Grid Backup Solution

• Delivers unrestricted scalability and effortless management
• Stores more data—safely— for less investment
• Self-evolving system eliminates today’s forklift upgrade
• Fast, reliable, secure

What is the Grid Backup Solution?
RAID's Grid Backup Solution is a next-generation disk-based data protection platform designed from the ground up to address key backup and archive challenges without the complexity, risks and operational limitations of current VTLs and disk archive appliances. The solution’s grid storage architecture differentiates it from other disk-based backup and archive systems. Our revolutionary architecture combines the intelligent OS, DynamicStor™, with best-in-class industry standard servers to deliver unmatched capacity optimization, data resiliency, effortless management and unrestricted performance and capacity scalability.

Delivered as a turnkey solution installed and backing up or archiving data in under 45 minutes, the Grid Backup Solution is a fully self-managed, self-tuning and self-healing system that moves beyond “thin provisioning” to the new realm of “no provisioning.” Both performance and storage capacity can be scaled independently based on business needs. The Grid Backup Solution accomplishes this scalability by using two node types within the grid. Nodes can be added nondisruptively and without labor-intensive configuration or tuning.

• Accelerator Nodes enable high performance backup and archive scaling.
• Storage Nodes allow disk capacity to be scaled easily and non-disruptively from terabytes to petabytes.

In a single instance, the Grid Backup Solution can efficiently and securely store months or even years’ worth of backup and archive data. This unparalleled affordable scalability is a benefit of both the Grid Backup Solution’s
grid architecture and integrated data management services.

The Grid Backup solution layers into your storage environment behind whatever backup and/or archiving applications that have already been deployed. There is no need to perform a “rip and replace” of the existing infrastructure. It simply slips in to complement and enhance what is already there.

Unified Disk Storage Platform for Enterprise Backup & Archive
The Grid Backup Solution layers into your storage environment behind whatever backup and/or archiving applications that have already been deployed. There is no need to perform a “rip and replace” of the existing infrastructure.The Grid Backup Solution slips in to complement and enhance what is already the the Grid Backup Solution is not just another disk-based backup or archive system— it is a strategic storage platform unifying both backup and archive data and providing integrated data management services. And unlike first-generation VTLs and disk-as-disk appliances that put de-duplicated data at risk, the Grid Backup Solution is the only solution that fully addresses IT’s requirement for increased data resiliency in a de-duplicated environment.

Driving Forces Behind Backup & Archive
While backup and restore is an age-old core IT operation required to ensure that lost, destroyed or damaged data can be recovered, archiving is a more recent responsibility driven by three forces:

Regulatory compliance-A growing number of government imposed regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and SEC 17a, dictate ever more stringent record retention policies for specific types of data.

Legal discovery-The consequences of not locating and providing all requested information to lawyers, investigators and the court in a prescribed, narrow time window have dramatically and rapidly escalated to fines in the millions of dollars.

Storage optimization-According to the Enterprise Strategy Group, 60-80% of data remains idle and unused 90 days after its creation. This idle data creates an opportunity for a new cost-effective data archiving paradigm. By intelligently migrating this data off of primary storage and archiving it onto lower cost storage, IT can not only improve application performance but also reduce the amount of daily backup data, improve restore times, and dramatically lower overall storage costs.

Backup & Archive Issues
Yesterday’s tape-based backup and archive environments are no longer able to keep pace with today’s business and IT challenges. Three main areas of dissatisfaction led to the development of the Grid Backup Solution, including:

• inadequate speed...with backup and restore windows shrinking, and more demanding compliance and eDiscovery requirements, performance no longer meets business requirements;
• high failure rates...tapes regularly suffer from read/write and other hardware failures forcing operation redos and unpredictable results; and
• security...tapes get lost and stolen, creating legal and public relations exposure nightmares.

