ST Mar-Apr 2021

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

March/April 2021 

Vol 21, Issue 2 

DATA MANAGEMENT: 

The ‘beating heart’ of an organisation 

SURVEILLANCE DATA: 

Covering all the angles 

BACKUP BUDGETING: 

Not the time for cutbacks 

PRODUCT REVIEWS: 

ExaGrid, StorageCraft 

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

Keep ahead of the 

ransomware waves! 

Ride with balance and poise. 

Over the horizon ransomwares just keep on coming, 

sometimes daily, wave after wave. 

From ransomware, unpredictable data capacity needs, 

compliance requirements to high standards of data availability, 

security and fast recovery, we equip our customers and 

partners to meet the future head-on, with modular, flexible, 

and future-proof data management and business continuity 

solutions for the next generation of hybrid data centers. 

When prevention fails, StorageCraft protects your data! 

One vendor, one solution, total business continuity. 

www.StorageCraft.com 

WHERE YOUR DATA IS ALWAYS SAFE, ALWAYS ACCESSIBLE, ALWAYS OPTIMIZED

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

DATA MANAGEMENT: 

The ‘beating heart’ of an organisation 

March/April 2021 

Vol 21, Issue 2 

CONTENTS 

STOR 

MAGAZINE 


CONTENTS 

SURVEILLANCE DATA: 

Covering a l the angles 

BACKUP BUDGETING: 

No the time for cutbacks 

PRODUCT REVIEWS: 

ExaGrid, StorageCraft 

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

COMMENT….....................................................................4 

Backup: what is it good for? 

INTERVIEW: BACKUP…..….........................................…..6 

Eric Siron, long-standing backup evangelist and author of the recently published 

'Backup Bible' eBook, speaks to Storage magazine editor David Tyler 

08 

CASE STUDY: WATERAID.........................................……8 

Richard Landen of WaterAid explains how IBM, Recarta and WaterAid's IT team worked 

together on a highly successful data centre migration resulting in significant process 

and performance gains 

REVIEW: STORAGECRAFT ONEXAFE SOLO.......….10 

PROFILE: SUPERMICRO……......................................…..12 

Storage Magazine speaks to Supermicro CEO Charles Liang about how the company 

has perfected its 'one-stop' total solutions approach 

14 

MARKET FOCUS: SURVEILLANCE……..........................….14 

David Friend, CEO and co-founder, Wasabi Technologies, discusses different 

approaches for fixing the storage issues raised by putting surveillance data in the cloud 

THREE STEPS TO OBJECT HEAVEN…………...........…..16 

Jerome Wendt of analyst firm DCIG looks at three key features that will help enable 

Object storage capacity and performance at scale 

CASE STUDY: HEART OF WORCESTERSHIRE COLLEGE.18 

The Heart of Worcestershire College's continued journey into Software-Defined Storage 

gives reassurance and certainty faced with variable infrastructure requirements 

16 

MARKET FOCUS: CLOUD BACKUP……..................…..20 

Carl Oliver, Product Manager, Giacom explains why cloud backup is increasingly 

important for SMBs and how this opens up new opportunities for service providers 

CASE STUDY: WESTCOAST…………......................…….22 

Databarracks' Backup-as-a-Service offering is helping tech distributor Westcoast to save 

resources and add an additional layer of security to its backups 

24 

TAKE YOUR PARTNERS…….......................................…24 

Valentine's Day seems like a distant memory already, so in the spirit of true romance 

Storage magazine talks to a panel of industry experts about how to find 'the right match' 

when looking for a storage solution that suits your needs 

REVIEW: EXAGRID EX84….......................................….28 

STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT….....................……30 

Mark Radford, Director Enterprise Sales UK, Infinidat, discusses the various growing 

pains facing the modern I.T. leader 

TECHNOLOGY: ALL-FLASH NAS………...................…..32 

Frank Lee, Senior Director of Product Planning at Infortrend, explains how to get the 

ultimate performance gains for your applications with all-flash NVMe Scale-Out NAS 

30 

MANAGEMENT: BACKUP BUDGETS…...................….34 

Joe Noonan, General Manager, Unitrends, offers some insights into how best to budget 

for backup in 2021 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Mar/Apr 2021 


MAGAZINE 

03

COMMENT 

EDITOR: David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

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mark.lyward@btc.co.uk 

REVIEWS: Dave Mitchell 

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BACKUP: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? 

BY DAVID TYLER 

EDITOR 

This issue of Storage magazine features a particularly readable (and quotable!) 

interview with backup guru Eric Siron, whose thoughts - predominantly on why 

organisations just refuse to take backup as seriously as they should - have made 

for an article that will doubtless provoke some controversy. In truth we could have 

probably dedicated at least another couple of pages to what turned out to be a wideranging 

conversation that - despite the transatlantic time difference - took up far more 

of our day than it was intended to. 

You can't miss the almost evangelical zeal in Eric's thoughts about the importance of 

backup: "How do we explain how important this is? If you go to pretty much any 

technical forum you will see 'Hey, I just got this great new system, now I want to back it 

up - but I want to do it for free.' Really? Is that what your system is worth to you? Of 

course there are free backup solutions out there, but is that really the value you're 

placing on all of your data?" 

It's all too easy for those of us working in (or writing about) the industry to assume 

that everyone sees the world the way we do - but backup is a really good illustration of 

the huge gap between our perception and that of most business executives. As Eric 

says in the interview: "The business case is actually very simple: look at your data, and 

decide what that is worth to you. If it were stolen or lost, what would that do to your 

organisation? It's like an insurance policy: it sucks to keep throwing money at 

insurance all the time, until you have to make a claim - and then you're glad you did 

it." 

Surely though, we can't keep building the business case for spending on backup on 

the idea that organisations will never really understand the need for it until it's too late? 

What is needed, Eric suggests, is for vendors to be much more upfront about the 

criticality of backup, to ensure that it is seen as part of the solution from day one. The 

system, and the need to back that system up, need to go hand-in-hand. 

But if organisations don't want to face up to the upfront cost of adding backup to any 

given solution, how do we get round that? Roll in the price of the backup to the 

solution cost? It will be a very brave vendor who moves first with that strategy. 

