ST1901

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

January/February 2019 

Vol 19, Issue 1 

TRADING UP: 

European exchange moves to the cloud 

DISASTER RECOVERY: 

'Grappling with data loss' 

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: 

Preparing for Industry 4.0 

VDI BOTTLENECKS: 

Is all-flash the answer? 

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS

TRADING UP: 

 

January/February 2019 

Vol 19, Issue 1 

CONTENTS 

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

CONTENTS 

DISASTER RECOVERY: 

 

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: 

 

VDI BOTTLENECKS: 

 

 

Comment.......................................4 

GREATER REGULATION, ANYONE? 

06 

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: 

OPTICAL DISK…...............................…6 

Hideharu Takeshima, CTO of Mitsubishi Chemical Media examines 

the ongoing role of archival optical disk an an increasingly data 

driven era 

INTERVIEW: STORAGECRAFT...….12 

Matt Medeiros, CEO of StorageCraft, speaks to Storage magazine 

editor David Tyler about how current rates of data storage growth have 

created the need for a new approach to intelligent data management 

14 

ANALYSIS: STORAGE TRENDS.….14 

Rainer Kaese, Senior Manager Business Development Storage 

Products at Toshiba Electronics Europe, examines likely storage 

trends for 2019 

20 

RESEARCH: 

DISASTER RECOVERY.....................20 

New research from Unitrends suggests that although DR testing is 

growing in popularity, there is still much to be done 

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: VDI……..…24 

Deploying VDI can be demanding and expensive, argue Juan Mulford 

and Stefan Ferrari of AccelStor, but industry-validated, cost-effective, 

all-flash storage can help 

24 

COURT ON CAMERA………...........…28 

Safeguard your surveillance data or potentially fall foul of the law, 

warns Gary Watson, CTO of StorCentric and founder of Nexsan 

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: HDD…..….30 

Jason Feist, Managing Technologist at Seagate Technology, describes 

how a laser no bigger than a grain of salt is just one crucial element 

of the next generation of hard drive technologies 

30 

STRATEGY: 

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION.….…34 

Mark Jow, EMEA Vice President, Technical Services at Commvault, talks 

about preparing for an effective digital transformation journey 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Jan/Feb 2019 

^ 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

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COMMENT 

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GREATER REGULATION, ANYONE? 

BY DAVID TYLER 

EDITOR 

As we start a new year, it seems that data protection is still on the minds of 

many and isn't going away any time soon. In fact, 80% of IT professionals 

believe more stringent data protection regulations will benefit their 

organisations, but only 20% are confident that they comply with the latest regulatory 

requirements. This is according to a survey conducted late last year at the Data 

Protection World Forum by Commvault. 

Many of the findings of the survey make for worrying reading: almost two thirds of 

respondents (64%) felt the changing business processes and cultural requirements 

necessary for the uptake of genuinely compliant data-centric practices across 

organisations were greater barriers than the technology issues. This is despite the 

fact that technology challenges such as cloud migration, integrating with legacy 

systems and managing unstructured data were still areas of concern. 

Despite this, almost 40% of respondents actually stated that they would welcome 

more data regulation. The thinking presumably here is that more regulation and 

enforcement could result in better data management practices being implemented in 

their organisations in the long term. 

Meanwhile, nearly one in five respondents (17%) said that the penalties for falling 

foul of current regulatory policy were still not strict enough. This means that 

regulations might need to be stricter in order to drive the real organisational changes 

required to recognise the potential business value 

"With many businesses still struggling to navigate the challenges of data protection 

regulations like GDPR, it's never been more important than it is today, to focus on 

the core principles of effective data management, beyond simply a tech perspective, 

but to also include cultural and process elements too," comments Jo Blazey, Global 

Data Governance Officer, Commvault."Every benefit you can gain from data tracks 

back to four simple premises: being able to see what data you have, where it's 

stored, how it's protected and what it's being used for. Compliance with current 

regulations requires changes in business and working cultural behaviours to achieve 

this but let's be clear, better data management is as much a business or legal priority, 

as it is a technology one." 

What do you think? Would you welcome even more regulation around data 

protection? I'd be interested to hear your views, via my email (see top left) as ever. 

^ 

04 STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

Jan/Feb 2019 

@STMagAndAwards 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: OPTICAL DISC FOCUS: 

DATA - THE OIL OF OUR TIME 

HIDEHARU TAKESHIMA, CTO OF MITSUBISHI CHEMICAL MEDIA EXAMINES THE ONGOING ROLE OF 

ARCHIVAL OPTICAL DISC IN AN INCREASINGLY DATA DRIVEN ERA 

With the popularisation of Social 

Networking Services (SNSs), the 

Internet of Things (IoT) and higher 

camera resolutions, the amount of data 

being generated will continue to increase 

dramatically, improving productivity and 

creating new business opportunities. We are 

in the Data Driven Era. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered to 

be the key technology in this era with 

Deep Learning the mainstream of AI, 

creating the neural network that learns 

from known input and output data and 

predicting optimum answers. The accuracy 

of the analysis is determined by how much 

learning data is given to the neural 

network. In addition, as new analysis 

algorithms are created, new knowledge 

can be obtained by analysing the past 

data with the new algorithms. Therefore, 

captured data that had previously not 

been considered useful may now prove 

highly valuable. 

Oil has been the world's most important 

substance since the mid-1950s - the 

lifeblood of the industrialised nations. Its 

products underpin modern society, mainly 

supplying energy to power industry, heating 

homes and providing fuel for vehicles and 

aeroplanes to carry goods and people all 

over the world. 

We are now living in a data-driven society 

and it can be argued that data is now more 

important and valuable than oil. Data can 

be used, but unlike oil, it does not have to 

be consumed. It can be kept for future 

analysis, so we have a duty to store data 

with the view that it may prove useful in the 

future. The challenge is how we should 

store these increasingly large volumes of 

data in a way that is cost effective and 

accessible for the future. 

06 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 


www.storagemagazine.co.uk 

MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: OPTICAL DISC 

the reliability of this storage method. 

DATA EXPLOSION 

As shown in Figure 1 (below right), due to 

the popularisation of IoT, the explosive 

growth of data is expected to exceed the 

storage capacity available to the world. The 

result is that valuable data is being 

discarded and lost. This dramatic growth in 

demand for data storage combined with the 

nature of this data - often referred to as 

Cold Data as it has low access frequency 

requirements and is stored for a long period 

of time - necessitates a change in how we 

store this data from now on. 

ARCHIVAL GRADE 

Optical discs are still one of the most 

popular forms of storage media in the 

world; for consumer applications, but also 

for business purposes, administrative 

materials and research materials in 

museums, libraries, and archives. 

For optical discs used for archiving, the 

reliability of the storage method and media 

is critical. Long-term preservation of data 

can be realised by combining longer 

lifetime optical discs, called Archival Grade 

Optical Media, which has proven higher 

reliability than regular optical media, 

together with a dedicated optical drive. 

addition, a dedicated recording drive is 

used and a specific recording method is 

adopted that draws out the best 

performance. There is also a drive 

employed that measures the quality of the 

recorded signal and periodically checks the 

quality of the recording. 

The optical media industry has benefited 

hugely from the adoption of international 

standards developed by ISO and JIS to 

ensure wide compatibility. Table 1 (above) 

shows the three standards that are used: 

Format Standard, which ensures 

compatibility with the drive used for 

recording or reproducing the data; Lifetime 

Measurement Standard, a test to assess the 

likely longevity of the media, and 

Operational Standard, which guarantees 

It has been reported that optical media 

using a stable inorganic material recording 

film can last for several hundred years - or 

even several thousands of years - when kept 

at a temperature of 25°C and a relative 

humidity of 50%. Also, using the 

parameters obtained by the lifetime 

specification and the Eyring formula, the 

estimated lifetime at different temperatures 

and humidity can be obtained. 

For example, even at a temperature of 

35°C and a relative humidity of 50%, the 

estimated lifetime is over a hundred years, 

and it can be presumed that data can be 

stored and managed for a long period of 

time even in a rough storage environment. 

Based on all of this evidence, it is possible 

to significantly extend the data migration 

interval which is carried out every three to 

five years on a normal hard disk, by using 

archival optical discs instead. 

In optical disc library systems, power is 

not needed except during recording and 

reproduction, so the amount of energy 

required and generation of heat is very 

small. Therefore, the use of archival optical 

discs make it possible to suppress energy 

For archival optical discs, Mitsubishi 

Chemical Media, which also owns the 

popular Verbatim brand, has improved 

resilience by using more durable materials 

compared to consumer optical discs, and 

strict quality control standards with tighter 

specifications to remove variation. In 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

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TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: OPTICAL DISC FOCUS: 

can reduce the data migration cost and the 

power consumption cost when compared to 

RAID (hard disk) and tape, as can be seen 

here in Figure 2. 

and CO2 emissions associated with air 

conditioning. 

From a cost perspective, an optical disc 

library system can be considered to be an 

ideal long-term data storage method that 

In addition, it has been proven that 

archival optical disc can be durable in 

extreme environmental conditions. In a 

test where dual-layered archival BD-R was 

submerged at 1.5 m in the sea for a 

week, then taken out, washed with water, 

dried, and the Random Signal Error Rate 

(RSER) measured, the result confirmed 

that the data stored on the media could 

still be read. 

Furthermore, and very importantly, due to 

the industry standards employed, backwards 

compatibility is very good across 

generations of media, with old discs being 

able to be read on the latest generation of 

DiskStation DS1019+ 

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TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: OPTICAL DISC 

optical drives. This helps with migration 

time and reduces costs. And the 

development is continuing with Mitsubishi 

Chemical Media working on new Archival 

Grade Optical Media with higher capacity 

in combination with optical drive 

manufacturers to increase the total capacity 

of optical library systems. 

