Improving Backup to be More than an Insurance Policy

StorONE’s S1:Backup elevates the process, improving backup to be more than an insurance policy. We always strive to provide our customers with the best storage solutions. Our future-ready portfolio includes core products for current customers and innovations that create modern solutions for new markets.

StorONE’s novel backup solution, S1:Backup, aligns with our vision- “THINK RESULTS.” We deliver the best results for our customers. It enables modern backup-server software to achieve its full potential. Combined with S1:Backup, these applications can meet the strictest recovery point and time objectives at the lowest possible cost while providing complete protection from a ransomware attack.

The result is a comprehensive backup storage solution rather than the singular “point” solution our competitors-tout, enabling customers to extend beyond the backup as an insurance policy mindset. At StorONE, we view backup as more than an insurance policy for data, but first, it needs to address three main ‘insurance’ requirements:

To extend backup to be more than an insurance policy, a backup storage solution must:

• Provide usability under normal conditions
• Extend beyond temporary replacement
• Add value to the asset

StorONE invested eight years into R&D to develop the industry’s only Enterprise Storage Platform. The highly innovative capabilities of S1:Backup are based on the superior technologies of ultra-high-performance technologies with a minimum number of flash drives, advanced auto-tiering technology, rapid rebuild, and support for all storage protocols from a single platform.

Improving Backup Value

The best way to improve backup value is to reduce the recovery point objective (RPO). Backup can no longer be a once-per-night activity. Data changes too quickly, and attacks can occur at any time. To get the most updated data, you need to backup frequently, rather than every few hours or days, and with all the ransomware attacks, you prefer to keep these frequent copies in an immutable state for a few months. Backup now requires a high-performance and high-capacity storage solution:

• Flash Tier – StorONE developed an efficient technology that enables a few flash drives to achieve extremely high-performance backup. S1:Backup is the first backup storage solution to deliver hundreds of thousands of IOPS while supporting the most simultaneous block-level incremental backup jobs. This optimized performance eliminates the need to purchase many high-cost flash drives. Our competitors require many drives to achieve high performance, thus resulting in costly backup solutions.

• Long Term Data Retention – Modern backup software supports decade-plus data retention, but backup storage cannot scale to meet this capability. This lack of scale and flexibility forces customers to add yet another storage silo, an archive. With our advanced auto-tiering technology, we automatically move the data from flash to a high capacity hard disk tier, which can expand to support 15+ PB of capacity to meet the decades-long retention requirement.

• Immutable Everywhere – Regardless of tier, all backup data is stored in an immutable state for 90, 180 days, or indefinitely, with a point and time roll-back granularity of 60 seconds. S1:Backup supports millions of these “checkpoints,” so no matter how sophisticated the ransomware attack, you can recover from it. S1:Backup provides immutability across all supported protocols. Our competitors, if they offer immutability, often force you to use S3 Object Storage.

Improving Backup Cost

In 2021, high-performance and high-capacity storage solutions can be easily achieved with hardware alone. The challenge is to do it with minimum hardware and complete data protection but without performance degradation. Other storage vendors suffer because of the overhead of their feature set, which cripples their ability to extract maximum performance and fully utilize modern storage hardware’s capacity. The result is that they need even more hardware to compensate for their inefficiency. Improving backup cost requires:

• HDD Tier – High-density drives: our fast rebuild technology requires only a few hours of required rebuild time even in volumes made up of 18TB drives. It makes use of high-density drives practical, and our customers can enjoy significant cost reduction per TB. High-density HDDs provide a 10X price advantage over the flash equivalent.

• Mix Drive Density – Because of StorONE’s forward-thinking R&D and our 100% software solution, (different drive types: performance and high density) can provide capacity to the same volume. Each drive is useable to its total capacity. Our competitors’ technology requires “formatting down” or creating new volumes, increasing IT’s operational burden or leaving them stuck using low-density drives for many years.

• NO Migration – StorONE’s S1 technology eliminates the need for migration, and all activities are done automatically in the background without IT intervention. This is an essential feature as backup is expanding exponentially, and migrations are very complicated.

Improving Backup Recovery Time

It is imperative to have the backup data available for the application immediately if needed. If ransomware strikes and your organization faces a multi-day recovery effort, they may be tempted to pay the ransom. The backup infrastructure must always be ready, and there is never a good time to move data between different storage solutions. Improving backup recovery time requires:

• Data Availability – StorONE’s sizable flash tier means that most recovery data is already pre-positioned on the flash tier. StorONE uses the same auto-tiering technology for recoveries of older data but in reverse order. The data immediately moves to the flash tier and will be available for the applications to use. There is no need for additional steps; the backup-server software will automatically trigger data movement to the flash tier. As we discuss in our article “Understanding Instant Recovery Performance,” S1:Backup makes an instant recovery, instant!

• All Protocols – If the production storage system faces a prolonged outage, customers can use S1:Backup for standby-primary storage. S1:Backup has highly available storage controllers and supports all enterprise protocol requirements, including NFS, SMB, S3, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and NVMe-oF, thanks to our Enterprise Storage Platform. Applications connect directly to the data without waiting for the original production storage system to return to service or squeeze data onto another production system.

StorONE’s revolutionary S1:Backup is the first backup storage solution designed to complement modern backup storage software. Our superior technology delivers complete ransomware protection and recovery while extending the value of the backup storage investment and dramatically lowering the upfront and long-term costs of storage.

Learn More About S1:Backup

• partners.storone.com/backup
• Register for our live webinar “Ransomware’s Three Attacks on Backup and How to Neutralize Them” Live on December 2nd.
• Download our white paper “Modernizing Backup Infrastructures.”
• Watch our S1:Backup LightBoard Video