Articles published reflect the opinions 

of the authors and are not necessarily those 

of the publisher or of BTC employees. While 

every reasonable effort is made to ensure 

that the contents of articles, editorial and 

advertising are accurate no responsibility 

can be accepted by the publisher or BTC for 

errors, misrepresentations or any 

resulting effects 

^ 

04 STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

Mar/Apr 2021 

@STMagAndAwards 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

INTERVIEW: BACKUP BACKUP 

"EVERYBODY NEEDS 

BACKUP, BUT NOBODY PAYS 

ATTENTION TO IT…" 

ERIC SIRON IS A LONG-STANDING BACKUP EVANGELIST AND THE 

AUTHOR OF THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED 'BACKUP BIBLE' EBOOK. 

STORAGE MAGAZINE EDITOR DAVID TYLER SPOKE TO HIM ABOUT 

WHY PROPERLY MANAGED BACKUP POLICIES ARE MORE 

IMPORTANT THAN EVER, AND WHY RELYING ON A CLOUD 

PROVIDER TO DO THE HEAVY LIFTING ON YOUR DATA PROTECTION 

IS A RISKY APPROACH TO TAKE 

David Tyler: Hardly a week goes by 

that we don't see a new 

ransomware or data loss horror 

story - so why do we still need to tell 

people how important backup is? 

Eric Siron: For better or for worse, fear is 

a poor long term motivator - that's really 

the issue. 

You can walk into a boardroom and say 

"Here's the deal: ransomware, fire, flood, 

tornado, hurricane, act of God, meteor 

strike, whatever…" and you can get a ton 

of money that day - they want you to fix it, 

make that problem go away. But when you 

come back three years later and explain 

that all that stuff is now out of warranty 

and needs to be refreshed, the response 

all too often is "But hang on, nothing bad 

happened - you said meteor strikes etc. - 

so we're not going to give you all that 

money this time." 

That's the boardroom issue. Take it to the 

IT guy and he'll tell you he has 87,000 

projects to do, and backup is just 

something he will (hopefully) get around 

to. For such a critical system, it never 

ceases to amaze me: everybody needs 

backup, but nobody pays attention to it. If 

you look at all the major operating 

systems, the one aspect of all of them that 

is outright trash every time, is the built-in 

backup. Nobody takes it seriously. 

As a journalist you're obviously seeing 

these bad news stories, but if you just go 

out into any random business and ask 

"When was your last major data loss?", 

the chances are they won't even know - it's 

just not top of mind. It's very easy to just 

think that it won't happen to you - and let's 

face it, the odds are heavily in their 

favour. That's what I mean about fear not 

being enough of a motivator, so we have 

to keep at it and make it an issue. 

DT: Does that mean that as an industry we 

have to find a 'business-positive' reason to 

convince organisations to prioritise 

backup? 

ES: You absolutely do, and if anyone has 

any suggestions for what that might be, I'd 

love to hear them! How do we explain 

how important this is? If you go to pretty 

much any technical forum you will see 

"Hey, I just got this great new system, now 

I want to back it up - but I want to do it 

for free." Really? Is that what your system 

is worth to you? Of course there are free 

backup solutions out there, but is that 

really the value you're placing on all of 

your data? 

I say to these people, whatever happens 

to your system, your backup is crucial - if 

that's gone, you're finished. They need to 

understand that, and also that the law of 

averages says that the longer you go 

without a failure, the more likely you are 

to have one. People get too comfortable 

with "… it worked fine yesterday." That's 

not a good thing, it's not a good sign for 

the future - all it means is that it worked 

yesterday. Even with seasoned IT 

professionals, that mentality can be hard 

to get around. 

People will say they are replicating to 78 

locations around the world, so what could 

possibly go wrong - the simple fact is that 

one ransomware strike will render all that 

replication useless. The business case is 

actually very simple: look at your data, 

and decide what that is worth to you. If it 

were stolen or lost, what would that do to 

your organisation? It's like an insurance 

policy: it sucks to keep throwing money at 

insurance all the time, until you have to 

make a claim - and then you're glad you 

did it. What is that old saying? "You have 

to be lucky every day, the bad guys only 

have to be lucky once…" 

DT: Why do you think there is such a 

disparity between how the boardroom 

views data protection and how the IT 

function does? 

ES: I've found that business people are 

06 STORAGE Mar/Apr 2021 


www.storagemagazine.co.uk 

MAGAZINE

INTERVIEW: INTERVIEW: BACKUP 

"How do we explain how important this is? If you go 

to pretty much any technical forum you will see 'Hey, I 

just got this great new system, now I want to back it up 

- but I want to do it for free.' Really? Is that what your 

system is worth to you? Of course there are free 

backup solutions out there, but is that really the value 

you're placing on all of your data?" 

trained to think short term and reactively: 

"This is what's happened in the last three 

months, that will guide how we behave in 

the next three months". For IT people of 

course, three months is far too short a 

horizon - the last three months don't really 

tell you anything. They are thinking in 

maybe 5 year increments. 

The shift to cloud, and therefore from 

Capex to Opex, has changed things a bit, 

but that basic problem still exists, that the 

time horizons between IT and the 

boardroom are so at variance. At the 

same time, in larger enterprises you might 

find that you can never even get your 

argument to the boardroom. 

This is the disconnect: the way that 

people in the boardroom look at how the 

business survives, is completely different 

from how IT does it. I can go in there and 

talk common sense and logic to them all 

day, but that's not what they're there for. 

For them, it's about getting through the 

next quarter, and looking at that three 

month trend. 

DT: You touched on the shift to cloud 

services: has the ease-of-use of cloud 

storage been a boon or an additional risk 

- or both - for businesses? 

ES: In the short run I'd say it's been almost 

overwhelmingly negative - people assume 

that because Microsoft and Amazon have 

all this money and these huge systems, 

there is no way anything bad can happen 

to you. A lot of people are under the 

impression that cloud providers are 

already running backups for them as part 

of their service - they're not! That's an 

extra value add, they're not going to give 

anything away for free. There is definitely 

a false sense of security going on out 

there around cloud backup. 

Part of the problem is that when vendors 

are selling their systems, they generally 

don't talk about backup unless as an 

afterthought: "Oh, by the way, you also 

need to back it up…" "OK, how much is 

that going to cost?" "Maybe another 

$100,000." "Erm, ok…" 

Vendors aren't upfront enough about the 

criticality of backup, and making sure that 

it is seen as part of the solution from day 

one. The application and the backup of 

the application need to go hand-in-hand, 

and at present that doesn't happen nearly 

often enough in my opinion. 