A MULTITUDE OF OPTIONS 

Everyone is familiar with the small-scale 

systems that manually record data on 

optical discs using a PC and an optical 

disc drive and store them on shelves, but 

there are numerous options for larger 

scale systems. 

There are online systems in which a robot 

carries an optical disc, fills it in a drive, and 

records and reproduces it. There are also 

systems that incorporate different recording 

media (flash memory, hard disks, tapes, 

etc.) and provide a rational system that 

automatically selects optimal data storage 

locations by hierarchical technology. 

We are living in a time where data is one 

of the most valuable things that we create, 

and where the care of which could have a 

significant influence on the way our society 

will learn and develop. Optical media 

clearly has its part to play in this, providing 

a very reliable and efficient method of longterm 

data storage so that we can benefit. 

The industry standards that have been 

crucial in its success so far, ensuring 

compatibility across generations of optical 

media technology, will be maintained to 

continue to direct its development as higher 

capacity optical media and library systems 

are launched over the coming years. 

More info: www.verbatim.com 

with EW201 

www.synology.com

CASE STUDY: SENSIRION STUDY: SENSIRION 

SENSOR SENSIBILITY 

ADVANCED SENSOR MANUFACTURER SENSIRION HAS SHIFTED FROM BACKUP TO A SECONDARY 

STORAGE MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENT WITH THE HELP OF COHESITY 

Headquartered in Stäfa, 

Switzerland, Sensirion is one of the 

leading manufacturers of digital 

microsensors and sensor systems. 

Established in 1998, the company 

employs a workforce of just under 750 

with operations in the U.S., South Korea, 

Japan, China, Taiwan, and Germany. 

Their product range includes gas and 

liquid sensors as well as differential 

pressure and environmental sensors for 

measuring temperature and humidity, 

volatile organic compounds (VOC), CO2, 

and particulate matter. 

Sensirion supports their customers with 

both standard and tailor-made sensor 

system solutions for a wide range of 

applications. Sensirion sensors are widely 

used in healthcare, industrial, and 

automotive applications as well as in 

analytical instruments, in the consumer 

goods industry, and in heating, 

ventilation, and air conditioning 

equipment. 

CHALLENGES OF EXPANSION 

With backup storage in need of expansion 

and operating costs on the rise, 

Sensirion's executives were on the lookout 

for a new storage solution. 

Previously, Sensirion had worked under a 

traditional data centre design. The 

10 

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CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: SENSIRION 

"Cohesity is more than a simple backup solution; it also holds its own in other 

use cases. Auditing is clearly better. We do not have to set up our own 

reports and the solution is very transparent for the customer. It's easy to 

understand and future-proof." 

applications serving their workforce of just 

below 750 ran in two data centres, and 

around 350 VMs were deployed using 

Pure Storage as tier one storage, with a 

full flash solution for applications with 

high performance requirements. 

With backup storage needing expansion, 

rising technological demands, and 

growing licensing costs, the executives at 

Sensirion began to evaluate new 

solutions. Andreas Kuehne, Global IT 

Infrastructure Services Lead at Sensirion 

AG, puts it this way: "We took the 

optimisations and renewals we had in 

mind as a good opportunity for us to 

question our concept and find a 

replacement for our existing solution. We 

looked for a way to underpin the 

Snapshot for Pure Storage functionality. 

Furthermore, a new solution was to 

enable archiving in the cloud." 

Sensirion needed to address a number 

of challenges in a new storage 

architecture: 

Backup storage: Support nearing its 

end set the scene for a new storage 

solution. 

Pure Storage: Flash memory was at its 

limit and needed expansion. 

Cloud backup: Very costly due to 

missing or at best limited data 

deduplication and compression. 

Sensirion's executives entered into a 

multiple stage selection process based on 

a number of key criteria. The key 

requirement was to allow both Pure 

Snapshots and SMB Targets. Furthermore, 

archiving into the cloud was to be an 

option, allowing the company to shrink its 

tape infrastructure to a minimum or 

reduce its role to that of a static archive. 

A WHOLE NEW APPROACH 

The project officials decided to prepare a 

proof-of-concept (PoC) with expertise from 

information management and backup 

specialist Infoniqa. Sven Meyer, Senior 

System Engineer with Sensirion, explains 

the idea: "To begin with, we planned to 

keep the existing backup environment and 

use Cohesity only as a backup target for 

the time being. In addition, Pure 

Snapshots were to be replicated to 

Cohesity. We did not manage to do that 

altogether, however, and needed to find a 

different approach for the PoC." 

But although Cohesity did require 

customisation, it still won Sensirion's IT 

professionals over with its rapid and easy 

installation. One of the reasons tipping 

the balance was that Cohesity had more 

to offer than just a simple backup 

solution. Their portfolio encompassed 

other application options as well - going 

as far as a management environment for 

secondary storage, with archiving, 

analytics, file and object storage, and 

testing facilities all included. In addition, 

Cohesity provided a native cloud solution. 

MULTIPLE BENEFITS 

Sven Meyer cites strong points for 

choosing Cohesity: "Cohesity is more than 

a simple backup solution; it also holds its 

own in other use cases. Auditing is clearly 

better. We do not have to set up our own 

reports and the solution is very 

transparent for the customer. It's easy to 

understand and future-proof. Handling it 

is cool and the Sensirion engineers are 

quite happy using it. It meets our 

requirements." 

Cohesity DataProtect completed backups 

significantly faster than the existing 

solution had ever done. In addition, it 

showed a convincingly good performance 

in restore operations. 

Other key benefits with Cohesity include: 

Rapid and simple deployment 

Reliable operations 

Pleasant experience working with 

Cohesity's engineers 

Intuitive user interface 

Convenient, easy-to-manage file 

system 

First class support 

Additional potential, future-proof 

From the initial success of the Cohesity 

solution for backup and recovery, 

Sensirion will soon consider using other 

features of Cohesity. The team is looking 

at including archiving and data analysis, 

tape export, as well as cloud integration 

and disaster recovery from the cloud. 

"For us, Cohesity's ease of deployment, 

its operational simplicity, and its 

professional support were the deciding 

factors," concluded Andreas Kühne. "We 

can see additional potential to develop 

this backup solution into a secondary 

storage management environment - 

across sites and with cloud integration." 

More info: www.cohesity.com 



Jan/Feb 2019 

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INTERVIEW: STORAGECRAFT STORAGECRAFT 

GREATER THAN THE SUM OF 

ITS PARTS 

MATT MEDEIROS, CEO OF STORAGECRAFT, SPEAKS TO STORAGE 

MAGAZINE EDITOR DAVID TYLER ABOUT HOW CURRENT RATES 

OF DATA STORAGE GROWTH HAVE CREATED THE NEED FOR A 

NEW APPROACH TO INTELLIGENT DATA MANAGEMENT 

David Tyler: It's a couple of years 

now since StorageCraft saw a 

significant investment in its 

business from TA Associates, which was 

followed by the acquisitions of Gillware 

and then Exablox. To what extent has this 

helped you to deliver your proclaimed aim 

of a platform that combines primary and 

secondary storage? 

Matt Medeiros: We have always had a 

vision: StorageCraft had a legacy software 

offering for backup and recovery, but it 

wasn't a complete solution. We needed to 

move things on quickly around product 

development, and acquisition was one 

way for us to get products and solutions to 

suit our customers' needs, and also to 

have better control of our own destiny. At 

the same time we had to revamp our 

approach to the channel - not because 

what we were doing was wrong, but more 

because the solutions we are selling today 

are very different to what we were selling 

prior to the TA investment. 

Looking at our business model today we 

sell an awful lot of subscription services to 

the MSP market, around backup and 

recovery for their customers. Customers 

had been saying to us "We like your 

technology, but we don't want to have to 

do the heavy lifting of pairing your 

technology with the server, we don't want 

to have to optimise the solution - we 

would prefer you to do that." 

DT: So the combination of StorageCraft 

and Exablox technologies is more than the 

sum of its parts? 

MM: This was an opportunity to really 

disrupt the BDR (backup and disaster 

recovery) market; when you optimise the 

StorageCraft and Exablox technology you 

no longer have just a BDR offering, you 

have a scale-out intelligent data 

management solution. And that is 

precisely what we had defined as our 

vision. 

We acquired Exablox over a year ago, 

and we've been working on unifying the 

products, making sure they not only 

12 STORAGE 

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MAGAZINE

INTERVIEW: INTERVIEW: STORAGECRAFT 

"We're in danger of losing sight of the dilemma that if data is doubling every 

year, how does my IT budget keep up with that? We've simply got to get 

smarter." 

complement each other, but work really 

well with each other. Now we provide our 

ShadowXafe product, the next generation 

of our ShadowProtect software, and it had 

to be optimised and unified onto our 

platform. That's what we've been spending 

our R&D efforts on since the Exablox 

acquisition. Now those products are 

integrated, the companies integrated, and 

we are able to serve our customers in a 

much more seamless way. 

DT: How has this shift toward a broader 

data management offering affected 

business? 

MM: We officially started shipping product 

in October 2018, but well before that our 

Exablox business in Europe was growing at 

well over 100% CAGR. That's not just 

down to the product, but also to the sales 

model we deploy here, as well as the 

people we employ and the leadership of 

the management team. 

Our cloud offering is also enjoying well 

over 100% CAGR here in Europe. There is 

again a great connection unifying those 

products: we can seamlessly move data 

from a OneXafe solution to the cloud and 

back. Customers are definitely looking for 

that easy 'transportability', and the 

knowledge that their data is always going 

to be available to be recalled on demand. 

DT: Does this growth in cloud business 

mean a shift in focus for you toward more 

enterprise level prospects rather than your 

traditional SME market? 

MM: Some of our sales now would 

certainly suggest that they are well 

beyond what we'd typically think of as an 

SME type of investment, so yes I think so. 

