Small businesses face the same data storage, high availability and disaster recovery issues as their bigger counterparts; they just don’t have the same budget for dealing with them.
Shared storage is now an affordable and a realistic investment for small businesses, and makes server virtualization payoff double-time. A virtualized server environment on a shared storage platform provides not only enhanced server availability, but also business flexibility. Northwest Computer Support has now taken this technology and created an online backup service combining HP’s shared storage and virtualization solutions that allows businesses to replicate their data to our co-location facility.
Traditionally, shared storage or Storage Area Network (SAN) has been too expensive and complex to manage for most organizations. But the latest Storage Virtualization technology changes all that, easily and inexpensively turning any existing X86 server into shared storage on an Ethernet network. The newest SAN technology is robust, powerful and easy to install. Companies can now replicate their data across multiple sites and to Northwest Computer Support, creating an effective, easy to manage, and quick to restore online backup service. Since the solution combines virtualization; recovery in the case of failure is a snap. In the event of a disaster at the client’s main facilities, a virtual image of the server can be brought online from Northwest Computer Support’s online backup service facility in a matter of hours. Combining offsite replication and virtualization creates a powerful offsite disaster recovery solution that is both cost effective and easy to manage.
The Left-Hand technology was chosen for Northwest Computer Support’s online backup service over competing solutions because the SAN to SAN replication is bundled together in the Left-Hand software package, with no additional add-ons. This makes management and recovery easier and cheaper than other available storage solutions.
If you are considering an online backup solution or you are interested in HP Left-hand,they provide many benefits to the small business looking to share storage through virtualization:
Storage clustering simplifies scalability: Storage clustering allows a customer to consolidate multiple storage groups into pools of storage. All available capacity and performance is aggregated and made available to every volume in the cluster. As storage needs increase, the solution can scale performance and capacity right on-line.
Thin provisioning increases storage efficiency:
Thin provisioning allocates space only as data is actually written without pre-allocating storage. This raises utilization and efficiency, reduces cost and ultimately increases ROI.
Remote Copy reduces costs for disaster recovery:
Remote Copy replicates snapshots between the SANs at primary and remote locations. Remote Copy enables centralized backup and disaster recovery on a per-volume basis.
Data remains available during site failures:
The SANs stripe and mirror multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes, eliminating any single point of failure on the SAN. Applications have continous data availability in the event of power, network, disk, controller, or entire storage node failure.
Purchase only what you need today:
Avoid up-front cost and performance constraints. Purchase only what you need today, and grow the performance, capacity and redundancy as your storage requirements evolve.
Avoid disruptive upgrades:
Add resources to the SAN solution non-disruptively, as capacity and performance requirements increase. Applications remain online during maintenance events for best in class availability
Server virtualization is well known for its ability to simplify administration,lower cost, improve utilization, carry out non-disruptive upgrades and provide increased availability. Storage virtualization provides the same benefits to the small business wishing to virtualize.
If you are interested in finding out more about our virtualized, shared storage online backup service for disaster recovery or want to find our more about Left-Hand SAN solutions, Contact Us first and take advantage of the current specials available from HP on this innovative product. Our team of experts is ready to help you set up a solution perfect for your business.