There is a lack of clear responsibility, 

especially with SaaS type systems; the 

accountability chain is 'fuzzy'. And to 

make it worse, a lot of users assume 

things are going on that simply aren't. 

Many users are losing a clear view of what 

their data even is, as a result of moving 

things into the cloud - so that's why I feel 

that the short term ramifications of the 

cloud - from a backup perspective - are 

mostly negative. 

Longer term, it brings us back to the 

Capex/Opex issue we discussed earlier: if 

I'm going to do cloud-based backup, I 

can get rid of a lot of Capex. It can be 

easier to go into a boardroom and sell 

that, as maybe a $6,000 a month charge 

as opposed to $85,000 in chunks every 

couple of years. Ultimately I think cloud 

will mean that the solutions will be 

smoother - but the hurdles to get there 

might be higher, in terms of hearts and 

minds. 

Eric Siron's recent eBook 'The Backup 

Bible' can be downloaded for free using 

the following link: 

https://www.altaro.com/ebook/backup- 

bible.php?LP=storagemagazine%20- 

%20LC-Articleinterview_bb&Cat=LC&ALP=ebookinterview_bb-storagemagazine%20- 

%20LC&utm_source=storagemagazine&ut 

m_medium=lc&utm_campaign=ebookbackup-biblecomplete&utm_content=article 


@STMagAndAwards Mar/Apr 2021 


MAGAZINE 

07

CASE STUDY: WATERAID STUDY: WATERAID 

DATA CENTRE MIGRATION: 

EXPERTISE ON TAP 

RICHARD LANDEN, INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGER FOR WATERAID, EXPLAINS HOW IBM, RECARTA 

TECHNOLOGY AND WATERAID'S IT TEAM WORKED TOGETHER TO ACHIEVE A HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL 

DATA CENTRE MIGRATION RESULTING IN SIGNIFICANT PROCESS AND PERFORMANCE GAINS 

WaterAid is an international nongovernmental 

organisation (NGO), 

focused on water, sanitation and 

hygiene. It was originally set up in 1981 as a 

response to the UN International Drinking 

Water Decade (1981-1990) and now 

operates in over 30 countries worldwide. 

When WaterAid moved its offices from 

Vauxhall to Canary Wharf, it meant the NGO 

needed to migrate its IT services as well. 

Some of the systems were running core 

business, such as the link to direct debit 

processing, the phone system and data 

warehouse, so it was essential that WaterAid 

formed a close partnership to support and 

manage a planned transition to the new 

environment. WaterAid turned to IBM for its 

support and invested in new Lenovo 

production servers and IBM storage, namely 

an IBM FlashSystem FS5100 array for 

production and the FlashSystem 5010 as 

backup repository for Veeam. 

WaterAid wanted flexibility upon starting its 

journey to cloud and were looking for a 

storage solution as the foundation to 

accelerate them to being cloud-ready and IBM 

Storage, which supports containers and is 

integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, provided 

them with the flexibility to achieve this in the 

future. 

the UK's leading IT advisory services, which 

meant this challenging process became 

seamless and achieved positive results within 

days of migration. 

From the start of the two-month process, 

great attention to detail was put into the design 

and build of the new solution, to make sure it 

was fit for WaterAid's business requirements. 

Recarta arranged calls with current customers 

to share their experiences of working with IBM 

and Lenovo equipment, as the IT team had no 

experience with either of these vendors. A 

dedicated engineer helped the team work 

towards the migration, explaining the different 

methodologies for migrating the IT systems 

IBM's experience of complex data migration 

projects helped WaterAid through the 

challenging process of migrating data, to help 

plan and execute the complicated operation 

successfully. IBM and WaterAid worked in 

collaboration with Recarta Technology, one of 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: WATERAID 

"Our joint objective was to really home in on the business objectives behind the 

requirement for the upgrades and changes and translate them into practical technical 

solutions, using the best of breed platforms, in which we hold a high level of expertise. 

A lot of thought went into the analysis of workloads to ensure that appropriate solutions 

were designed. It's of utmost importance to neither over-specify nor under-size." 

between the two sites. The input and guidance 

of someone experienced in completing 

hundreds of migrations was crucial to the 

success of the process. 

"Our joint objective was to really home in on 

the business objectives behind the requirement 

for the upgrades and changes and translate 

them into practical technical solutions, using 

the best of breed platforms, in which we hold 

a high level of expertise," explained Ben 

Spode, Client Director at Recarta. "A lot of 

thought went into the analysis of workloads to 

ensure that appropriate solutions were 

designed. It's of utmost importance to neither 

over-specify nor under-size - and this analysis 

and consultation with Richard Landon and his 

team meant we jointly reviewed and explored 

relevant options and collaboratively agreed 

upon the recommended optimum solutions. 

This planning and preparation work meant the 

extended team of WaterAid and Recarta had 

confidence in the designs based upon 

empirical analysis and accurate projections of 

the workloads running in different scenarios. 

The technical solution needed to be right, and 

Recarta's primary focus is our customers results 

and objectives." 

The migration successfully delivered the 

improved data onto the new system, with 

minimal impact on business during the 

transition. The transition showed immediate 

positive results and there have been some 

major business benefits of this equipment. 

With data processing speeds drastically 

improved, the organisation can work much 

more efficiently. 

WaterAid has also experienced an increase in 

computing resources, where the IOPS 

(read/write) performance has increased 

dramatically compared to WaterAid's old 

equipment, which will reap huge benefits to 

other services. The environment has been 

consolidated from 6 servers and 2 storage 

arrays to 3 servers and 1 array, making it 

easier to manage. Looking to the future, the 

improved storage performance means backup 

process time for a future disaster recovery 

solution will also be reduced. 

The success of the project resulted in 

significant speed and process improvements: 

Processing speeds have improved 

significantly with the new equipment and 

now, loads from the data warehouse only 

take 9-10 minutes compared to 20 

previously. This has resulted in jobs now 

running on time (due to quicker overall 

completion) rather than being bottlenecked 

behind other SQL jobs. 

WaterAid can also now stack jobs to be 

closer together. 

The CRM is now 6 hours faster and has 

seen a real performance gain. 

For the data warehouse, process time 

reduced by 8 hours during an evening 

sync. For example, a process took 13 

hours overnight, whereas previously it was 

more in the order of 21 hours. 

Results met key business and project 

objectives, which allowed various projects 

such as Power BI reports to transform and 

finish the files at night, to avoid congestion 

in the next daytime run. 