Six-digit sales by customer are not 

uncommon for us these days. Equally it's 

not uncommon for a customer to be 

talking to us about not a terabyte of data 

in our cloud but a petabyte. Those are 

the kind of conversations we're having 

increasingly now: complexity, yes. Huge 

scale, yes as well. 

Customers are also respecting the level 

of agility that we've brought into the 

business - unlike a lot of the status quo 

storage providers, our users have an 

expectation on us to be more nimble. The 

definition there of agility is not about us 

'jumping through hoops', it's more about 

data being transportable, while still 

maintaining data integrity. Customers 

value that they don't have to go through a 

validation process to ensure that what 

they wanted transferred, did get 

transferred, whether that be on-premise or 

in the cloud. 

DT: How important is your partner network 

to the shift to cloud? 

MM: We do all of our business through 

partners, and in the UK a huge 

percentage of our business is specifically 

through MSP partners, and they are 

having that conversation internally: 

whether to carry on doing things in their 

own data centres, or to come to 

StorageCraft and exploit the IP that we've 

built up. We're seeing a large transition of 

people moving to our cloud over the last 

twelve months or so, because it is so 

robust and so simple as a solution - and 

we anticipate that accelerating this year. 

It comes down to this: whether you're an 

SME or a large enterprise, we have a 

foundational belief that not all data is 

equal. Certain data, you want to make 

sure is always accessible. And there is 

other data that, frankly, you just want to 

move it off to the cloud and "I'll get it when 

I get it." 

DT: It sounds like a large element of your 

sales proposition is based on the idea that 

you can help businesses to regain control 

of a storage infrastructure that might be at 

risk of collapsing under the weight of 

exponential data growth. 

MM: We're in danger of losing sight of the 

dilemma that if data is doubling every 

year, how does my IT budget keep up with 

that? We've simply got to get smarter. 

StorageCraft can give you intelligent 

tiering of your data, then you can make 

practical decisions on it. That's why we 

love our partner model - they are the 

professional services providers, who can 

go into a customer and analyse their 

business agenda while also helping them 

organise their data pools in the best way. 

That is what we mean by intelligent data 

management: you can go in, perform a 

targetted analysis and prescribe a simple 

approach toward how the customer 

should look at their data and recovery. 

But this requires work - it's not just a 

matter of flicking a switch. Someone has 

to profile the data: what's important to 

your business? The answer will be 

different depending on who you ask, of 

course. That's why our partners have to 

have a close working relationship with the 

business. 

It takes time to get there, but people are 

doing it - why are they willing to invest 

time and money to get this right? Because 

they just can't keep up with the exponential 

rate of growth of data. I've heard so many 

times: "My IT budget in 5 years is going to 

be 90% storage…" That's just wrong. 

More info: www.storagecraft.com 



Jan/Feb 2019 

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ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: STORAGE TRENDS 

IT'S NOT RAINING DATA, IT'S POURING 

RAINER KAESE, SENIOR MANAGER BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT STORAGE PRODUCTS AT TOSHIBA 

ELECTRONICS EUROPE, EXAMINES LIKELY STORAGE TRENDS FOR 2019 

Where on earth are we going to put 

all this data? Thanks to engineers 

and programmers, disk drives are 

becoming more voluminous and combining 

them into efficient storage systems is getting 

easier. Taken together, we can see that the 

challenges we are facing today will be 

simpler to resolve. 

But with ever more data predicted to be 

generated by machines, such as 

autonomous vehicles and smart factories, 

coupled with the gigantic quantity of 

material already being stored and 

backed-up by humans, will we be able 

create enough storage for the coming 

decade's needs? Or will we have to 

contemplate a more ruthless approach 

and start to contemplate what warrants 

being stored at all? 

BALANCING HDD AGAINST SSD 

Not only does the amount of data that we 

store continue to grow unabated, its growth 

is faster than predicted. The expectation had 

been that, while the proportion of data 

stored on flash and SSD increased, there 

would be a drop in the quantity of data 

stored on hard drives and magnetic tape. 

However, it is clear today that all three 

technologies continue to grow simply 

because there is so much data to be stored. 

In 2019 it can be assumed that 90% of the 

capacity for typical cloud computing 

applications will be realised with hard disks, 

with some possibly on magnetic tape, and 

only 10% will be implemented with SSD. But, 

since Enterprise SSDs cost up to ten times as 

much as HDDs per unit capacity, the 

financial investment will be balanced with 

around 50% spent on HDDs and the same 

invested in SSDs. These storage systems 

cover the entire spectrum of applications, 

from "all-flash" appliances, to hybrid models 

with flash for cache or hot data and HDD 

for cold/warm data, through to pure hard 

disk-based storage servers. 

HELIUM HDDS OFFER 20TB 

All three major manufacturers are now 

shipping HDD models filled with helium, 

with 14TB capacities currently available. 

Over the coming years capacity can be 

14 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: STORAGE TRENDS 

"Not only does the amount of data that we store continue to 

grow unabated, its growth is faster than predicted. The 

expectation had been that, while the proportion of data stored 

on flash and SSD increased, there would be a drop in the 

quantity of data stored on hard drives and magnetic tape. 

However, it is clear today that all three technologies continue to 

grow simply because there is so much data to be stored." 

expected to increase at a rate of around 

2TB per year, meaning 20TB HDDs should 

be available at the beginning of the next 

decade. These hard drives are likely to be 

optimised for high capacity at a low price, 

but notable improvements in other 

technical parameters are not expected. 

One exception is power consumption, 

which will reduce as a result of the 

introduction of helium in HDDs. 

While air-filled 3.5" 7200rpm HDDs 

consumed a relatively constant 11W of 

power under load, regardless of capacity, 

the power consumption of helium-filled 

HDDs lie at around 6 - 7W. This is as a 

result of the lower friction of the lighter 

helium gas. Thus, the introduction of 

helium-filled hard drives will help to tackle 

the challenge of increasing energy 

consumption of data centres. Every watt of 

power saved by such drives results in less 

energy required by a data centre as well as 

less dissipated heat, resulting in more 

economical cooling. 

A knock-on effect of the reduced 

temperature is that helium-filled drives also 

have an increased reliability compared to 

air-filled drives in continuous operation. 

This results in far fewer failures and a 

longer life. Further increases in storage 

density are also in the pipeline, with 

technologies such as microwave assisted 

magnetic recording (MAMR) to be 

integrated into hard drive write heads. 

STORAGE ARCHITECTURES 

We can expect a continuing growth in 

top-load rackmount storage solutions due 

to capacity demands. While 60 bays in a 

4U format is standard today, there are 

already enclosures supporting 78 to 

around 110 bays for 3.5" hard drives. 

Instead of opting for hardware RAID, such 

quantities of drives are configured using 

software solutions. 

Modern software-defined storage systems 

will continue to dominate, along with 

scale-out designs such as Ceph clusters, 

with several storage servers being 

combined into larger units. Here data 

protection is no longer ensured through the 

redundancy of hard disks in the server. 

Instead, redundancy is implemented 

through the storage servers nodes 

available on the server network. 

DATA EXPLOSION? 

Today there is already an enormous 

amount of data being generated by 

people. When we also consider that this 

data is then backed up in data centres and 

the cloud, this only serves to multiply the 

amount of storage needed. To date, the 

quantity of machine-generated data has 

been, by comparison, rather low. 

However, this will change from 2019 

onwards as solutions and technologies 

such as autonomous driving, smart 

factories, Internet of Things (IoT) and home 

automation generate further data streams 

that need to be stored. The expected 

amount of data is so large that the current 

philosophy of data storage is under 

scrutiny. The harsh reality is that we will 

need to analyse data before it is stored to 

determine which data is really important 

and needs to be retained. 

AI, DEEP LEARNING AND 

BLOCKCHAIN 

New computing applications, such as 

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning 

and Blockchain have increased the 

demands on processing performance 

dramatically. We can expect these 

technologies to generate much more data 

and demand access to storage solutions. 

Currently it is unclear precisely what 

impact they will have on storage 

requirements, as not enough is known 

about the applications and how they will 

be implemented. We should, however, start 

to acquire more clarity as we move through 

2019 and into the next decade. What is 

clear today is that these technologies will 

even more increase in the amount of data 

to be stored. 

More info: toshiba.semicon-storage.com 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

15

PRODUCT REVIEW REVIEW 

ALTARO VM BACKUP 8.2 

Businesses worried about protecting 

their virtualised environments can 

rest easy with Altaro VM Backup 

on their side. This slick software product 

can secure both VMware and Hyper-V 

VMs and is so easy to use it can be up 

and running inside 15 minutes. 

It's super value, with prices starting at 

only £445 per host for the Standard 

edition which protects five VMs and has 

no limitations of the number of host 

sockets or CPU cores. The Unlimited 

edition starts at £545 per host and adds 

deduplication, Exchange item-level 

restore plus cluster support while the 

Unlimited Plus edition adds a cloud 

management console for MSPs, cloud 

backup to Azure, WAN-optimised 

replication and CDP (continuous data 

protection). 

Deployment is swift: we loaded VM 

Backup on a Windows Server 2016 host 

in five minutes. The console presents a 

wizard where you declare Microsoft 

Hyper-V, VMware ESXi Hypervisor and 

VMware vCenter Server hosts plus 

backup locations - and you are ready 

to go. 

For testing, we used the lab's Hyper-V 

and VMware ESXi hosts and entered 

their IP addresses and credentials, after 

which VM Backup confirmed 

connections with them. For our backup 

locations, we declared an SMB share on 

a high-capacity Qnap NAS appliance 

for local backup and another share on a 

Synology appliance for off-site copies. 

Now comes the fun part, as most 

backup operations are drag and drop. 

From the Hosts view in the main console, 

we selected VMs from both our hosts and 

simply dragged them onto our backup 

locations. 

Backups can be run manually with one 

click but if you drag VMs onto predefined 

backup schedules, these will be 

automatically applied. Schedules are easy 

to create as you choose weekly or 

monthly recurrences, the days and times 

you want them to run and whether 

backups are followed by off-site copies. 

