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Slash Costs and Improve Operations with Server, Storage and Backup Virtualization

Affordability
With Cybernetics’ miSAN^® D Series, terabytes of highly reliable RAID storage capacity can be allocated across a variety of servers, operating systems, and databases. Full-featured yet surprisingly easy to manage, miSAN^® is live, block level storage that is fast, efficient, reliable – and affordable. Consider a small company with six servers. This example illustrated in the chart below accounts for the servers with associated hardware and software for basic operations and traditional backup. The obvious omission is the tape backup hardware device itself, which is common to both solutions and does not impact the relative cost differences. This six-server data center will cost about $18,000:

This data center has no redundancy and no failover whatsoever. If any of the disk drives or servers experiences a failure, the entire department is down until the problem can be resolved and the server and data can be recovered. This is complicated by the fact that traditional servers are plagued with a classic dissimilar hardware problem. If a traditional server fails, recovery from backup requires an identical hardware server platform for a fast recovery.. With a dissimilar replacement hardware server, the operating systems and applications must be loaded from scratch before any data recovery can even begin. This applies to every board and chip in the server, so the likelihood is very low that an exact duplicate of any given server will be available into the future. Traditional server operating systems are locked to the hardware, making the recovery effort complicated and time consuming.

In a virtualized environment, a similar “six-server” configuration will cost a little more at $19,000:

An important difference is that this virtualized data center has more powerful and reliable servers and delivers complete redundancy and failover. If one server fails, the virtual servers will simply restart on the other hardware server. Another benefit is that virtual servers are never dependent on a particular hardware server platform. If server hardware fails, any server can quickly be installed to replace it. By contrast, in the traditional data center with DAS (direct attached storage), any single server or single disk failure results in downtime.

The role of the iSCSI SAN storage is critical in the virtual environment because storage virtualization lends fluidity to data accessibility. Just as virtual servers are unfettered by hardware, SAN storage is completely removed from any server hardware platform. When a virtual server fails over, it transparently maintains the data connection. With a Cybernetics miSAN^® iSCSI SAN, all storage is virtualized and protected with RAID + hot spare redundancy. Because the Cybernetics miSAN^® D Series supports both SCSI and iSCSI boot, so there is no need for direct attached storage at all.

An important source of cost reduction in the virtual data center is in the backup software. Cybernetics’ miSAN^® D Series iSCSI SAN backs itself up to tape without a backup server or backup software. Data is streamed directly from the high-speed RAID array to the SCSI attached tape drive. Because the backup is handled at the hardware level by the miSAN^® D Series, it is a serverless, background operation, and the backup does not create any network traffic. The backup streams over the dedicated SCSI bus at the maximum possible rate of the tape drive, which is the optimal operating condition for the tape drive and the media, improving the reliability and longevity of tape backup.