A collaborative approach between IBM, 

Recarta Technology and WaterAid's IT team 

yielded a successful data centre migration that 

was completed as planned, on time and 

without any negative impact on business 

operations. 

More info: www.ibm.com 




MAGAZINE 

09

PRODUCT REVIEW REVIEW 

STORAGECRAFT ONEXAFE SOLO 

StorageCraft has an excellent pedigree 

in the MSP and SMB data protection 

space and it now extends this 

expertise to ROBOs and home workers. 

The OneXafe Solo delivers a plug-andprotect 

backup and business continuity 

solution for smaller environments with 

limited on-site IT support. 

Key features are its simplified 

configuration and management allowing 

MSPs to provide a DRaaS (disaster recovery 

as a service) solution that requires minimal 

on-site infrastructure. The Solo offers a 

swift two-step installation process so it can 

be deployed any time, anywhere as all it 

requires is an internet connection to stream 

data directly to StorageCraft's cloud 

services. 

The Solo is a small-footprint mini-PC 

which runs StorageCraft's ShadowXafe 

software and functions as a service leader 

device allowing it to integrate seamlessly 

with StorageCraft's OneSystem cloud 

management portal. All configuration, 

data protection policies and recovery 

processes are managed in the cloud so 

there's nothing for the end user to do other 

than plug and connect. 

Deployment is indeed, a very simple 

process. After providing power and 

network connectivity to the Solo, we loaded 

our OneSystem cloud portal, registered it 

using the claim code on its base and 

assigned it to our predefined site. 

The Solo is a true hybrid backup solution 

that can secure data to an internal 

HDD/SSD plus iSCSI targets or SMB/NFS 

shares on local networked storage devices 

as well as to the cloud. For testing, we 

fitted a 1.92GB Micron SATA SSD in the 

Solo and used a QNAP NAS appliance 

with a dedicated 4TB SMB share. 

From the OneSystem console, we defined 

our local storage destinations, enabled 

compression and selected backup 

encryption. Cloud storage on 

StorageCraft's data centres is configured 

from the MSP portal and then assigned to 

their OneSystem account. 

The Solo uses standard OneSystem 

protection policies which define backup 

frequency along with hourly, daily, weekly 

and monthly snapshot retention 

requirements. You also assign storage to 

them and each policy can manage both 

on-site backups and off-site cloud 

replication. 

Virtual host backup is agentless and we 

swiftly declared our VMware ESXi/vCenter 

and Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V hosts. 

Physical servers and desktops can be 

included by installing a light agent service 

on each one and providing the site ID plus 

agent registration token. 

For large initial backups, cloud storage 

can be seeded by shipping a removable 

drive to the customer's site. It's connected 

to the Solo via its USB port and a backup 

policy with the seed drive option enabled 

encrypts and copies data to it, after which 

it is couriered to the data centre for bulk 

upload. 

During testing, we found the Solo 

performed its protection duties at the 

appointed times without any problems. 

The OneSystem console is very informative 

as its dashboard shows system protection 

status while the analytics section provides 

capacity planning data and ensures 

customer SLAs are being maintained. 

Recovery services are excellent as you 

select a protected VM, choose a recovery 

point from the local or cloud repositories 

and restore it back to the host system as a 

new VM. Files and folders can also be 

retrieved by browsing the contents of a 

recovery point and downloading them as a 

ZIP file. 

The VirtualBoot feature provides superfast 

system recovery by creating new VMs 

directly from the backup repository. Cloud 

recovery is available to MSPs where they 

view the customer's protected systems and 

associated recovery points from their 

portal, restore files and folders or 

provision a cloud-hosted VM for one-click 

failover. 

Product: OneXafe Solo 

Supplier: StorageCraft Technology Corp. 

Web site: www.storagecraft.com 

Sales: sales@storagecraft.eu 

Price: From £1,014 per year exc VAT 

VERDICT: The OneXafe Solo is an innovative backup solution that's remarkably easy to deploy and manage. It's ideally suited to 

MSPs that want to provide cloud-managed business continuity to SMBs, branch offices and remote workers. 




MAGAZINE

PROFILE: SUPERMICRO SUPERMICRO 

COMING OUT FROM UNDER THE RADAR 

STORAGE MAGAZINE SPEAKS TO SUPERMICRO CEO CHARLES LIANG ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY HAS 

PERFECTED ITS 'ONE-STOP' TOTAL SOLUTIONS APPROACH 

For a company that has been around 

for over 25 years, Supermicro is 

something of a best-kept secret 

outside of the IT industry where it has 

been quietly - and very successfully - 

expanding its portfolio and its customer 

base throughout that time. When Storage 

magazine spoke with CEO and founder 

Charles Liang (via online video chat, of 

course), his enthusiasm for the company 

he has built was evident from our opening 

conversation. 

What, asked Liang, did Supermicro 

have in common with Tesla? The 

management at Tesla did something 

unique, and he explained: as most automobile 

manufacturers shifted everything 

offshore, Tesla stayed in Silicon Valley, 

where they've continued to grow and 

thrive. Liang went on: "The Supermicro 

story is more similar than you might 

think: most companies selling servers, 

storage, IoT and even 5G hardware have 

moved to offshore operations over the 

last 30 years or so - but we've been in 

Silicon Valley for 27 years. The US today 

has hardly any server, cloud, or 5G 

design and manufacturing, and more 

importantly, no one here is seeing any 

real growth in those markets - except, 

that is, for Supermicro." 

Charles Liang, CEO, Supermicro 

GLOBAL GROWTH 

Around ten years ago, Supermicro saw 

increasing manufacturing and engineering 

costs but also saw expanding market 

opportunities overseas, especially in Asia. 

Supermicro decided then to extend its 

operations to Taiwan, and it has aggressively 

grown market share, and now has 

a large and solid foundation in Taipei. 




MAGAZINE

PROFILE: PROFILE: SUPERMICRO 

Liang explains: "This expansion allowed 

us to really scale our offerings. That's 

how we are now able to provide the 

industry with not only world-beating 

design and solutions but also high-volume 

products. We have extended and 

increased our capacity to serve the 

broader IT industry regionally, and we 

want to share our message more widely, 

not just in the US but increasingly across 

Europe. Historically, our successful 

growth has been on that foundation: the 

technology and the products, and now 

we feel we have solutions that are ready 

to serve the industry globally." 