Predefined data retention policies are 

included but you can quickly create new 

ones for on-site and off-site backup 

locations. Just decide how many versions 

should be kept and for on-site backups, 

choose whether older ones are deleted or 

archived using GFS (grandfather, father, 

son) rotation. 

Enable CDP on selected VMs and you 

can schedule backups for as often as 

every five minutes. Application consistent 

backups can be applied to VMs running 

VSS-aware apps such as Exchange and 

SQL Server where VM Backup 

communicates directly with them to ensure 

transaction consistency. 

The Unlimited edition performs data 

deduplication by default on all VM 

backups, but you can disable it on 

selected VMs if you wish. To use off-site 

storage you set a master encryption key, 

and once configured it can also be used 

to encrypt local VM backups as well. 

Recovery features are outstanding as you 

can clone a VM, restore its virtual hard 

disk (VHD) to the same host or another 

one and perform granular restores of files 

or Exchange items. We cloned one of our 

Hyper-V Windows Server 2016 VM 

backups and the job automatically 

created a new VM for us on our host 

ready to be powered up. 

Businesses should test their data 

protection solution to ensure it'll work 

when they need it most and VM Backup's 

sandbox feature does just that. It verifies 

the integrity of selected backups but, 

more importantly, performs full test 

restores by cloning a VM backup to the 

host to ensure it'll boot - and all without 

impacting on the live source VM. 

Product: VM Backup 8.2 

Supplier: Altaro Software 

Web site: www.altaro.com 

Tel: +44 (0) 203 397 6280 

Sales: sales@altaro.com 

Price: Starts from £445 ex VAT 

VERDICT: With its intuitive console and slick drag and drop operations, Altaro VM Backup takes the pain out of protecting Hyper-V 

and VMware environments. It's remarkably easy to deploy, offers a wealth of valuable features and simply won't be beaten for value. 

16 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: EURONEXT STUDY: EURONEXT 

TRADING UP 

OVER THE PAST 2 YEARS TALEND HAS SUCCESSFULLY WORKED ON THE MIGRATION OF TRADING 

EXCHANGE EURONEXT'S DATABASE - ONE OF THE LARGEST IN EUROPE - TO THE CLOUD, HELPING 

THE COMPANY TO POSITION ITSELF FOR A FUTURE AS A 'DATA TRADER' 

Following its split from the New York 

Stock Exchange in 2014, Euronext 

became the first pan-European 

exchange in the eurozone, fusing together 

the stock markets of Amsterdam, Brussels, 

Dublin, Lisbon, and Paris. Euronext 

comprises close to 1,300 issuers, reporting 

a total market capitalisation of 3,700 billion 

euros at the end of March 2018. 

In 2016, Euronext began the typical 

process of migrating its data to the cloud. 

Except that this migration had nothing 

typical about it at all. First, the Euronext 

database contained 100 TB of data - one of 

the biggest in Europe. Then there was the 

fact that this was not just a simple transfer of 

a database to a hosted platform. The idea 

was to create a 'governed data lake' with 

self-service access for business units and 

clients in an effort to monetise new services 

and generate additional revenues. 

MIGRATING TO A GOVERNED 

CLOUD 

"We use Optiq, a trading platform with 

systems that work practically in 

nanoseconds," explains Abderrahmane 

Belarfaoui, Chief Data Officer (CDO) at 

Euronext. The huge Euronext database is the 

active memory of transactions handled 

directly by the stock exchange operator (1.5 

billion messages per day). "The database is 

compressed (at a rate of 400%) but some 

information was not being archived for lack 

of space," says Belarfaoui about the 

problems of the old system. 

Before 2016, Euronext stored its data on 

site, on hardware from one of the big 

names in the industry. But Euronext's storage 

needs continued to grow, especially 

following several acquisitions, such as the 

Dublin Stock Exchange and Fast Match in 

the US. 

"Our IT infrastructure had reached the end 

of its lifecycle in our European operations, 

where regulators were expecting that 

Euronext store more and more data," 

Belarfaoui recalls. "Moreover, sometimes we 

had to wait six to twelve hours after market 

close on days with important events, such as 

the UK Brexit vote, before we could send the 

data to business units and clients." 

The situation prompted Euronext to look at 

moving to a hybrid cloud model. "We still 

keep trading platform information on an onsite 

server because lag times are not yet 

available on the cloud," explains Belarfaoui. 

"We also use AWS Managed Services in 

serverless mode together with Amazon S3 to 

have access to a data warehouse with 

unlimited storage capacity. For analysis, we 

use Amazon Redshift. And taking advantage 

of the cloud's great scalability, we can run 

the whole system while anticipating events 

18 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: EURONEXT 

"We can set up an environment for a data scientist in less than one day, compared to 

the 40 days it used to take, and we have moved from D+1 analytics to real-time 

analytics. This is fundamental to understanding markets, clients, competitors, and how 

they interact." 

that cause high volumes on the markets." 

Still, the transition to a Platform as a Service 

(PaaS) does require one key condition: 

remaining independent of the cloud provider. 

"The core of the data lake is managed by 

Talend. It was very important for us to keep 

this 'independence' compared to the layers 

below Talend. So, if tomorrow Euronext wants 

to change clouds, they can," says the CDO, 

happy about the greater flexibility. Euronext 

chose Talend Big Data to absorb real-time 

data in the data lake, including internal data 

from its own trading platform; and external 

data, such as from Reuters and Bloomberg. 

In an ultra-regulated world, Talend has also 

proven to be highly adept at meeting the 

challenges of data lake governance and 

regulatory compliance. Being able to safely 

open data involves knowing it inside out, 

keeping track of changes and the history of 

data feeds, and knowing how to classify them 

in a granular structure. 

This governance strategy is applied in very 

specific tools, such as the Talend Data 

Catalog. A dictionary is created together with 

each technical project for each individual 

market. These dictionaries are used to find the 

history of end-to-end data, from the sources 

to the reporting. 

"Now I can see when S3 is the data source, I 

can add value to the data, combine it with 

other data, and convert it into other data in 

Redshift," says Belarfaoui, who is very satisfied 

with the new process. "I can also add tags. 

Typically, we add the storage duration. For 

example, whether data has to be kept for ten 

years, or five years (per MIFID II), or if it 

should be archived." 

At the same time, data lineage with Talend 

drastically reduces impact analysis costs. "One 

simple example comes to mind: we plan to 

change the value of an index on the British 

stock market. Once we integrate it into our 

systems, it propagates itself pretty much 

everywhere. Currently we have to figure 200 

person-days just to find the index in our 

different systems. But with the dictionary, we are 

able to run this data lineage with just one click." 

MONETIZING STOCK MARKET DATA 

Two years after its launch, the governed lake 

project with Talend and AWS is a success. 

"The initial returns are more than positive," 

says Belarfaoui. "On the technical side, we 

can manage ten times more iso-budget data." 

Beyond the improved architecture, the 

migration is also positioning Euronext to 

become a "data trader." The stock market 

operator wanted to be able to refine and add 

to its wealth of data in order to monetize it. In 

fact, the sale of data already brings in 20% of 

Euronext's revenues. 

"Traders actually sell, buy, and make their 

investment decisions in milliseconds. They 

have a huge appetite for aggregated data in 

real time. Who sells which stock, to whom, at 

what price and when. We are in the best 

position to track performance of the CAC 40 

or other indexes and sell that information to 

investors through our Datashop platform," 

says Belarfaoui. 

In addition to clients, this project also 

involves giving data scientists and business 

units self-service access to this data, which 

they can analyse in data sandboxes for tasks 

such as market monitoring. Belarfaoui 

explains: "We can set up an environment for a 

data scientist in less than one day, compared 

to the 40 days it used to take, and we have 

moved from D+1 analytics to real-time 

analytics. This is fundamental to 

understanding markets, clients, competitors, 

and how they interact." 

This is a real turning point for Euronext. "In 

2016, we identified the need, but we didn't 

have the capacity to do it. At the time, we 

could only relay the volumes of market activity 

to market regulators (Mifid II). Today, we can 

dig deeper. Under the General Data Protection 

Regulation (GDPR), I have to know where 

personal data is stored. If I receive requests for 

modification or deletion, I can find the data, 

thanks to the dictionary," elaborates Belarfaoui. 

"Similarly, a user who searches a transaction 

can instantly see if it is confidential. Once data 

is identified as being critical, the data steward 

can deny user access." 

Euronext is just at the beginning of its digital 

transformation. A study is currently underway 

on the deployment of Talend's Master Data 

Management (MDM) solution. "We are 

working on 'golden sources' within all of our 

systems (CRM, trading, billing, finance, 

various departments, subsidiaries, etc.). The 

goal is to make all Euronext data even cleaner 

and of higher quality, such as by being sure 

that a client is consistently represented across 

all systems. Such standards will make our 

data even more usable," predicts Belarfaoui. 

More info: www.talend.com 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

19

RESEARCH: 

RESEARCH: DISASTER RECOVERY 

ENTERPRISES 'GRAPPLING WITH DATA LOSS' 

NEW RESEARCH FROM UNITRENDS SUGGESTS THAT ALTHOUGH DR TESTING IS GROWING IN 

POPULARITY, THERE IS STILL MUCH TO BE DONE 

Unitrends has shared survey 

findings from its fourth annual 

Cloud and Disaster Recovery 

Survey. The survey sheds light on the 

current state of data protection and 

disaster recovery (DR), as well as IT 

attitudes towards cloud usage and 

adoption. Incorporating input from over 

800 surveyed IT professionals across the 

world, the report also offers advice for 

implementing cloud into disaster 

recovery practices. 

need to protect more than 100 TB of 

data, more than double the figure 

compared to 2016. However, 30 percent 

of respondents report losing at least 

some of their data - a figure that has 

remained consistent since 2016. Data 

loss clearly continues to be a problem for 

the enterprise. 

