Thursday, September 23, 2010

They first tried using optical media but those had no compression or deduplication and it was hard to get the staff to be consistent about rotating the media in and out. It also was very time consuming to burn the optical media. Moe even looked at tape media but was concerned about recovering data given the proprietary formats. He also had concerns about the reliability of reading a tape from one drive to another. According to Moe, “The Nasuni Filer was the God-send” he was looking for, which is why he jumped on it as soon as he saw it was technically sound.

The Nasuni Filer provides complete NAS services as a virtual machine, meaning there is no extra hardware to buy. And because its caching technology only needs to keep the most recent files on local storage, those local capacity requirements are small as well, the default size is 64GB’s but can be set to match whatever your active change rate demands. As data is added to the Nasuni Filer it’s then replicated to several cloud storage providers, on an hourly basis. For example, Storage Switzerland uses Iron Mountain for its backup volume and Rackspace for storing its production home directories volume.

Founded in 1965 Cole Instrument Corporation has earned a reputation for providing high quality, precision rotary switches to the commercial, aerospace and military industries. Based in Santa Ana, California it employs about 114 people. The business generates many CAD/CAM files as well as other data associated with projects. Moe was looking for something that would provide recovery from minor slip ups that can occur during the design/redesign process. They were also concerned about disaster recovery; because like many small businesses, they have a single site and limited options to replicate elsewhere. This combination made Moe think this would be an ideal opportunity for using cloud storage and that's when he found Nasuni.

As with most businesses that are beginning to embrace cloud storage. Moe wanted to use Nasuni as a backup storage area first, but liked the idea of eventually being able to expand to production storage at some point in the future. The first set of Cole's data to be protected in the cloud was on their file servers. Using the data protection application “Beyond Compare 3” they are able to copy certain files as they change to the Nasuni Filer, which then replicates the data to the cloud. Even though Cole struggles with a slow internet connection, thanks to the Nasuni caching area they are able to perform two replications per day, essentially giving them an AM and PM backup. The Beyond Compare software also allows Garcia to perform a bit-for-bit comparison between what is stored on the Nasuni Filer and on the primary file servers. At that point, the backup is in a file system format. We have seen repeatedly that users develop a high degree of comfort when they can “see and touch” their backups. This happens when they’re not stored in a proprietary backup format.

As Storage Switzerland demonstrated in its latest test drive of the Nasuni Filer they can use the Nasuni Web interface to navigate though the available snapshots (replication jobs) and then select the file they want recovered. The cloud based nature of the Nasuni environment also resolved one of Moe's other concerns: file recovery in the event something happened to their only data center location. With Nasuni, he could simply connect another file server and start restoring files. The Nasuni Filer would automatically recover files as they are needed and accessed by users.

Why all this attention to detail when it comes to data protection? Moe says "Because I am extremely risk averse, I know the amount of time and money required to generate the work on these files. Engineering staff is not cheap!" Data loss for Cole Instruments means loss of time and potentially revenue, something that no business, large or small can tolerate. For a small business though, loss of revenue often becomes more personal.

Security was another key concern for Moe because Cole is under ISO 9001 and AS9100 quality systems as well as the pressure of providing products to the government. The Nasuni Filer makes sure that all data is encrypted before it leaves the Cole Instruments facility and remains encrypted while stored at the cloud provider, so it  can only be read by Cole's Filers which meets their requirements. In fact, Nasuni recently offered a widely publicized security challenge to anyone that could compromise the data that it stores, no one broke their security.

For new Nasuni users Moe recommends not scheduling snapshots until your usage is stable. Generally, usage will be higher during the initial loading up phase, not your typical ‘steady-state’ levels, so you won’t know how long snapshots will usually take. Also, you may not have the internet/networking performance to make the snapshot occur quickly. That investment in better bandwidth is well worth it, as there’s tremendous value in having a high snapshot frequency.

In Storage Switzerland’s use we found that slowly loading the Nasuni with new data was another good way to get started. Instead of copying all of our files to the Nasuni Filer we started by just putting new files on it. This allowed for a nice, slow rollup of snapshots (we suffer from an equally slow internet connection as Cole) yet it will allow us to eventually decommission our primary file server.

Moe is also now using the multiple volumes capability that the Nasuni Filer offers to store different types of backups on the system. There is a volume for personal data and soon they will be putting on bi-monthly copies of large Exchange stores as well as MS-SQL server backup files. In the future they may put image copies of critical workstation images on the system as well. This will allow them to store critical data potentially forever in a secure fashion.

An important takeaway is Cole Instruments’ impressions of the Nasuni Filer is similar to ours: a simple installation and a secure storage platform that can expand well beyond just backups and into primary storage. It’s also a system with excellent pricing that’s well within the budget of most small businesses.

George Crump, Senior Analyst