BUILDING A ONE-STOP-SHOP 

We asked Charles Liang if there had 

been a particular go-to-market strategy 

that has allowed Supermicro to thrive in 

such a competitive - and often cost-driven 

- market, and his answer was surprisingly 

straightforward: "I have always 

wanted Supermicro to offer a one-stopshop 

opportunity for our customers. It 

shouldn't matter if we're talking about 

storage, cloud, IoT, or smart edge 

devices - Supermicro can provide a total 

solution suited to our customers' requirements 

combining US-based engineering, 

superior global manufacturing, and fast 

time-to-market operations." 

The Supermicro story today is certainly 

not just about hardware - with management 

software offerings and global onsite 

service, the company in 2021 is a 

true one-stop-shop for IT, telco, and AI 

clients worldwide. Liang summarised it 

neatly: "Supermicro has a uniquely broad 

product line, based on a building-block 

solution approach. It means we can offer 

a comprehensive portfolio of optimised 

solutions to customers such as cloud 

service providers, for instance. Also, we 

work with all sorts of major players 

globally, in scale, in total solutions, 

including 5G telcos." 

ENGINEERED TO BE GREEN 

Charles Liang came from a background 

as an engineer, so engineering excellence 

has always been a critical focus - 

as well as a key long-term advantage - 

for Supermicro. That engineering vision 

has also coloured Liang's passion for 

reducing e-waste and improving the 

industry’s environmental credentials. 

"We operate in a very sophisticated and 

complicated market, of course," he 

explains, "And again this is part of why 

we have taken our time in developing 

our market offerings not just in terms of 

product quality but also service, and the 

capacity for production and support. As 

a business, we have always focused on 

energy and resource savings as part of 

our efforts to ensure we are offering the 

most optimised hardware possible for 

our customers. Obviously, we are first 

and foremost an engineering company, 

a design, and manufacturing business - 

but we have always aimed to provide 

the 'greenest' solutions in the world in 

terms of energy savings and resource 

savings. We are absolutely dedicated to 

that vision." 

Supermicro was one of the earliest 

companies to focus on 'green computing', 

long before it became a buzzword 

a few years ago: high-efficiency power 

supplies, high-efficiency designs able to 

work at high temperatures, cooling systems 

and far more. Many of their customers 

are achieving a PUE (Power 

Usage Effectiveness: the most popular 

method of calculating energy efficiency 

for data centres) rating of 1.1 or 1.05 

in their data centres - the accepted 

industry 'ideal' PUE is 1.0 - reflecting 

how seriously the company takes the 

need for environmental efficiencies in 

the tech sector. 

Emphasising the resource-saving 

aspects of their offerings helps 

Supermicro customers to reduce their IT 

waste over the lifetime of their investments, 

and Liang is keen to explain the 

company's approach: "Our subsystems 

are built from components that have 

longevity designed in. It is not unusual 

for many items to have a lifetime of ten 

or even twelve years, whether that is the 

chassis, the power supply, the cooling 

fan, the cooling system, or the I/O subsystem. 

Customers buying from us can 

upgrade the parts they need - CPU, 

memory, storage - as frequently as they 

want while keeping most of the critical 

subsystems in place for up to twelve 

years. This can save them a lot of 

money over those twelve years in hardware, 

depreciation, and upgrade costs." 

MARKET-READY 

We ended our conversation with a 

discussion of the way that the 

Supermicro brand has been something 

of a best-kept secret in the past - even 

though the company has been selling to 

most of the major players in the global 

market for a very long time. 

We wondered if Charles Liang had 

made a conscious decision to take a 

more proactive stance in getting his 

message out to the market: "It is true 

that we intentionally chose to 'stay 

under the radar' somewhat in the past 

as we quietly grew the business over 

time, and developed and perfected our 

total solutions approach," he admitted. 

"We didn't want to make a big splash 

too early - but I am confident that 

Supermicro is ready now to promote our 

unique one-stop shopping approach to 

the whole IT market. Every aspect of the 

business is set up to succeed - hardware, 

software, and service, and 

Supermicro is supremely well-prepared 

after 27 years to take the next steps and 

broaden our appeal even further." 

More info: www.supermicro.com 




MAGAZINE 

13

MARKET FOCUS: SURVEILLANCE FOCUS: 

SURVEILLANCE: COVERING 

ALL THE ANGLES 

DAVID FRIEND, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, WASABI TECHNOLOGIES, 

DISCUSSES DIFFERENT APPROACHES AIMED AT FIXING THE STORAGE 

ISSUES RAISED BY PUTTING SURVEILLANCE DATA IN THE CLOUD 

The value of video surveillance for security 

purposes has become increasingly 

attractive over the last few decades. 

Whether it is public sector bodies looking to 

improve public safety, or companies building 

new customer experiences that rely on 

surveillance systems, like Amazon's futuristic 

"till-less" grocery store which has just launched 

in London, the surveillance video market is 

projected to grow to more than US$68 billion 

between 2020 and 2025. 

Much of this growth is being driven by 

increasing transitions from analogue to Internet 

Protocol (IP) based video surveillance systems 

and digital upgrades on already existing hybrid 

systems - between 2017 and 2018 the rate of 

investment in network cameras jumped by 

almost ten percent to 70% of total cameras 

shipped. Despite the pandemic, many 

companies have taken the last year as an 

opportunity to invest in revamping their 

surveillance video solutions. And whilst 

surveillance in some areas raises important 

considerations around data privacy, there's no 

doubt it has become an increasingly important 

part of most organisations' security strategies. 

VIDEO STORAGE BOOMING 

The amount of data stored globally is 

anticipated to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025 

according to IDC/Seagate research, and a 

major part of this growth will be generated by 

video footage. One 4K video camera on its 

own is able to generate over 250GB of data 

per day, all of which needs to be stored, 

assuming low frame rates and enhanced 

compression codecs. Given we're moving 

beyond 4K now and into the realm of 8K and 

10K cameras, the data generated is 

proliferating rapidly. 

The amount of data created by way of these 

higher resolution cameras has vastly 

overwhelmed many organisations' storage 

budgets, and most firms are only coping with it 

by reducing frame rates and storing data for 

only a few days before it has to be deleted. 

Given these are both undesirable options, the 

industry is clearly in need of much less costly 

storage options than the on-premises 

hardware solutions traditionally used. 