The survey results show that many 

organisations are not following baseline 

best practices for data protection and 

DR. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 

leaders in DR are increasingly using the 

cloud to play a critical role in business 

continuity. Key survey findings include: 

Data growth continues to be 

exponential, however data loss continues 

at an unacceptably high rate. Twenty 

seven percent of respondents say they 

More organisations conduct regular DR 

testing and have a secondary recovery 

site. Compared to 2016, 46 percent 

more companies today say they conduct 

20 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

RESEARCH: 

RESEARCH: DISASTER RECOVERY 

DR testing every month. A full 75 

percent of IT professionals conduct DR 

testing at least annually (64 percent in 

2016). Additionally, the survey shows a 

16 percent drop in the number of 

organisations who lack a secondary 

recovery site to store data copies or host 

recovery operations, compared to 2016. 

However, there is a 24 percent increase 

in companies that use their own site or a 

co-location facility as their secondary 

DR site. 

Cloud continues to see acceptance, as 

its role in backup and data protection 

grows. The majority of survey 

respondents trust the cloud enough to 

use it for data protection and business 

continuity. Twenty two percent more 

companies use the cloud for backup and 

disaster recovery compared to 2016 - 

considerable growth in just two years' 

time. Indeed, cloud is replacing legacy 

media options to get backup data offsite, 

as more report storing backups in the 

cloud (36 percent) than using physical 

media (disk to tape, removable, tape) 

combined (31 percent). 

Cloud acceptance grows with resistance 

now settling around cost - not technical 

concerns. Among respondents who do 

not currently use the cloud, more say 

they plan to do so much sooner than 

compared to 2016 (when 55 percent 

said they had no plans). Cost is the most 

frequently cited reason today for nonadoption, 

compared to functional 

concerns in previous years. 

However mid-sized companies lag in 

cloud adoption, and cloud usage varies 

greatly by industry. Cloud adoption rates 

are not equal across companies of 

different sizes, as findings show that midsized 

corporate cloud adoption is 12 to 

18 percent lower compared to smaller 

and larger organisations, respectively. 

Not surprisingly, technology companies 

lead cloud adoption with 68 percent of 

respondents saying they use the cloud for 

business continuity and disaster recovery 

(BCDR) purposes. 

"Findings from this year's Unitrends 

Cloud and Disaster Recovery Survey 

unearthed some interesting trends, as we 

were able to analyse survey data across 

three consecutive years," comments Joe 

Noonan, vice president of product 

management and marketing, Unitrends. 

"Remarkably, 30 percent of organisations 

say they still experience data loss - a 

figure that has surprisingly remained 

consistent since 2016. It's clear from this 

data that there's still much work to be 

done to help organisations successfully 

implement and leverage backup and 

disaster recovery solutions and best 

practices. As a leader in the BCDR space, 

it's our responsibility to educate and 

empower enterprises with the knowledge 

and technologies they need to protect 

and recover their data." 

A full copy of the survey results is 

available from the website below. 

More info: 

www.unitrends.com/cloud_surveyresults_a 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

21

PRODUCT REVIEW REVIEW 

STORAGECRAFT ONEXAFE 4417 CONVERGED STORAGE 

StorageCraft's OneXafe appliances target 

mid-sized businesses that want to get 

their data backup and storage houses in 

order. They go way beyond the capabilities of 

typical legacy backup appliances by offering 

a converged scale-out storage and data 

protection platform for both physical and 

virtual environments. 

In this hands-on review, we look at the 

OneXafe 4417, a classy 2U appliance built 

around a top-quality Dell PowerEdge R740xd 

server platform. Powered by Xeon Scalable 

CPUs, it supports up to 17 internal LFF hard 

disks and StorageCraft allows you to bring 

your own drives or have it delivered 

preconfigured. 

The OneXafe appliances present their 

storage as SMB or NFS shares and a key 

feature is StorageCraft's patented distributed 

object-based file system, which delivers 

integral encryption, deduplication and 

compression. Vastly superior to classic RAID 

arrays, this technology allows up to seven 

OneXafe appliances to be placed in a ring, or 

cluster, where data blocks are automatically 

distributed across all members and drives for 

faster rebuilds and on-demand storage 

expansion. 

Management and monitoring is cloud-based 

and we had no problems registering our 

appliance with the StorageCraft OneSystem 

web portal. This presents an intuitive console 

where we could enable cluster encryption, 

create users and groups and provision secure 

access to SMB and NFS shares. 

This is a fairly simple use case for the 

OneXafe which really comes into its own 

when partnered with the Private OneSystem 

solution. Hosted on-site as a VMware VM, 

Private OneSystem joins seamlessly with 

StorageCraft's ShadowXafe backup software 

to deliver converged data protection and full 

storage management. 

The Private OneSystem console 

amalgamates everything you need for your 

data protection strategies into a single pane 

of glass. Its dashboard opens with an 

overview of system and host protection status 

along with data usage, throughput and rates 

of change. 

Storage locations are easily defined and you 

can declare OneXafe repositories along with 

SMB and NFS shares on third-party devices 

and iSCSI targets. A smart feature of 

ShadowXafe is that it can vastly improve 

backup speeds by communicating directly 

with the OneXafe repository using the gRPC 

(Google RPC) protocol and sending data to 

its object-based storage. 

ShadowXafe communicates with the VMware 

hypervisor for host-based VM backups with 

Hyper-V support coming soon. For physical 

system protection, you need to install a smallfootprint 

agent on each one. 

Policies determine backup job frequency 

plus data retention periods and control 

replication to secondary storage locations 

such as a remote OneXafe repository or the 

StorageCraft cloud. Context-based policy 

management allows backup requirements to 

be precisely matched to SLAs, RTOs and 

RPOs and once a policy is assigned to a 

virtualisation host, it will automatically protect 

new VMs as they created. 

System recovery couldn't be any easier as 

you select a machine or VM from the 

console, view and choose a recovery point 

and tell it to go ahead. Restoration options 

abound as, along with direct VM recovery, 

you can restore a physical machine as a VM 

and visa-versa. 

Bare-metal recovery of physical systems 

requires a recovery ISO agent to be created 

on bootable media. This connects with 

OneSystem, presents a list of recovery points 

and performs a full system restore. 

The VirtualBoot feature offers instant 

recovery in milliseconds, allowing 

StorageCraft to claim industry-leading RTOs 

and RPOs. It's extremely easy to use as it 

simply creates a new VM directly from the 

backup data in the OneXafe repository. 

Product: OneXafe 4417 Converged Storage 

Supplier: StorageCraft 

Web site: www.storagecraft.com 

Tel: +44 203 481 1240 

Price: Storage only from £19,913, 

Converged from £41,804 (all ex VAT) 

VERDICT: We found the appliance simple to manage and clearly capable of bringing order to data protection chaos. Businesses 

that can't afford any data loss downtime will find the StorageCraft OneXafe is an affordable converged protection solution offering 

lightning-fast recovery and easy scalability. 

22 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

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ortial.com

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: VDI FOCUS: VDI 

ELIMINATING THE VDI PRICE/PERFORMANCE 

BOTTLENECK 

DEPLOYING A VDI SOLUTION CAN BE DEMANDING AND EXPENSIVE, WITH STORAGE IN 

PARTICULAR A MAJOR POTENTIAL HURDLE, ARGUE JUAN MULFORD AND STEFAN FERRARI OF 

ACCELSTOR. INDUSTRY-VALIDATED, COST-EFFECTIVE, ALL-FLASH STORAGE HOWEVER, CAN ENABLE 

BUSINESSES ACROSS ALL VERTICALS TO ADOPT VDI 

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) allows 

IT organisations to simplify and automate 

the management of thousands of users, 

securely delivering desktop-as-a-service from a 

central, secure location. Adoption of VDI is 

highest in industries where there are both high 

levels of regulation and a distributed workforce 

or many remote offices (healthcare, banking, 

education, retail etc.). 

When effectively deployed, VDI delivers high 

returns on investment; reducing operating costs 

and closing security gaps through infrastructure 

consolidation, while also adding flexibility to the 

workforce which is now empowered to work 

from anywhere. 

THE VDI TRAP 

Because VDI touches so many users, it directly 

affects the productivity and bottom line of the 

organisation deploying it. This high level of 

visibility puts immense pressure on IT to deliver 

performance to ensure a positive user 

experience, and this added pressure is the 

single biggest roadblock for VDI adoption. 

Storage is widely regarded as the biggest 

hurdle to overcome from both a cost and 

performance perspective. 

In order to deliver a user experience on-par 

with users having their own desktop, the VDI 

infrastructure stack must service bursts of very 

high read/write I/O while maintaining ultra-low 

latency for all users at once. Failure to do so 

leads to the death blow of many VDI projects - 

users asking for their desktops back. 

According to IDC, most failed VDI 

deployments are blamed on storage, as 

bursts of high I/O request impact user latency 

across the VDI platform. It is unsurprising 

then that storage is often the most expensive 

and carefully selected hardware in successful 

VDI deployments. 

Traditional spindle (spinning disk) based and 

even hybrid (spindle mixed with flash) storage 

have failed to meet the demands of VDI 

because these systems depend on a read/write 

cache to service low-latency I/O requests - 

however once the cache is overwhelmed, 

latency increases, the users complain, and the 

project dies. 

THE ACCELSTOR DIFFERENCE 

The storage demands of VDI are so high that 

even all-flash storage systems that are 

dependent on NVMe or NVRAM caching for 

low-latency I/O can fail to deliver a user 

experience that leads to a successful VDI 

implementation. 

With AccelStor there is no cache. Only 

metadata is temporarily stored in global 

memory, so all write blocks are direct to disk - 

meaning all reads come directly from disk. 

This cache-less design means all I/O goes 

straight to/from the SSD media at near-cache 

speeds, significantly increasing performance, 

lowering latency, and providing better data 

resiliency than traditional cache-based systems. 

