fact, 17% of the IT hardware budget is being used to store and 60% of the storage devices are invested in human resources, but it is still difficult to meet the data and storage requirements--an average increase of 20% to 40% per enterprise per year Storage capacity that needs to be managed and protected.

Data is important, storage systems are also important, and 20% and 32% of storage budgets are used for backup and failback for this reason, but since traditional data architectures are complex, inefficient, and less flexible, data protection, disaster recovery architectures become complex, inefficient, and inflexible. How to use the new data architecture and storage concept to achieve better data protection and disaster recovery is the topic that the enterprise thinks and tries at present.

But investment protection is equally important, even though the storage system has an update cycle of 2-3 years longer than the server, but during the 3-5-year update cycle, companies are still facing new data storage systems, server systems, and newer storage devices-such as de-duplication backup systems, object storage Systems- Impact and impact on existing storage architectures, storage-system investment protection is not limited to investment continuity between two generations of products, but it is more important to ensure that the investment in the data storage architecture is protected from each purchase, whether for performance, capacity or management purposes upgrades and purchases.

Investment protection is as important for businesses as it is for data protection, so when it comes to the topic of "protection", I tend to talk about data protection and investment protection-not just because it's all about protection.

"Mobile data" enhances the effectiveness of data protection

Since in the enterprise's storage investment, more than 20% of the inputs were used for backup and 32% of the inputs were used for failback, but while data growth was increasing with 20–40% data, this meant that data protection seemed like a job that needed a lot of input and increased effort, but is that really the case?

If you use a storage-oriented consolidation, backup, recovery, and archive Dell Consulting assessments, you'll find that things are not as you might think. Data protection is cumbersome and expensive--very long backup windows and great backup restores--often because organizations cannot rank data A large number of data that are not real-time online applications are also protected by backup recovery. The fact is that 90% of the data is never accessed after it was created, and 65% of the remaining 10% are accessed only 1 times.

From the idea of the information lifecycle, we understand that the value of information and data is governed by its lifecycle, and that the end of the lifecycle-data is often no longer frequently read and needed-the value of the data and the likelihood of access to the data are extremely low, which means that If you're storing data in an online or near-line system that's obviously expensive and wasteful, and based on our need for online systems and near-line system data protection, it's clear that we've backed up and protected too much to actually be able to lie in the filing system.

In fact, by going to be unimportant, outdated data from the online system automatically migrated to the near line, off-line and archiving system, greatly reducing the online system-especially the SSD, SAS disk, these high-performance disk storage capacity, on the one hand, saving valuable capacity space, on the other hand, to less, More frequent and multiple backups of the data on these high-performance disks, while the less important data on the SATA disk--Since the SATA disk is large and inexpensive--can reduce the amount and number of backups. Data can be quickly recovered when a fast recovery of an online system is required.

Based on Dell's statistics, Dell Mobile data solutions include compellent, equallogic storage systems, PowerVault DL (disk to disk backup) and TL (tape library) disk to tape backup devices, DX target storage platforms (archive storage, Large-scale archiving with content-aware capabilities – reduced backup time by 55% and recovery time by 70%.

The right solution to achieve the ideal investment protection

Everyone wants to spend the least money to buy the best things, this is especially true in corporate procurement--and cheap is always more popular--but there is a difference in corporate procurement, which is to provide better benefits of the old and procurement continuity, in the enterprise procurement IT systems, both inexpensive, but also to the old with new.

When it comes to "cheap", we've talked about using the Dell Mobile data solution to reduce backup and recovery time by 55% and 70%, in fact, based on the concept of mobile data, placing data in different systems based on the information lifecycle, while significantly reducing data in the storage network- Storage networks are often expensive, complex, and unusually important--a feature that saves 75% of the cost of an enterprise storage network. In fact, getting more data out of the online system has largely reduced the cost of users purchasing online storage-expensive and complex to deploy.

In Dell's storage product line, EqualLogic is a "cheap" model, EqualLogic as a No.1 in the iSCSI domain, the most important value is not only in performance and landscape scaling (we'll talk about this as an important foundation for investment protection), more on software features and services, automatic streamlining of configuration (Thin provisioning), Automatic tiered storage between the array and the array, SAN HQ has multiple sets of monitoring and management capabilities, as well as data protection for integrating a variety of mainstream servers, virtualization applications-and, of course, you'll learn from many media reports that EqualLogic is the only storage system that offers all the software and functionality to users at the moment. Yes, you don't have to spend money on software and system features.

But more importantly, in the new, storage systems tend to have a lifecycle of more than 3 years, but as the volume of data increases, we see "additions" rather than upgrades of storage systems becoming mainstream, which means that users need storage systems that can continuously scale capacity and improve performance Compellent and EqualLogic are designed for this purpose.

Under an extensible unified infrastructure, compellent and EqualLogic, as Dell's primary SAN storage systems, have a "scale-out" capability that extends to storage-system nodes, leveraging storage virtualization technology and the extended integration capabilities of the system itself, through horizontal, Increasing the number of nodes, extending system capacity and simultaneously improving performance--automated data tiering and migration across disks, nodes, and even raid types--not only ensures performance increases as they grow, but also increases system availability.

Based on this user no longer needs to consider how the newly added storage system merges with the old system-the new and old products make up a unified architecture rather than a separate product-which means no damage to the original storage system, the extension is seamless. It also means that under a single console, you can achieve high levels of automated management for your entire storage infrastructure. Both Compellent and EqualLogic support a mix of drive types, SAS, SSD, or SATA, and the different features of the disk constitute a complete system-wide or cross system automatic layering, further reducing overhead.

In addition, Compellent offers the ability to mix and match different Sans, supporting FC, iSCSI, or FCoE in a SAN architecture, with the ability to integrate different storage systems for unified management, Compellent can integrate the old different types of San -both FC, iSCSI and FCoE can achieve long-term seamless integration and expansion.

With flexible, seamless scaling, and the pervasive use of virtualization technologies in Dell Storage systems, Compellent and EqualLogic provide a high level of system scalability, upgrades, and application flexibility to achieve the idea of on-demand storage, based on change rather than rigid planning, Plus now that Dell accelerates its integration with Exanet file storage technology, it introduces FS7500 and NX3500 storage systems for unified storage and file storage, with better physical storage systems, smarter data management, and application-oriented storage being formed in Dell storage systems.

In the next article, we'll look at Dell's development in unified storage.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)