The increasing usage of body worn video 

cameras (BWVs) in different contexts is a good 

example of how progress in surveillance is 

increasing data demands. In the last few years 

UK supermarkets like Asda have provided 

security guards with BWVs, and others are 

likely to follow suit. Meanwhile the police have 

long been aware of these tools - a pilot 

scheme by the London's Metropolitan Police in 

2016 has led to wider rollout all over the UK 

as police forces and local communities have 

increasingly recognised the merit of such tools. 

It follows that the Metropolitan Police recently 

chose an unlimited data contract as part of 

their surveillance contract to future-proof 

themselves against burgeoning requirements. 

One or two hours of footage generated by a 

typical BWV camera, the average amount 

generated per day, requires around 3GB of 

data storage space which will grow 

significantly in the coming years as these 

cameras are upgraded to higher resolutions 

and better capabilities. 

Strict regulations are also compelling 

organisations to keep captured footage on file 

for longer. Today, airport guidelines require 

video of on-camera injuries, thefts or conflicts 

to be stored for seven years at a minimum - 

that's hundreds of gigabytes of data if we 

consider that incidents are normally captured 

by multiple cameras and from different angles. 

A five year commitment for body cams for 

one hundred police officers will cost in the 

region of US$500,000 - and almost two-thirds 

of that is for the storage alone. Because of 




MAGAZINE

MARKET FOCUS: FOCUS: 

SURVEILLANCE 

"Given we're moving beyond 4K now and into the realm of 8K and 

10K cameras, the data generated is proliferating rapidly. The 

amount of data created by way of these higher resolution 

cameras has vastly overwhelmed many organisations' storage 

budgets, and most firms are only coping with it by reducing frame 

rates and storing data for only a few days before it has to be 

deleted. Given these are both undesirable options, the industry 

is clearly in need of much less costly storage options than the 

on-premises hardware solutions traditionally used." 

such costs, many police departments and 

private security firms tend to only keep body 

cam footage for periods of time as little as 

two weeks. 

THE RIGHT CLOUD APPROACH 

For companies needing to expand the 

amount of video footage they can store, there 

are typically two routes available. Either 

picking a single vendor solution from a 

hyper-scaler which incorporates everything 

you need - cameras, software and storage all 

in one, or selecting a systems integrator 

package, where you purchase a bespoke 

solution via a third-party. 

The single vendor option is convenient in 

many ways, but can prove costly in the long 

term, given you could be locked into only 

using their cloud storage provider for a 

number of years whose services can be 

marked up at a whim. It can be hard to justify 

such an expensive solution when independent 

cloud storage solutions can store the same 

amount of data for a tenth of the price or 

less. 

It's also worth considering the data security 

implications of an all-in-one solution. This 

week it came out that one of the largest 

Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) 

vendors suffered a huge data breach that 

affected customers globally with hackers 

gaining access to 150,000 video cameras 

and archived footage. 

Everything from hospitals to schools, 

enterprise corporations, police departments, 

and prisons were compromised, which raises 

the likelihood of additional problems, such as 

interruptions in the chain of custody for 

evidence in law enforcement contexts, or 

compliance breaches where healthcare 

regulation is concerned. Whilst a VSaaS 

solution can prove attractive for security 

departments looking to remove the burden of 

excessive management and admin, it cannot 

be denied that a solution that secures both 

live stream footage and storage of video in 

transit and at rest is objectively better. 

Using a hybrid cloud solution that air-gaps 

video management software (VMS) onpremises, 

while utilising the cloud primarily 

for storage, is one of the best ways to secure 

surveillance video data. Such a solution is 

designed to mitigate against potential 

problems that crop up in using a pure cloud 

solution for surveillance applications, from 

maintaining operational effectiveness (e.g. 

speed, bandwidth and guarding against 

latency) as well as legal requirements that 

may require data retention for years on end. 

In a surveillance context, most recent video 

would be stored locally for sake of speed - 

where it usually only needs to be stored for a 

day or two, subsequently being copied to the 

cloud where it can be kept for as long as the 

organisation needs it. 

Picking a provider that enables you to make 

video files "immutable" to protect it against 

malicious data destruction should also be a 

key feature of your surveillance storage 

strategy. Some providers offer services that 

allow you to store data in immutable 

"buckets" which in object storage terms 

operate similar to folders on PCs or Macs. 

Data stored in these buckets cannot be 

modified or deleted by anyone, enabling you 

to store data in them for several decades. 

Companies can get on top of their 

surveillance storage needs by partnering with 

a solution that allows maximum flexibility in 

storing and managing unlimited data. This 

will empower security decision makers to 

carry out their duties as effectively as possible 

to protect and serve stakeholders. 

More info: www.wasabi.com 




MAGAZINE 

15

TECHNOLOGY: OBJECT STORAGE 

THREE STEPS TO OBJECT HEAVEN 

JEROME WENDT, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF ANALYST FIRM DCIG, LOOKS AT THREE KEY FEATURES 

THAT WILL HELP ENABLE OBJECT STORAGE CAPACITY AND PERFORMANCE AT SCALE 

archival data. To expect them to suddenly 

deliver read response times under a second 

does not happen accidentally. They cannot 

meet these demands because they were never 

designed to do so. 

All object storage solutions face this growing 

challenge of delivering on competing 

demands of economical capacity and subsecond 

performance at scale. In response, 

more have taken steps to provide them. The 

ones best equipped to deliver on these new 

requirements offer the following three features: 

1. Stores object metadata on flash media 

2. Scale performance independently of 

capacity 

3. Stores objects in chunks and processes them 

in parallel 

Many organisations primarily view 

object storage systems as costeffective 

solutions to host their 

archival and backup data. This mindset 

makes sense as it represents how many 

organisations introduced object storage 

solutions into their environment. However, 

the use cases for object storage continue to 

expand. 

Organisations generate and capture 

expanding amounts of data and deploy new 

applications that process that data to 

generate new business value. To meet these 

new demands, object storage solutions must 

deliver both economical capacity and high 

performance. 

PERFORMANCE: OBJECT'S NEW LOVE 

Multiple applications now push object storage 

solutions to function as more than archival and 

backup data stores. These sources include 

applications that generate log files; machine 

sensors that capture environmental and 

performance data; and video surveillance. 

Organisations still want economical storage 

solutions on which to store these types of data. 

However, organisations also want to study and 

analyse this data, sometimes in real time, to 

support decisions and take actions. 