FLASH-OPTIMISED 

RAID was designed in the late 1980s to 

provide resiliency and increase performance for 

spinning HDD based storage systems. It was 

widely successful at the time, so successful in 

fact that it is now still the foundation used by 

many so-called "state-of-the-art" all-flash 

storage systems. These 'RAID optimised for 

24 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: VDI 

flash' based systems do two things that are 

actually far from optimised for flash: 

Write data to the SSDs randomly 

Write data more than once 

The AccelStor approach is very different. Born 

from an in-depth research project into the 

adverse effects of RAID on SSD media, 

AccelStor took a step back and uncovered a 

better way to use SSDs effectively. 

At the heart of every AccelStor system is a 

cache-less, RAID-less technology called 

FlexiRemap. The culmination of 10 years of 

research, 2 PhDs, and over 45 patents and 

counting; FlexiRemap harnesses the true power 

of NAND memory with gamechanging write 

I/O performance. With major funding from 

tech giants like Toshiba Memory and wide 

recognition like best-in-show at FMS 2016, this 

technology really is revolutionary. 

WHAT IS FLEXIREMAP? 

FlexiRemap got its name because it remaps 

incoming write I/Os into a single sequential 

write across every SSD in the system. To do 

this, it breaks the data down into 4K pages, 

which is, mathematically speaking, what fits 

best in most SSDs. 

Because the writes are sequential and 

writing in a way that is designed for NAND 

memory, they now occur much faster than in 

a RAID-based system (700,000 sustained 

write IOPS in a single appliance); there is no 

need to stage data to cache first, enabling a 

cacheless design. 

Additionally, because the writes are spread 

across every SSD in the system, read I/O gets 

serviced faster as well (1.1M 4K mixed 

read/write IOPS). 

Many RAID based appliances will use 

expensive SAS SSDs to support a shared 

storage architecture with dual controllers, 

however RAID is unable to utilise the potential 

of SAS SSDs and will on average only achieve 

10% of the potential IOPS from each SSD. 

FlexiRemap combined with a 'shared nothing' 

cluster architecture is able to out-perform 

these systems using SATA SSDs utilising 90% 

of their potential. This means a lower TCO 

and higher ROI. Essentially, FlexiRemap 

means you get what you pay for. 

Finally, unlike spinning hard drives, SSDs fail 

at a predictable rate based on the number of 

writes. So, unlike RAID-based systems, 

FlexiRemap technology writes data once and 

only once, increasing the longevity of each SSD 

by over 300%, keeping operating and support 

costs low as well. 

FlexiRemap technology therefore unlocks the 

true potential of flash, allowing AccelStor 

customers to do more with less across all types 

of high I/O, low-latency applications like VDI. 

A SIMPLE SOLUTION 

AccelStor NeoSapphire AFAs are preconfigured 

and simple to manage. The web-based GUI 

allows users to create volumes easily and 

present them to hosts. There is no cache to 

manage, the system just works. 

The NeoSapphire provides full integration as 

well with VMware environments, with support 

for VAAI block, SRM, Horizon View, and the 

VMware vSphere plugin integration tools 

people have come to expect are all standard. 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

25

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: VDI FOCUS: VDI 

BETTER ROI FOR STORAGE 

AccelStor runs a "zero licence" operation, 

meaning that all features such as Clone, 

Snapshot, Replication, Deduplication and more 

are included out of the box, free of charge. As 

well as these features, AccelStor offers helpdesk 

support for the lifetime of the system, at no 

additional cost, minimising TCO and ensuring 

ease of budgetary administration. 

performance capabilities of VDI's heaviest and 

most resource-intensive workloads were tested. 

The results showed that no matter the 

workload, the user experience, or desktop 

application response-time remained 

unaffected, with average latencies well below 

the coveted 0.6 ms across the board (see 

chart below). 

The AccelStor NeoSapphire AFAs come 

equipped with FlexiDedupe, a deduplication 

algorithm that provides up to 10:1 data 

reduction with a minimal impact to 

performance in VDI environments. With the use 

of linked clones and FlexiDedupe, storage 

capacity efficiency has been shown to be as 

high as 98% (see chart). 

At full desktop density on a NeoSapphire 

AFA, AccelStor's FlexiRemap technology 

combined with thin provisioning and 

deduplication, reduce the storage cost as low 

as US$30 per power-desktop across the entire 

NeoSapphire line. 

TESTED AND VALIDATED 

The NeoSapphire product range has been 

tested and validated with the industry leading 

tool from Login VSI, the industry standard loadtesting 

tool for performance and scalability of 

VDI environments. 

In a test using 500 linked-clones on VMware 

vSphere and Horizon View, the storage 

CONCLUSION 

When storage performance really matters, and 

all-flash storage is a consideration for VDI, a 

system built on FlexiRemap technology will 

deliver the best performance for the price, bar 

none. With the ability to use enterprise SATA 

SSDs that last 3X longer and provide 

consistently low latency, these are systems 

tuned and tested to serve the needs of VDI. 

Please visit the website below for a free 

consultation and try a no obligation POC 

system to see how AccelStor's FlexiRemap 

powered NeoSapphire products can eliminate 

your VDI challenges today. 

More info: www.accelstor.com 

^ 

26 STORAGE Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: DAIKIN 

A BREATH OF FRESH AIR 

AIR CONDITIONING SPECIALIST DAIKIN INDUSTRIES HAS ADOPTED A NEW STORAGE APPROACH FOR 

ITS MISSION CRITICAL BUSINESS APPLICATIONS 

as four SSDs per controller can be used, 

including SATA disks. In addition to faster read 

speeds, SSD cache reduces performance 

impact compared to spin-drive caches with 

rapid warm up and less drive wear. 

Configuring and managing SSD Cache 

pooling is easy via the intuitive SANWatch UI. 

Automated storage tiering optimises storage 

performance and increases ROI by leveraging 

high speed SSD for expedited access to hot 

data while using affordable drives such as NL- 

SAS for archiving purposes. To protect SSDs 

and the vital data they store, EonStor DS 

3000 systems offer SSD wear level indication 

that provides users with accurate real time 

SSD health info. 

Daikin Industries Ltd., a global leading 

air conditioning manufacturer with 

headquarters in Osaka, Japan, has 

adopted the Infortrend EonStor DS storage 

family in order to implement the entire suite of 

mission-critical business applications such as 

ERP, database, VDI, virtualisation, and backup 

in their Vietnamese operation. 

Daikin is the developer of numerous 

refrigerant volume systems and an innovator 

in split system air conditioners. It has 

operations in Japan, China, Australia, India, 

countries in Southeast Asia such as the 

Philippines and Vietnam, Europe, North 

America, and South America. 

Due to continuous business expansion, 

Daikin's Vietnam operations started to 

experience both impacted performance of 

their business applications and insufficient 

capacity in their storage system. After a 

rigorous selection process, Daikin Vietnam 

decided to replace its previous system with 

multiple high-performance EonStor DS 3024 

units. These storage devices feature highspeed 

Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces and 

Hybrid Drive technology to combine 

SSD/HDD, providing better performance and 

high capacity utilisation. 

The new setup has three subsystems. The first 

subsystem powers up Microsoft Hyper-V 

technology for server and desktop 

virtualisation, with more than 200 VMs (virtual 

machines). The second subsystem runs the 

ERP database system that uses Microsoft 

Dynamic AX 2012. The third subsystem 

supports backup of the company's missioncritical 

business application data. 

EonStor DS 3000 systems are designed for 

all-SSD storage and support large high speed 

SSD cache pools. SSD Cache speeds up read 

performance for priority data, and boosts 

cache pool capacities up to 6.4TB. As many 

"EonStor DS 3024 offers us a great pile 

of network storage at a very affordable 

price. It also supports a choice selection of 

high-performance data ports," said Mr. 

Nguyen Nhat Linh, system administrator at 

Daikin Vietnam. 

All EonStor DS 3000 systems are excellent 

platforms for database and VDI applications 

thanks to ample computing power, and their 

massive bandwidth serves to enhance media 

editing and surveying jobs, freeing users from 

bottlenecks. When looking to expand storage, 

up to an extra 444 drives can be connected 

easily using JB 3000 enclosures. 

"EonStor DS storage family is the industry 

price-performance leader with top rankings 

in both SPC-1 and SPC-2. It delivers 

superior IOPs, great capacity expansion, and 

reliable performance to power missioncritical 

business applications," commented 

Thomas Kao, Senior Director of Product 

Planning at Infortrend. 

More info: www.infortrend.com 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

27

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: SURVEILLANCE DATA 

COURT ON CAMERA 

SAFEGUARD YOUR SURVEILLANCE DATA OR POTENTIALLY FALL 

FOUL OF THE LAW, WARNS GARY WATSON, CTO OF 

STORCENTRIC AND FOUNDER OF NEXSAN 

Video surveillance has advanced 

rapidly since CCTV was invented in 

1942. In particular, the move to 

digital technology means its quality is 

now good enough to be routinely used by 

law enforcement agencies across the 

world, whether it's in court as evidence or 

to monitor and track individuals. 

Despite concerns about privacy, CCTV 

plays a fundamental role in daily life. In 

the UK alone, there are between 4 million 

and 5.9 million CCTV surveillance 

cameras protecting the public, their 

"Beyond the greater storage capacity that video 

surveillance footage demands, police and other law 

enforcement agencies are equally challenged by the 

manner in which electronic evidence must be stored. If 

the data collected is to be used to support legal cases, it 

is essential that it follows the legal, compliance and 

regulatory legislation - otherwise critical evidence could 

be deemed inadmissible." 

property and helping to prevent crime 

and bring criminals to justice. Whether it's 

recording the most serious crimes and 

terrorist incidents as they happen or the 

many examples of CCTV being used to 

help find missing people, it has become 

part of the fabric of modern society. 