While using tape may still seem cost-effective—although it never has made the grade for ease of management—the increasingly stringent regulatory climate and business service levels of today expose the hidden cost of tape. With the imposition of stiff penalties for not being able to produce data—often a result of lost or unreadable tapes, or not being able to retrieve data from tapes quickly enough—forward-thinking companies realize their need for rapid, predictable, online access archive data.

As 24 × 7 operations becomes the norm, restore time objectives continue to shrink. Tape-based data restores of destroyed or deleted data is a highly manual, labor-intensive and time-consuming task that doesn’t support today’s service level requirements.

Benefits for Backup & Archive

The Grid Backup Solution addresses traditional and today’s backup and archive challenges with a single system optimized for both backup and archive data needs.

Time
The solution non-disruptively scales from 200 MB/sec to 14,000 MB/sec with online de-duplication to support the most demanding backup and archive data throughputs. With the Grid Backup Solution, archived data retrievals and backup windows decrease by 50%.

Reliability
With no single point of failure and RAID's patent-pending DRD technology providing levels of data resiliency far beyond RAID capabilities, the Grid Backup Solution offers continuous availability.

Security
As a disk-based solution, the solution allows IT to remove tape from their environments, creating a more secure backup and archive platform than lost tapes ever could.

Layers into Existing Environment
The Grid Backup Solution has been validated with leading backup and archive software applications, and integrates easily into existing infrastructures using industry standard NFS and CIFS protocols. Each Accelerator Node comes with two 1 Gb NICs, and optional 10 Gb NICs for enhanced performance. Accelerator Nodes can be connected to one or more backup and/or archive servers to maximize throughput.

Advantages

The Grid Backup Solution is not only easy to manage, but easy to deploy: the platform layers non-disruptively into almost any existing IT infrastructure. Through its use of industry standard access protocols, NFS and CIFS, The Grid Backup Solution easily integrates with a wide variety of email, filesystem and document management archiving and backup applications. As the amount of backup and archive data grows, nodes can be non-disruptively added to increase search and retrieve performance, as well as augment disk space. With its grid architecture and integrated data management services, the Grid Backup Solution grid storage platform offers a number of unique capabilities that reduce the cost and complexity of storage.

Unrestricted scalability
The Grid Backup Solution’s unique grid architecture enables both performance and disk capacity to be scaled independently to meet customer requirements. Accelerator Nodes scale performance from 200 MB/sec to 14,000 MB/sec with data de-duplication to reduce backup and archive times and enable faster access to stored data when needed. Storage Nodes scale disk capacity from 150TBs to 10PBs as one logical pool of capacity, liminating today’s costly and labor-intensive siloed capacity challenge. With the Grid Backup Solution, IT has one system to manage for both backup and archive data, instead of multiple systems with disparate interfaces.

Effortless management
The Grid Backup Solution goes beyond thin provisioning to no provisioning. The Web browser-based GUI allows for quick and easy monitoring of de-duplication ratios, capacity utilization and trends, as well as overall system to individual node status. The Grid Backup Solution is a self-managing, self-tuning and self-healing system with one
management dashboard to reduce complexity and administrative costs, and improving staff productivity.

Self-evolving system
The Grid Backup Solution’s community of smart nodes allows IT to nondisruptively ride the hardware technology curve, leveraging new node hardware in support of business needs without today’s painful and time-consuming forklift upgrades, application downtime and manual data migration to new models. With The Grid Backup Solution, IT can transparently introduce ever greener nodes, faster processors, and higher capacity hard disk drives into the same solution system, non-disruptively and painlessly.

Safe de-duplication
The Grid Backup Solution maximizes storage efficiency without the risk of data loss in current de-duplication point products. Its patent-pending DataRedux technology eliminates redundant data across and within incoming data streams to enable The Grid Backup Solution to reduce storage requirements up to 95%. The Grid Backup Solution’s DataRedux also operates across both backup and archive data to eliminate redundancy between the two for further capacity savings.

Grid Storage Options