Waits of multiple seconds or even minutes for 

object reads to complete represents the norm 

for many object solutions designed to host 

Feature #1: Object storage metadata hosted 

on flash media 

Organisations should first verify the solution 

offers the option to store object metadata on 

flash media (NVMe or SAS SSDs). Each object 

stored will have metadata associated with it. 

Due to the millions or billions of objects stored 

on a solution, object metadata databases will 

grow large. 

These systems can and do host metadata in 

memory. However, the size of these metadata 

databases makes this technique impractical at 

scale. Storing all metadata on flash media 

accelerates access to the metadata and 

improves the possibility for sub-second read 

response times. 

This need for sub-second response times 

explains why Cloudian, Dell EMC, and others 

recently introduced flash media into their 

solutions. Others such as Scality have offered 

the option to store metadata on flash storage 

for some time. 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: OBJECT STORAGE 

"Object storage solutions that deliver both economical capacity 

and high performance at scale do exist. However, DCIG knows 

of only a few solutions that leverage all three features 

mentioned here to deliver on these enterprise expectations. 

Enterprises should be wary of any solutions that have existed for 

over 10 years. Many have introduced flash media into their 

systems to host metadata on flash to help improve their 

performance. It certainly helps, but how well?" 

Feature #2: Scales performance 

independently of capacity 

Storing object metadata on flash media 

represents only the first part of the key to 

delivering performance at scale. Object 

storage solutions typically scale out capacity 

and performance simultaneously by 

introducing new server nodes into the cluster. 

Each server node may contain both flash 

media and HDDs with fixed amounts of both 

media types. 

Unfortunately, the available performance in 

the storage solution cluster may not meet 

application or user expectations. Two ways 

exist to increase performance. 

1. Add more nodes to the cluster. Each node 

adds more capacity and performance to the 

cluster. This may improve the situation, though 

organisations will buy un-needed capacity. 

2. Select a solution that frees them to scale 

performance independently of capacity. Using 

this architectural approach, an organisation 

may install new flash media in existing nodes. 

They may introduce performance-centric 

nodes that primarily contain flash media and 

few or no HDDs. This provides the targeted 

performance boost they need without paying 

for unneeded capacity. 

Feature #3: Stores large objects in chunks 

and processes them in parallel 

While organisations may one day store their 

object data on flash media, that day has not 

yet arrived. In the meantime, organisations 

will continue to store their object data on 

HDDs. This may present a performance 

challenge, especially when storing and 

reading large objects from HDDs. 

Individual objects may grow into the 

hundreds of GBs if not TBs in size. Using a 

single process to read object data from 

HDDs on cluster nodes will take significant 

time to complete. To improve response 

times, identify solutions that perform two 

tasks. 

First, they should break large objects into 

smaller chunks before writing them to 

multiple nodes and disks. 

Second, they should use multiple parallel 

processes to read back the object data. 

These techniques serve the following 

purposes. Spreading large objects across 

multiple nodes and disks enables the 

solution to both write and read objects back 

more quickly. This accelerates performance 

at scale. 

NEWER OBJECT STORAGE 

SOLUTIONS BETTER ACCOUNT FOR 

FLASH MEDIA 

Object storage solutions that deliver both 

economical capacity and high performance at 

scale do exist. However, DCIG knows of only 

a few solutions that leverage all three features 

mentioned here to deliver on these enterprise 

expectations. 

Enterprises should be wary of any solutions 

that have existed for over 10 years. Many 

have introduced flash media into their systems 

to host metadata on flash to help improve 

their performance. It certainly helps, but how 

well? 

Unfortunately, it remains unclear to what 

extent taking this step alone helps at scale. 

The early evidence seems to suggest it does 

not translate very well. 

Those organisations scaling into the 

petabytes will be better served by identifying 

and choosing object storage solutions with 

more modern designs. These newer solutions 

better account for flash media, scale 

performance and capacity independently, and 

parallelise I/O to deliver performance even as 

data stores scale to multiple petabytes. 

More info: www.dcig.com 




MAGAZINE 

17

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: HEART OF WORCESTERSHIRE COLLEGE 

FLEX IS THE WORD 

THE HEART OF 

WORCESTERSHIRE COLLEGE'S 

CONTINUED JOURNEY INTO 

SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE 

GIVES REASSURANCE AND 

CERTAINTY FACED WITH 

VARIABLE INFRASTRUCTURE 

REQUIREMENTS 

Eight years ago, Heart of 

Worcestershire College (HoW 

College) opted for a software based 

storage approach over traditional storage 

hardware options, in the knowledge that 

one of SDS's key benefits was the ability 

to flexibly accommodate growth of 

student numbers. Since then, the 

institution has relied on DataCore's 

SANsymphony's pliancy to deliver a 

merger of colleges in 2014, increasing 

services and capacity overnight, and in 

2020, to cope with the unprecedented 

infrastructure strains throughout the 

pandemic. 

HoW College is a leading academic 

institution offering further and higher 

education in the West Midlands with 

campuses at Worcester, Malvern, 

Redditch, and Bromsgrove. HoW College 

was established in August 2014, following 

the merger of Worcester College of 

Technology and North East Worcestershire 

College (NEW College), with the 

College's IT Lead Engineer, Ed Haworth, 

keen to continue the College investment 

into software-defined storage for the 

emerging new institution. 

MERGING AND EXPANDING 

"Even 8 years ago when we swapped to 

DataCore's SDS platform, we were strong 

advocates of storage virtualisation, 

having realised and used SDS effectively 

for management and consolidation of our 

VMware estate," Ed reflects. "When the 

two local colleges merged in 2014, we 

were eager to continue with the softwarebased 

approach running behind our 

infrastructure, not least so that we could 

flexibly increase demand using the 

hardware already in place." 

Indeed, after the merger into HoW 

College, expansion was exponential. 

Academically, HoW increased breadth, 

offering hundreds of new courses and 

increasing student numbers. Today the 

College continues to grow, offering 

cutting edge courses to over 10,000 

students including establishment of a 

gamification centre of excellence. Within 

IT, supporting over 700 staff alongside 

the student community, the Team offers 

access to critical apps across 200 Virtual 

Machines, including Microsoft SharePoint, 

Moodle, Exchange, Windows, in house 

apps, security apps, and SQL across a 

total 33 TB pool of storage data, all 

working in a synchronously mirrored 

configuration. 