However, this ongoing growth in the use 

of video surveillance brings with it new 

challenges for data storage, and as the 

role of CCTV grows ever more important, 

it is critical that it is managed and 

protected in the correct way. 

In particular, it's vital to consider data 

storage and security, ensuring it abides by 

the General Data Protection Regulation 

(GDPR) and The Regulation of 

Investigatory Power Act. For digital 

evidence, it's important to be able to offer 

seamless scalability to accommodate 

rapid growth, along with a 

comprehensive suite of data security 

features that meet strict requirements for 

file integrity, privacy, chain of custody, 

and compliance. 

CAPACITY PLANNING 

In terms of capacity, video and digital 

images are exceptionally heavy users of 

28 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: SURVEILLANCE DATA 

deleted or altered in any way. A chain of 

custody involves the chronological 

documentation of the custody, analysis, 

and configuration of physical or electronic 

evidence, to help prove in court that any 

evidence being used is correct and valid. 

storage space and the guidelines around 

managing evidentiary data are key to it 

being recognised as a valid source by the 

criminal justice system. Not only are more 

videos being created due to the everincreasing 

number of surveillance 

cameras, but also the resolution and 

specifications are constantly increasing in 

quality and therefore creating larger files. 

Many organisations require higherresolution 

video to ensure compliance 

with insurance providers, maximise loss 

recovery and strengthen criminal cases in 

court, for example. It is therefore essential 

that data is stored in a solution that is 

scalable and cost-effective, allowing 

customers to add capacity as and when 

needed, as running out of storage space 

is not an option. 

RETENTION RULES 

In addition to the daunting amount of 

storage that evidentiary videos and 

images consume, police departments and 

other law enforcement agencies must also 

address the retention requirements that 

govern how long video surveillance and 

images must be kept. 

Storage capacity needs (and costs) 

obviously increase the longer surveillance 

videos are retained; ideally, video should 

be stored no longer than required by law. 

Storage solutions that incorporate policybased 

rules for data retention can help 

police departments to, for example, 

significantly boost their storage efficiency 

by automatically keeping all surveillance 

videos only for their legally mandated 

retention period. 

Beyond the greater storage capacity that 

video surveillance footage demands, 

police and other law enforcement 

agencies are equally challenged by the 

manner in which electronic evidence must 

be stored. If the data collected is to be 

used to support legal cases, it is essential 

that it follows the legal, compliance and 

regulatory legislation - otherwise critical 

evidence could be deemed inadmissible. 

SECURITY AND CHAIN OF 

CUSTODY 

Security and chain of custody are perhaps 

two of the most important aspects to 

consider when it comes to ensuring digital 

video data is permissible in court. A 

digital chain of custody, including an 

audit trail, proves that any digital 

evidence is correct and has not been 

In the UK, digital evidence comes under 

the same laws as any other form of 

evidence, but new guidelines were 

published in 2012 in the ACPO Good 

Practice Guide for Digital Evidence to 

advise examiners on the authentication 

and integrity of evidence. Four principles 

were created to help decide whether 

digital evidence can be used in court, 

including: 

No action should change data that is 

relied on in court 

Anyone accessing the original data 

should be competent and provide 

evidence of the relevance of this 

An audit trail should be preserved and 

able to be checked by a third party 

The person in charge of the 

investigation must ensure the law and 

these principles are upheld 

Part of this process therefore relies on 

the security of the surveillance data - as 

no actions should cause the data to be 

changed, it is vital that it is stored 

securely enough to prevent anyone 

without authority having access to it at 

any point, thereby guaranteeing the 

integrity of the files. With adequate 

security measures in place within the 

storage solution, CCTV data is far more 

likely to be accepted in a court of law as 

evidence. 

By implementing high quality storage 

solutions, the owner of the surveillance 

data - whether that's local government or 

a business with its own CCTV - can be 

sure that it can be utilised as evidence to 

help win the case in question. And when it 

comes to catching criminals, it's better to 

be safe than sorry. 

More info: www.nexsan.com 


@STMagAndAwards Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

29

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: HDD FOCUS: 

HAMR: UNLOCKING THE NEXT STAGE OF 

DATA GROWTH 

JASON FEIST, MANAGING TECHNOLOGIST AT SEAGATE TECHNOLOGY, DESCRIBES HOW A LASER 

NO BIGGER THAN A GRAIN OF SALT IS JUST ONE CRUCIAL ELEMENT OF THE NEXT GENERATION 

OF HARD DRIVE TECHNOLOGIES 

One thing is for sure: the 

conventional way we store data 

is reaching its limit. For the past 

few decades we've grown accustomed to 

hard drive capacity increasing as surely as 

the passing of the seasons. But this will 

soon change. 

The world is producing more and more 

data. With the development of 

technologies like machine learning, 5G 

and AI this statement might not come as a 

surprise, but the sheer scale of the 

challenge ahead is worth remembering. By 

2025 the 'global datasphere' is expected to 

reach an astounding 175ZB, according to 

research from IDC sponsored by Seagate. 

Nearly half (49%) of that data will reside in 

the public cloud, further highlighting the 

urgent need for new technology to help 

deal with this massive increase in the 

production and storage of data at scale. 

Seagate is a company with a 40-year 

heritage in data storage and management. 

We understand these global industry 

trends, which is why we have invested our 

considerable research & development 

resources behind a technology called heatassisted 

magnetic recording, or HAMR for 

short. With HAMR, hard drive capacities of 

20TB and more will become commercially 

available from 2020, and the technology 

has the potential to make capacities of 

100TB or more a possibility within a few 

decades. The first HAMR drives are already 

out with Seagate customers for final testing 

and have been receiving excellent 

feedback. Here's the story of why we need 

a rethink of how we store data, and how 

we're charting a way forward with HAMR 

technology. 

A PROBLEM OF GRAINS 

While easily integrated and totally 

transparent to the end-user, HAMR is a 

highly complex technology sorely needed 

in the data storage industry in order to 

maximise capacity offerings. In order to 

appreciate why HAMR is so important, we 

first need to understand the current state 

of data storage technology and why we 

need innovative technologies in order to 

be sustainable. The vast majority of hard 

drives in the world today use technology 

called conventional magnetic recording 

(CMR). These hard drives are made up of 

disk-shaped platters, covered in a thin 

film of recording medium. This recording 

medium is made up of tightly-packed 

grains, which are polarized by magnetic 

fields produced by a write head in such a 

way that they can later be read as either 

'0' or '1'. 

Around a dozen of these grains make up 

a single bit of data, and the key to 

boosting the capacity of our hard drives 

has been developing new ways to make the 

grains smaller and pack as many as 

possible in a given space. This strategy has 

served the industry well for a number of 

years, but we're reaching the end of its 

usefulness. At a certain point, the grains on 

a storage medium are so small that they 

become unstable, potentially flipping 

between 0 and 1 when they're not 

supposed to. This can lead to data 

30 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: HDD 

"The theory behind HAMR technology is deceptively simple. In order to record 

data to the medium, it must first be heated up, to over 400°C. A tiny portion of 

the recording medium is brought to this temperature for a very short time - 

around one nanosecond - which allows the data to be recorded reliably and then 

'frozen' in place once the temperature has decreased." 

corruption and is clearly not acceptable; 

we need another solution if we are going 

to maintain a steady increase in hard drive 

capacity and keep up with the rapid 

growth in data storage needs projected 

over the coming years. 

INTRODUCING HAMR 

HAMR is a technology developed by 

Seagate that enables a significant increase 

in the amount of data that can be stored 

in a disk. Put simply, HAMR allows us to 

continue to shrink the size of the grains 

which makes it possible to increase areal 

density more than in previous types of 

hard drive. 

At the outset we knew that in order to 

reduce the grain size , we would need to 

experiment with the materials used to 

create the recording media. We tested a 

few different options, primarily highanisotropy 

(or "hard") magnetic materials 

such as iron-platinum alloys (FePt). The 

challenge with these materials is that, while 

they allow more bits to be recorded within 

a smaller space, these bits cannot be 

flipped under the normal temperatures that 

conventional hard disks operate at. In 

order to write data to drives with FePt 

recording media, the media needs to be 

hotter at the time of recording. 

PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE 

The theory behind HAMR technology is 

deceptively simple. In order to record 

data to the medium, it must first be 

heated up, to over 400°C. A tiny portion 

of the recording medium is brought to this 

temperature for a very short time - around 

one nanosecond - which allows the data 

to be recorded reliably and then 'frozen' in 

place once the temperature has 

decreased. 

Seagate has tested approximately 40,000 

HAMR drives so far, and the technology 

will be commercially ready very soon. 

Crucially, the new technology in HAMR 

drives has no detrimental impact on 

overall temperature of the hard drive or 

wider system, or the overall durability of 

the drive. For example, one of our drives 

has clocked up more than 4000 TB and is 

still going strong after an incredible 16 

months of continuous HAMR writing. 

Reducing the grain size in our hard drives 

in this way required us to completely 

rethink how we build our products. The 

structure of existing hard drives using 

conventional perpendicular magnetic 

recording heads designed to operate at 

room temperature would simply not work. 

HAMR is an amazing combination of 

technologies incubated by Seagate. We 

have designed an entirely new recording 

head which incorporates a tiny laser, no 

bigger than a grain of salt, which is 

capable of heating the recording media to 

the right temperature. We needed to 

introduce a host of other new components 

to HAMR drives to get them operating 

effectively, such as optical waveguides and 

near-field transducers, as well as tackling 

the thousands of small issues that 

engineers encounter whenever developing 

a new product. 

THE FUTURE OF STORAGE 

Seagate is committed to making the most 

out of emerging technologies and their 

potential for improving customers' ability to 

store and use their data effectively, and 

HAMR technology is just the latest example 

of this. Back in 2014 we introduced 

shingled magnetic recording, which 

increased areal density by 10%, and the 

following year we developed heliumsealed 

drive technology, enabling drives to 

run with more disks while using less power. 

