Coming soon: Near-line storage

Telarus will soon release some new offerings around storage and backups. A lot of companies these days are looking to speed up and ease the backup process and recover faster from backups using near-line storage.

SCSI or fibre channel drives have tended to be used for primary storage with near-line storage (an inexpensive way to store large volumes of data on removable media) becoming popular with the advent of the relatively inexpensive SATA (Serial ATA) standard. Due to significant increases in performance and reliability, SATA II drives (the latest iteration of the SATA standard) are now often used for primary storage too.

It is now quite common for near-line storage to be used as the primary repository for backups. The fast transfer rates from near-line storage alleviate pressure on backup windows from every expanding filesystems and the fact that the backups are available on disk significantly speeds up data recovery when required. Plus, once the backups are sitting on near-line storage they can be streamed to tape without concerns as to the impact on production systems. It is also possible to simply replicate data to near-line storage, with the ability to then backup from the replicated copy.

Also, a lot of storage platforms available today have in-built data synchronisation capabilities. Such platforms typically take a snapshot of a filesystem at a point in time and synchronise from this snapshot. This feature provides the ability to momentarily shut down databases such that the snapshot will contain a clean copy of the database without the data corruption and associated issues with restoration that otherwise tend to occur. Snapshots are also very useful for backups for this same reason.

Telarus customers with platforms such as the EMC Clariion storage system can mirror entire filesystems from their primary storage system to a system at another, off-site location. This can be done in a synchronous or asynchronous manner (depending upon data integrity requirements and the speed of the connection between the sites) or simply via scheduled updates.

Telarus can offer clients that co-locate equipment in a Telarus data centre a tape or optical storage (e.g. CD or DVD media) changing service. Once the required backup regime has been established, the removable media is changed according to this regime and taken to a secure off-site location.