Build Your Own Private Cloud Storage

Many small and medium businesses are doing at least some storage in the public cloud, especially with disaster recovery in mind. But you still need at least some storage locally. You can go with a SAN (Storage Attached Network) that is expensive and complicated or you can consider something much easier and simpler.

That something is a Drobo storage system. Drobo, which sounds like a good name for a robot, is a deceptively advanced hard disk storage solution that uses standard 3.5” SATA disk drives of pretty much any capacity. The deceptive part is that this appears to be just some simple multi-bay drive case. You can plug in more drives at any time. You can pull drives out at any time. You can even pull out a 1 TB drive and replace it with a 2 TB drive at any time.

Sounds convenient, but what kind of administrative nightmare lies behind swapping all those drives in and out. None at all. It’s truly plug and play... or I should say plug and store. You don’t have to log into any admin panel and start typing arcane command lines to make things work. All of that is automated and invisible to you, the user.

You are, indeed, building your own private storage cloud and it stays on your premises. There’s no worry about having sufficient bandwidth to access data in real-time because this unit sits on a desk or mounts in a rack and connects to your local network.

You are no doubt familiar with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives), a technique of interconnecting multiple hard drives so that the failure of one drive will not cause you to lose data. Drobo’s system goes even farther. They call it BeyondRAID. The difference is that with Drobo you can use drives of any size and they don’t have to be the same. Grab half a dozen SATA drives at random and plug them into the Drobo box. The system automatically sets them up for redundant storage with the combined capacity being your storage pool. It’s not a matter of the smallest disk defining the storage pool or virtual hot spare.

You can see how this is similar to the cloud philosophy in that you don’t need to be concerned about the mechanics of how to get all those disparate disk drives to work in harmony. That’s built into the operating system. If you start to run out of room, just plug another drive into an empty bay. Oh, your bays are all full? OK. Just yank out the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one. The system will automatically accommodate the drive change, give you the extra capacity and not lose any information in the process.

You can even upgrade the drive system at will. Move up from a 9 bay system to a 12 bay system for up to 24 TB of local storage. Pull your drive out of the old case and plug them into the new one. Oh, oh. You forgot which drive was in which slot? No problem. Just plug them into any open slot, include any new ones wherever there is room and you are good to go. The status lights will all light green when the system has sorted things out and is ready to use.

Does this sound a bit too simple to be true? Well, you’ll just have to read the material and watch the demonstration videos to see for yourself. Drobo units start at just 4 bays for small office use (with however many drives you care to plug in) and go up from there. Learn more and order your Drobo storage system now.

Note: Photo of open hard disk drive courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

New Data Center Networking Solutions

Data management and storage requirements for enterprise level organizations continue to increase. In addition, a majority of enterprise IT departments now replicate data between data centers. This has created a need for new and more cost effective bandwidth services, especially at 10 Gbps and above. Level 3 is addressing these needs with an enhancement of its existing data center networking solutions.

What’s different about data center connectivity compared to other business requirements? Data centers are far more concentrated than other computing resources. This is especially true for storage, a prime driver for offsite data centers in the first place. What this does is increase the need for high bandwidth connections between the concentration of storage and the concentration of users. It also influences the connectivity required.

What you need for last mile connections to an MPLS network or private lines to link business locations can usually be handled by T-Carrier, SONET/SDH or Carrier Ethernet line services. Data centers need higher bandwidth connections, but may also need special SAN protocols including Fibre Channel, Infiniband, ESCON and FICON.

SAN stands for Storage Area Networks. These are large collections of disk drives that connect directly to the application servers. SAN networks have traditionally been very localized, with the disk arrays physically near the servers. But what do you do when you need to duplicate data between data centers?

Many companies operate two or more data centers, sometimes a half-dozen or more. Some of this is due to mergers and acquisitions of formerly independent organizations with their own IT infrastructures. Much is driven by a need for disaster protection and recovery. When your business is critically dependent on its electronic data, normal backup processes aren’t adequate. You can have multiple copies of your files locked up locally and still be put out of business by a fire, tornado, flood, earthquake, hurricane or other disaster that destroys whole buildings and everything in them.

This means that you want to have copies of your critical data dispersed geographically. Establishing independent data centers in two or more cities far apart means than a disaster that takes out one center probably won’t knock out everything. There’s also an advantage to content providers in having the servers and data content located close to the customers. Latency is reduced and performance is increased due to less network congestion. A challenge is how to make sure the data is replicated exactly at all locations.

This is where long distance SAN networking comes into play. You need high levels of bandwidth but also support for SAN protocols to keep everything synchronized. FCoE or Fiber Channel over Ethernet is a popular protocol for transmitting Fibre Channel frames over 10 Gbps Ethernet connections. WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing avoids having to layer protocols to connect facilities. Each wavelength in a fiber optic link can be assigned its own protocol, regardless of what is running on other wavelengths in the same beam.

Level 3 Communications has expanded its data center networking portfolio to include SAN fiber channel protocol, dark fiber and managed fiber solutions. This is in addition to dedicated bandwidth services from 1 Gbps to more than 40 Gbps, including 10 Gbps EVPL or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service. They offer low latency route guarantees and an international service footprint, including a presence at key public exchange facilities.

Are you concerned with managing multiple high performance data centers? Would you like to have more options and/or better pricing for all your telecom connectivity needs? If so, get complementary consulting help and pricing and availability for high bandwidth networking services.



Note: Photo of data center servers courtesy of WikimediaCommons