SAN Challenge

You purchased a SAN in order to consolidate your storage, have a platform for server virtualization, and to take advantage of features such as thin provisioning and snapshots.

What you discovered was that your environment became even more complex in term of protecting notebooks, PCs, workstations, servers, and NASs as well as SANs. Frequent snapshots were possible but didn't protect against SAN failure or long latency viral infestation. And as the price of a terabyte drive went below one hundred dollars while SAN vendors price per terabyte stayed stubbornly high, it has become ever more important to protect all forms of computers and storage.

Unitrends Solution

The value that Unitrends brings to businesses that have deployed or are considering deploying SANs are as follow:

• Unified monitoring and management: Our Rapid Recovery Console allows unified monitoring and management; our alert, SMTP e-mail, and SNMP systems allow integration with third-party systems and network management platforms.
• Edge data protection: Protection of notebooks, PCs, and workstations at the "edge" of the IT infrastructure. Local storage is protected without requiring people to remember to copy to the SAN.
• Physical and virtual server protection: Protection of physical and virtual servers within the IT infrastructure. This may be used to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in of a single storage vendor or technology. In other words, when you need to expand you can add a terabyte for less than $99 to your server instead of paying thousands for a terbyte of SAN storage.
• NAS data protection: Protection of NASs within the IT infrastructure. This may be used to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in of a single storage vendor or technology. You can protect your NAS either directly or indirectly.
• SAN D2D tape replacement: Disk-to-disk tape replacement offers the lower total cost of ownership and reliability achieved when replacing tape media. SAN snapshots on a frequent basis may be used with less frequent D2D snapshots to protect data from SAN failure or from failure types infrequently detected
• D2D2D rotational archiving: Disk-to-disk-to-disk rotational archiving may be used for disaster recovery and to conserve WAN bandwidth in a multi-premise environment.
• D2D2T rotational archiving: Disk-to-disk-to-tape rotational archiving may be used for disaster recovery and to conserve WAN bandwidth in a multi-premise environment in a situation in which tapes are required by convention.
• Electronic vaulting: Electronic vaulting offers the lowest total cost of ownership in terms of disaster recovery and tends to conserve WAN bandwidth better than SAN-based replication. If sufficient WAN bandwidth exists, SAN-based replication is a viable alternative to electronic vaulting.

There are several typical SAN environments; each of these are depicted below along with the primary value proposition of our appliances in these environments.

Single SAN

A SAN at a single location is being used for on-premise storage.

Unitrends offers:

• Unified monitoring and management
• Edge data protection
• Server and NAS data protection
• SAN D2D tape replacement
• D2D2D rotational archiving
• D2D2T rotational archiving
• Electronic vaulting

Replicated SAN, Active/Passive

A SAN at one location is being used for on-premise storage and another SAN is being used as an off-premise replication target to solely to replicate the first SAN.

Unitrends offers:

• Unified monitoring and management
• Edge data protection
• Server and NAS data protection
• SAN D2D tape replacement
• D2D2D rotational archiving
• D2D2T rotational archiving
• Electronic vaulting†

Replicated SAN, Active/Active

A SAN at one location is being used for on-premise storage and as a off-premise replication target while a SAN at another location is being used for on-premise storage and as off-premise replication target.

Unitrends offers:

• Unified monitoring and management
• Edge data protection
• Server and NAS data protection
• SAN D2D tape replacement
• D2D2D rotational archiving
• D2D2T rotational archiving
• Electronic vaulting†