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Backup to Protect Your Data

Blog
November 15, 2018

Every IT professional knows they are up against exponential data growth and ever-increasing corporate demands that are pushing traditional data protection methods to their limit. The need to build a backup infrastructure to support unprecedented data growth and increasingly challenging SLAs is more important than ever. Visibility to the backups and control can be challenging. How can you deploy a cost-effective, reliable and scalable storage solution to meet demand?

Everyone has seen the fear statistics about natural disasters and the need to quickly recover the key data without which the business is at risk of failing. That certainly happens, but the bigger risk is the day to day events that IT deals with such as an accidental deletion of files, a power outage, a failed server or a virus hitting your systems.

The basics for a proper backup strategy remain the same for all businesses. There should be 3 copies of your business critical data: 1) the original, 2) a copy of that on-site but on a different device to protect against events such as hardware failure, IT error, accidental deletion, and 3) a third copy physically remote in case of a major disaster at the primary location such as fire or flood. There are many good backup solutions in the market so you can select the backup application that works best for your requirements.

Backups taken on a regular basis protect against data loss and these backups ensure you can restore your systems from a known good restore point. However, a complete refresh of an entire backup can be very processor and bandwidth hungry and impact your business systems’ performance when they occur. Snapshots are a good way to mitigate this as they only save the changes made to your data since your backup. These snapshots require much smaller amounts of data to be copied for safekeeping and so can be performed much more frequently and without business impact. Finally, if disaster does strike, you need to be able to restore access to the data within a timeframe your organization has deemed acceptable to it and/or its customers.

Nexsan provides and supports free software and plugins for seamless integration, at the system level, with Microsoft Windows, Linux and the VMware vCenter, Veeam, Commvault and many others’ business continuity packages. However, whatever backup software you use, you need the storage behind it to be reliable, easy to scale, worry free, and operationally efficient.

The Nexsan E-Series and BEAST product families make excellent, purpose designed, backup solutions that provide tens of Terabytes through to more than 2 Petabytes in compact and energy efficient 19” rack mountable 2U and 4U packages. There have been multiple generations of E-Series and they have been continually updated and improved to meet the growing and changing needs in the market.

Nexsan E-Series and BEAST have a strong history of reliability with some customers report continuous uptimes in excess of 7 years. Nexsan also provides and supports, for free, its own integrated software to allow fast and easy initial setup, intuitive creation and management of RAID arrays (including customizable “set and forget” automatic backup and snapshot scheduling), automatic system status notifications, ”hot” firmware updates and much more.

Manufacturing high-density disk arrays for more than a decade, Nexsan has acquired a wealth of experience that enables it to provide high-density backup solutions with an unrivalled combination of reliability, energy efficiency, capacity, performance and flexibility. The E-Series maximizes backup array storage density and power efficiency in a minimal footprint, consuming less than one-third the power and one-third the rack space of conventional backup arrays, thus dramatically reducing backup infrastructure and operating costs.

Smarter Energy Savings
Nexsan AutoMAID® (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) is a power-saving technology designed to manage energy consumption through a comprehensive policy-based approach. It enables E-Series high-density arrays to include the benefits of energy efficient technology without the performance limitations.

AutoMAID® also has the ability to spin down drives to lower energy consumption between data references. AutoMAID® (when configured for Level 1 operation) delivers sub-second response times to the first I/O request, and remains at full power for every subsequent I/O request until enough idle time has elapsed to activate AutoMAID® energy savings once again.

Comprehensive Anti-Vibration Technology
To combat the performance and reliability degradation caused by excessive vibration in high-density arrays, Nexsan employs Anti-Vibration Technology which includes installing drives in sturdy drawers, mounting those drives in counter-rotating couplets to counteract vibration of the adjacent drive, isolating groups of drives and utilizing vibration-deadening hardware. Mounting the drives in this way also creates an unobstructed channel for airflow that helps to maximize cooling efficiency.

Advanced Cooling Features
Nexsan Cool Drive Technology™ uses Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) speed-controlled, front mounted fans that push air over the components with additional internal fans that pull air out the back via well-engineered, front to back air channels, thus providing superior cooling for each drive. Mounting the drives in counter- rotating couplets also ensures that cooling airflow specifically targets the hottest parts of each drive (the electronics). Because the fans only need to spin at roughly half speed in normal operation, they produce less vibration, use less power, are quieter and last approximately ten times longer.

Easier System Maintenance
Nexsan Active Drawer Technology™ was an industry-first, making it simple for a single technician to maintain the high-density backup array. Servicing of drives or fans can be accomplished by just pulling out a drawer —while the system is being actively used, and so with no downtime is required.

Superior Disk Drive Reliability
Nexsan’s commitment to reliability includes stress-testing disk drives before they are installed in E-Series disk arrays, and testing again after installation to screen out sub-par drives. Coupled with the innovative design features of Nexsan E-Series high-density disk arrays (including AutoMAID®, Cool Drive Technology™ and Anti- Vibration Technology), this enables Nexsan to achieve one of the lowest drive failure rates in the industry—just 0.03 percent—while the industry average is approximately four percent.

So, when you are planning your backup strategy, add Nexsan to the checklist for the most reliable, efficient and powerful storage to meet your backup needs.

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