Crossroads Systems' new virtual tape-drive appliance for remote offices, a lower-cost midrange unit, and enhanced Continuous Data Protection software expand the range of its virtual tape backup solution from the desktop to the data center.
One of the highlights of the COMMON conference this week was learning about the progress that Crossroads Systems has made in expanding its product line to meet IBM user needs in the area of virtual tape backups.
Crossroads Systems is a relative newcomer to the IBM midrange market, but the company appears truly committed to meeting the needs of Power Systems users who are dependent upon physical tape for backups and disaster recovery. A silver sponsor at this fall's COMMON conference, Crossroads came prepared with a happy customer—Jason O'Dell, IT director at Greenville, Tennessee-based GreenBank, a regional bank with 75 branches and $2.6 billion in assets. GreenBank supports all its branches with a Power Systems server running IBM i and then backs up all the data onto tape kept at a remote disaster recovery site.
The problem for GreenBank was that whenever it needed to restore a file or retrieve an old record not currently on the server, someone had to get in the car, drive to the DR site, pull the backup tape, return to headquarters, load the tape, and copy the desired file. But wait, there's more…then, the driver would have to get back in the car, drive back to the DR site, and return the tape (hopefully to its original location, of course).
About 10 months ago, O'Dell decided to work with Crossroads to see if the company's SPHiNX virtual tape-backup appliance would help reduce the company's dependence on physical tape and shorten restore times. It did, and now GreenBank no longer uses physical tape—at all. It has two SPHiNX virtual tape library (VTL) appliances, one at the bank's main office and one at the DR site. It backs up the data from the server onto the SPHiNX, encrypts it using Crossroads data encryption suite and secure key-management practices, and then sends the encrypted data over a WAN, where it is replicated using the Crossroads replication suite to the SPHiNX at the DR site. The bank is confident the data is secure, and it has reduced its restore times by half. In the meantime, it can continue to do its selective saves without any disruption to the current environment.
Haley is quick to point out that the SPHiNX appliances generally aren't intended to eliminate physical tape altogether, and all SPHiNX units connect to tape decks on their backend so a user can later back up files to tape at his or her convenience for archival purposes without disrupting normal operations. However, having the data on disk offers greatly reduced restore times compared to tape.
Since the first SPHiNX was introduced to the IBM midrange market about two years ago, Crossroads has expanded its product line; it now has units that can back up data from the desktop to the data center. The SPHiNX is capable of backing up IBM i, AIX, and Windows servers, and Crossroads just introduced a 1U model specifically designed for remote office backup where Fibre Channel typically isn't present. At $8,900, it isn't much more than a new LT0-4 tape drive. With up to 3TB of internal capacity and unlimited external capacity to tape or disk, the 1U SPHiNX can collect all the data in the remote office, encrypt it, and send it over a WAN to a larger SPHiNX at the company's data center. The remote office unit can be a networked-attached storage (NAS) device or a VTL.
The company also just introduced a mid-sized 2U SPHiNX that, starting at $13,600, helps smaller companies that were stuck on the $19,950 starting price of the 3U SPHiNX. The 3U, by the way, now supports 2TB drives and can store up to 24TB of uncompressed data and 72TB of compressed data, assuming a three-to-one compression ratio.
Moving large amounts of data over a network can present problems, and one service that Crossroads performed for GreenBank was to make sure that the pipe fit the load. The company did detailed calculations of how much data the GreenBank network could carry and how much data would be sent using Crossroads' delta compression techniques.
"We were able to optimize the available connection and provide better utilization of their network connectivity," says Glenn Haley, senior product manager at Crossroads Systems. The data stream was actually split into multiple streams to be more efficient and then re-integrated at the DR site before being checked for integrity. The data was also resynchronized with the virtual tapes at the data center.
"Even though we're sending delta changes over, we don't have to incur the latencies of rebuilding a data set like deduplication does," says Haley. "We rebuild the virtual tapes in their entirety so that data is immediately available for restore if needed at the remote site. We synchronize and keep an exact copy of the virtual tape at both locations."
New software enhancements to the Crossroads family of products include its optional FileStor-CDP for Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and FileStor-HSM to automatically move data to lower-cost storage, such as physical tape, when required. Haley noted that remote users can benefit from the CDP software, which he said he had been using with his laptop. "I've been using it now for about three months, and it's incredible. I had to restore one file, and it was seamless. Anytime you've got the network connection to the target device, the SPHiNX is going to back up that file any time a change is made." You can use CDP to back up data to a SPHiNX at a remote site and then set replication policies within the SPHiNX to replicate the data over a WAN to a larger SPHiNX at the data center, where everything is consolidated. The SPHiNX units also work with third-party software, and the company is partners with Help/Systems and its Robot/SAVE backup and recovery software with tape management.
While many companies have become used to the procedures in backing up to tape, having data consolidated and improving restore times presents a persuasive argument for moving to a disk-based appliance. When the technology becomes affordable, as it may now be for many SMBs since disk prices have come down in the past few years, Crossroads plans on being there with a sensible solution.
Read the Crossroads Systems press release on the SPHiNX enhancements.
as/400, os/400, iseries, system i, i5/os, ibm i, power systems, 6.1, 7.1, V7
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