With today's HAMR technology we're 

currently on track to deliver five terabits 

per square inch, an unimaginable 

milestone just a few years ago. Keeping up 

with the constantly growing amount of 

data generated by the public and by 

businesses around the world is a challenge 

we work to solve every day. 

HAMR is going to deliver tangible storage 

improvements years into the future. 

According to our estimates, HAMR 

technology will enable us to achieve a 

30% compound annual growth rate 

(CAGR) in disk drive capacity over the next 

10 years. HAMR drives are just the 

beginning: the world's storage needs are 

increasing rapidly, and HAMR is the latest 

step in a long heritage of innovative 

systems and ideas to store the world's data. 

More info: www.seagate.com 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

31

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: MERCEDES-AMG PETRONAS 

DRIVING AUTOMATION 

THE MERCEDES-AMG PETRONAS MOTORSPORT TEAM HAS DEPLOYED RUBRIK TECHNOLOGIES TO 

HELP THEM BETTER LEVERAGE THE RACE DATA WHICH PLAYS A VITAL ROLE IN ACHIEVING THE 

INCREMENTAL GAINS THAT HELP THEM WIN TROPHIES 

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, 

headquartered in Brackley, UK, is 

one of the most successful teams in 

the history of Formula One. The team 

includes five-time FIA Formula One Drivers' 

World Champion, Lewis Hamilton, widely 

regarded as one of the greatest drivers in the 

history of the sport. The team's 16 wins in both 

2014 and 2015 broke a new record for most 

wins in a single season, before bettering that 

in 2016 with 19 victories. The following year, 

in 2017, the team became the first to defend 

both Championships across a major 

regulation change. 

Matt Harris, Head of IT, manages a 30- 

person IT team that supports over 800 heavy 

technology users: "Our team is focused on 

winning both the Drivers' and Constructors' 

Championships and the right IT environment is 

essential to that pursuit. The difference between 

winning and losing in this sport comes down to 

fractions of a second. As a result, technology is 

weaved into every facet of our team's 

performance, from design to trackside." 

"Fully understanding and leveraging data and 

IT solutions is now so important to win races," 

added Harris. "The team is constantly 

developing our cars in the quest for faster lap 

times, and analysis of race data plays a vital 

role in achieving the incremental gains that 

have put us at the top of the sport. We 

generate over 500 GB of data every race 

weekend from one car alone, so there is a 

massive amount of valuable information that 

needs to be protected." 

"The main currency in our organisation is 

time," said Harris. "Just as time is critical to 

the performance of our race cars, it is also 

vital to our team's ability to deliver the 

technical infrastructure that holds our 

organisation together. We are constantly 

looking for ways to improve our IT team's 

performance just as we strive to achieve faster 

lap times. As a result, we adopt technologies 

that allow us to save time or simplify our 

32 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: MERCEDES-AMG PETRONAS 

"Every year, the data that we produce in Formula One increases significantly. 

With Rubrik, we're confident we can not only protect that data, but scale to 

meet that growth. Rubrik is so much more than a business continuity solution - 

it's the future of data management." 

processes - and that's where Rubrik comes in." 

LEGACY HEADACHES 

"Our tape-centric legacy data management 

system had become too complex and 

unreliable to adequately protect our critical 

data," said Chris Green, IT Operations 

Manager. "We had a full-time employee 

dedicated to managing backups, yet we were 

missing 50% of our data protection goals. 

There were times where weeks would go by 

without some systems being successfully 

protected. We spent a year trying to fix the 

issues with no success." 

"We had no confidence in our previous 

solution and actually experienced data loss 

from the complexities of tape management," 

said Green. "We had a data tape 

inadvertently returned to the scratch pool, 

making it impossible for us to recover key 

data several years ago. The team was 

sceptical of our legacy solution's ability to 

adequately restore our data, and we needed 

to assign another IT person to assist our 

backup expert with the restore. This is the 

kind of resource expenditure that we just 

could not continue with." 

"Backup is not the most glamorous part of IT, 

but when it goes wrong, it can be very tricky. 

Using the right solution is absolutely critical," 

added Harris. 

UNRIVALLED SIMPLICITY 

"Some of the best decisions we've made as a 

team are when we prioritise simplicity," said 

Green. "We needed a data management 

solution that would lessen our team's 

workload while fully protecting the data that is 

crucial to our success. Rubrik offered a truly 

simple and elegant solution for data 

management. We also loved their API-first 

architecture, which would allow us to further 

drive value for the business with workflow 

automation. Our final decision was influenced 

by Rubrik's forward-looking data management 

philosophy, which will enable us to move 

faster as our needs grow and evolve." 

EMPOWERING BUSINESS 

"We are currently utilising Rubrik's role-based 

access control (RBAC) and multi-tenancy 

functionality," said Green. "One of the most 

appealing aspects of Rubrik is its ability to be 

rolled out to other teams. For example, we 

are in the process of upgrading our CAD 

platform and have allowed a number of key 

users to interact with Rubrik directly. Without 

having to open tickets with the IT team, they 

can do on-demand backups and self-service 

restores. This has led to cross-departmental 

gains in efficiency." 

"Traditionally, only the IT team would have 

the expertise necessary to perform data 

management functions for our engineering 

departments, but with Rubrik, the teams have 

direct control. Because Rubrik essentially 

manages itself, our team has more time to 

devote to strategic projects and finding ways 

to assist other departments," Green added. 

API-FIRST ARCHITECTURE 

"At the beginning of a race, we sign off new 

software code in a development lab and then 

ship that out to the race track," said Green. 

"Previously, we used virtual machine 

snapshots to seal the environment to a 

recovery point which involved shipping tapes 

and performing lengthy recoveries. We now 

use Rubrik's Live Mount to get up and running 

quickly and to ship new code faster. We are 

also looking into using Rubrik's REST APIs to 

create a lab orchestration package that 

speaks directly to Rubrik to further automate 

pre-race preparation." 

"The ability to use Rubrik's APIs with our 

software developers also eliminates the need 

for training," said Green. "They also no longer 

need to reach out to the IT team to do a 

backup. We supply them with a set of 

commands built with the APIs and all the 

complexity is hidden behind the scenes, 

making everyone's lives easier." 

BETTER VALUE BACKUP 

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport is using 

Rubrik to protect its 97% virtualised 

environment, including MS SQL, SharePoint, 

Exchange, Oracle, and NAS. Benefits include: 

90% management time savings 

Near-zero RTOs 

Significantly increased backup performance 

Simplified restore process 

Automated policy engine 

Ease of use 

Fast restores with Google-like search 

High performance with Pure Storage and 

Rubrik 

Data archival to private cloud 

"Every year, the data that we produce in 

Formula One increases significantly," 

concludes Matt Harris, head of IT. "With 

Rubrik, we're confident we can not only 

protect that data, but scale to meet that 

growth. Rubrik is so much more than a 

business continuity solution-it's the future of 

data management." 

More info: www.rubrik.com 



Jan/Feb 2019 

STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

33

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 

ARE YOU READY FOR INDUSTRY 4.0? 

MARK JOW, EMEA VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNICAL SERVICES AT COMMVAULT TALKS ABOUT 

PREPARING FOR AN EFFECTIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY 

Are you suffering digital transformation 

fatigue? Believe me you are not alone. 

'Digital transformation' has been 

adopted as a general buzzword and is now 

used indiscriminately by vendors whose 

offerings have often only had the loosest 

connection to the pure meaning of the term. 

This is a shame because behind the forced 

associations and antipathy lies a key point that 

we should all be paying close attention to. As 

The Economist put it back in 2014, in the 

report The Third Great Wave: "This wave, like 

its predecessors, is likely to bring vast 

improvements in living standards and human 

welfare, but history suggests that society's 

adjustment to it will be slow and painful." 

Comparing the shift to digital business to the 

industrial revolution might sound like an 

overstatement, but the comparison is defensible 

- especially from the perspective that both were 

primarily economic phenomena, driven by 

technology innovation. Economic and societal 

drivers remain the same today, but rewritten 

with new technologies and the shifting 

expectations of 21st century societies. 

International analyst house Forrester talk 

about the 'shifting expectation' imperative in 

The Digital Business Imperative (2017): "Digital 

fundamentally changes your relationship with 

your customers. To remain competitive, you 

must re-engineer how your business creates 

value for your customers in the digital age." 

Re-engineering value is a good way of 

thinking about digital transformation because 

that takes us beyond the boundaries of 

technology to a place where the people, 

process, and cultural aspects of digital 

business are required to provide the 'big 

picture' business outlook. The challenge for 

many more established organisations 

operating today, is that they are competing 

against digital-native companies who have 

already reimagined and re-engineered how 

they create value for customers. 

As of May this year, the five most valuable 

Fortune 500 companies in the world were 

Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and 

Microsoft. These companies have driven the 

development of the digital business world of 

today, and competing with these companies is 

tremendously difficult. The common element to 

all of these companies is the digital 'DNA' at the 

very core of their businesses and because of 

that gain a fundamental market advantage 

now and going forward. 

Recognition of the requirements and benefits 

of digital transformation for any business is 

clear. The path to achieving this transition 

successfully is much less obvious. 

Only recently IBM was quoted as saying that 

digital transformation projects on average take 

four years to complete, during which 85% of 

these undertakings actually fail. With these 

figures front of mind, it's crucial that 

organisations of all shapes and sizes should 

look at not just the technical questions about 

how they transform their operations, cultures 

and processes, but why they are undertaking 

these projects, and what success truly looks like 

at the end of the journey. 

As we start a new year, for many it will be 

the time to take stock of where they have 

reached along the path to digital 

transformation and consider what progress 

needs to made in 2019. 

More info: www.commvault.com 

34 STORAGE 

Jan/Feb 2019 



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StorageCraft is a registered trademark of StorageCraft Technology Corporation. 

All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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