Scale Computing

Scale Computing for Backup and Archive

Data archives are the foundation of data retention and protection. But successful backup and archive are getting more challenging all the time as data grows, hitting rates of 60 to 100 percent year over year. At the same time, IT budgets are tightening even as backup and archives grow to consume more and more storage.

Just throwing a lot of cheap storage at the problem causes a whole new set of problems. Tape-based storage is hard to manage and difficult to recover. Disk-based storage shrinks data center real estate and escalates power and cooling costs. Large arrays can house a great deal of backup and archived data but are expensive to buy and manage. Cheaper and smaller storage will only house a certain amount of data before you have to add and manage more. And no matter what type of storage you choose, capacity planning becomes a gateway to over-provisioning and an inefficient and very risky storage infrastructure.

Scale’s third generation ICS storage system solves these problems and more. ICS powers a clustered architecture that is effective and highly available, exceptionally scalable, and extremely cost-efficient. The entry-level StarterSAN begins with three SN1000’s, each sporting 1 terabyte (TB) of highly available and fully integrated storage. The SN2000’s higher capacity form factor offers 2 useable TB, while the SN4000 offers 4 useable TB. The ICS architecture gives IT managers the node-by-node scalability they need to house continually growing backups and archives.

And the nodes are highly redundant and protected. Built-in snapshots and replication store data across multiple nodes. If a single node fails, data is immediately re-replicated and another node seamlessly takes the load. ICS maintains system uptime up to N/2-1, meaning that nearly half of the storage system nodes can fail and the system will continue to operate.

With Scale’s ICS, you may safely and efficiently house your backups and archives without risk of data loss or system failure.

Benefits

• System-wide management tools available from every node
• Extremely high system uptime
• Data and service protection even during drive failure
• Non-disruptive scaling by simply adding storage nodes
• Grid architecture preserves data access speeds

Scale Computing for High Value Archiving

Archiving data is a fundamental IT task. Archives protect and preserve data for disaster recovery and business continuity, regulatory requirements, and business value – important reasons all. But with primary data growing at rates of 60 to100 percent per year, storing large data archives is an increasing challenge.

Many companies choose to store growing archives to off-site tape, which skips the storage capacity issue. But transporting tape is risky and restoring data from tape is extremely slow, assuming you can locate the data to be restored in the first place. Storing archives to disk instead solves the immediate availability and recoverability problems of tape, but disk-based storage has its own set of problems. First, even inexpensive storage adds up fast as data volumes double and triple. More disk means more energy costs, and also an increasing demand for scarce data center real estate. IT finds itself having to choose between expensive storage systems that offer high availability and performance, and cheap disk that runs out of room and must be downed every time IT adds more capacity. Both cases lead to expensive over-provisioning and an inefficient storage infrastructure at a high risk of failure.

Scale and High Value Archiving

The good news is that Scale Computing’s ICS high performance storage cluster is a third generation choice for high value archiving. Scale ICS combines the 3Cs of cost, control and convenience to give IT total control over their storage infrastructure.

• Cost: The Scale storage system reduces capital costs (CAPEX) by offering enterprise-class storage at a commodity cost. It keeps right on saving on operating costs (OPEX) because there is no downtime for adding new storage and because IT management time is minimal.
• Control: Scale ICS lets IT control data growth for value and cost savings. Upgrading storage does not require system downtime, and the core file system enables customers to simultaneously use CIFS, NFS and iSCSI without impacting storage system performance.
• Convenience: The Scale system replaces command lines with a powerful and flexible GUI. Storage nodes scale linearly for smooth increases in capacity and performance. Each node is easily manageable and can mix and match node densities. IT can add new nodes at will without data migration or downtime.

Architected for Extreme Value

Scale ICS is an enterprise-class, parallel, symmetrical architecture running on commodity hardware. The result is a high capacity, active/active cluster running at high-speeds at an exceptionally low cost. ICS fully leverages investment by acting as a SAN and/or NAS on the same system, which lets IT use the Scale ICS for both file and block-based storage.

Scale ICS is smoothly scalable to petabyte levels. The entry-level StarterSAN is a 3-node cluster with 1TB useable capacity per node. To grow a storage pool, simply add additional 1 terabyte (TB) nodes for smooth scalability to more than 2 petabytes (PB). Processing, throughput and capacity scale with each additional node. The scaling is simple: just add the new node and Scale does the rest. The management console automatically discovers the new node, adds it to the cluster and immediately begins to stripe and mirror data across all nodes for high availability. IT may also add and replace individual drives without downing nodes.

High availability and data protection are built in to the Scale storage system. Each node is highly redundant and protected with native snapshots and replication working across multiple nodes. ICS also offers advanced multipathing throughout the entire system. If a disk goes down, ICS automatically reassigns the IP address to a new node and data services continue automatically even in the event of disk and node failure. ICS maintains system uptime up to N/2-1, meaning that nearly half of the storage system nodes can fail and the system will continue to operate.

If this sounds like an enterprise-class storage system, it is – but all of this power and scalability comes at an extremely economical price. The entry-level StarterSANs are available as a 3TB cluster for $13,000, a 6TB cluster for $15,000, and a 12TB cluster for $21,000. From here, IT may easily grow their Scale storage systems node-by-node.

With Scale ICS, companies can safely and efficiently house their archives without risk of data loss or system failure.

Feature Benefit

Feature	Benefit
System-wide management tools available from every node	Very flexible system management
Extremely high system uptime	Reliable backup and recoverability for critical data archives
Data and service protection even during drive failure	Downed nodes will not affect operability
Active-active clusters preserve data speeds	Backup and archive operations are never stalled at a storage controller
Non-disruptive scaling by simply adding storage nodes	As your archives grow, so does your storage system’s capacity, throughput and performance