"For HoW, SDS has emerged as the 

historical victor over hardware in 

supporting the number of students and 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: HEART OF WORCESTERSHIRE COLLEGE 

"I guess when you have been using SDS as long as we have, it's easy to become 

complacent as to its inherent benefits. One thing that we love, and have always 

enjoyed, is that usage of a software layer gives you true vendor choice and 

independence without being constrained by the hardware that sits beneath or 

become beholden to any one vendor. Even in the recent past when we have been 

presented with incredibly cheap HCI hardware offerings, we are always thinking 

about the total lifecycle costs and what might happen in 3 years down the line." 

the availability of critical applications, 

even in remote learning times," Ed 

continues. "Better still, we have been 

able to stretch the use of the original HP 

Storage Arrays and haven't had to go 

through the trauma of rip, replace and 

redo since." 

INNOVATING FOR SUCCESS 

That doesn't mean to say that innovation 

has been hampered by use of older 

hardware. Quite the opposite. What the 

team have been repeatedly successful in 

doing is using SANsymphony as the 

framework for digital innovation using 

SDS's inherent policies to slot in new 

performance booster technology. 

For instance, auto-tiering toward SSDs 

to achieve enterprise grade performance 

and an easy non-invasive way to add 

storage to the pool has been repeatedly 

utilised since 2015. Now, HoW 

automatically tiers their hottest data to 

the highest performing, NVMe Flash 

cards and then cascades downward to 

SSDs in a logical tiered hierarchy based 

on data usage and importance. In total, 

the College now has four tiers of NVMe 

and Raid 10 SAS disks, accommodating 

the top tier applications such as SQL 

and databases. As the tiers fill, policybased 

provisioning means that older, 

less used data automatically drops into 

lower tiers. 

Moving forwards, when hardware is 

added, replaced or maintenance 

scheduled, HoW continues to confidently 

operate knowing that downtime will be 

avoided. Acting in an active:active 

configuration across the Worcester 

campus, the two DataCore nodes are in 

sync at all times to ensure business 

continuity. With DataCore, no 

applications appear offline and data 

remains constantly available, with new 

storage provisioned within clicks. The 

DataCore management console 

provides complete visibility of the entire 

vSphere infrastructure without having to 

jump between screens and interfaces, 

improving efficiency. Storage pooling is 

also integral. The team don't have to 

think about allocating which storage a 

new virtual disk should sit on, given it 

does it seamlessly. 

THE RIGHT CHOICE 

"I guess when you have been using SDS 

as long as we have, it's easy to become 

complacent as to its inherent benefits. 

One thing that we love, and have always 

enjoyed, is that usage of a software 

layer gives you true vendor choice and 

independence without being constrained 

by the hardware that sits beneath or 

become beholden to any one vendor," 

Ed cites. "Even in the recent past when 

we have been presented with incredibly 

cheap HCI hardware offerings, we are 

always thinking about the total lifecycle 

costs and what might happen in 3 years 

down the line." 

Further resilience is currently planned 

for, adding a third DataCore node to be 

housed at the Redditch campus that will 

utilise three-way mirroring to support 

mission critical SQL clusters and 

applications. So even if the Worcester 

sites were to experience total fallout or 

loss of power, the IT team remains 

confident that applications will continue 

to perform and allow online learning to 

continue with 24x7 access. 

"It's difficult to put a price on actual 

savings using SDS," concludes Ed. "What 

I can tell you confidently, is that we 

haven't had to spend IT budget on 

spinning disks for over four years 

allowing us to reallocate budget into the 

student's digital experience. But it's also 

a reflection on the peace of mind that 

DataCore affords, seamlessly doing 

everything for us without complaining or 

demanding. We're firm fans!" 

More info: www.datacore.com 




MAGAZINE 

19

MARKET FOCUS: CLOUD FOCUS: 

BACKUP 

THE CLOUD BACKUP OPPORTUNITY FOR MSPS 

CARL OLIVER, PRODUCT 

MANAGER, GIACOM, EXPLAINS 

WHY CLOUD BACKUP IS 

INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT FOR 

SMBS AND HOW THIS OPENS 

UP NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR 

SERVICE PROVIDERS 

Depending on who you talk to, 

digitalisation across the globe has 

been accelerated by around five 

to eight years because of Covid19. 

Transitioning towards the use of cloudbased 

technologies has formed a key 

component of this transformation. But, as 

organisations shift from using on-premise 

solutions to the cloud, many will not have 

considered that data - despite being 

located in the cloud - still needs to be 

backed up. This is particularly true of the 

SMB market. 

option, but what if a natural disaster 

occurs such as a pandemic, flood or fire? 

Accessing data becomes problematic and 

depending on the situation, data could 

be lost forever. A case in point is this last 

year, as pandemic work-from-home 

restrictions prevented many people from 

working in offices, making the idea of 

accessing office technology and IT 

backups difficult. So, many businesses 

turned to the cloud for support. Which, 

rightly, highlighted the need for cloud 

data security. 

The channel, therefore, needs to 

educate and support SMB organisations 

as they develop and deploy their cloud 

strategies. But, it also means that ITCs 

need to work with their Cloud Service 

Provider (CSP) partners to capitalise on 

the potential recurring revenue 

generating opportunities that backup 

provisioning can offer. 

ON-PREMISE BACK-UP 

SOLUTIONS AREN'T FAIL 

SAFE 

It won't come as a surprise to 

the IT channel that protecting 

data and backing it up is 

critical. But, what is the 

difference between backing up 

data on-premise compared with 

cloud backup solutions? 

As you can imagine, an onpremises 

back-up solution 

stores data securely on 

office-based hard 

drives. In principle, 

this is a 

feasible 

HOW SECURE IS DATA IN THE 

CLOUD? 

There's a common misconception that 

just because you shift your applications 

and workloads into the cloud, that all of 

your data is completely secure. While the 

cloud offers many benefits, including the 

availability of data, it doesn't entirely 

protect organisations from data loss or 

corruption alone. 

For instance, a recent study found that 

32 percent of companies using cloud 

had experienced data loss in the cloud 

across numerous threats. It points out 

that 64 percent of this data loss was 

accidental and that 20 percent was down 

to malicious intent. 

Worse yet, the average cost of this data 

loss without a backup solution in place 

equates to almost US$4,000 - not 

counting the potential reputational 

damage and fines from regulators. So, 

while cloud has enabled businesses to 

evolve and thrive, especially through the 

current pandemic, it's clear that data 

stored in the cloud still needs to be 

backed up via a dedicated method. 

This is why it is important for 

organisations to factor cloud back-up 

solutions into their long-term cloud and 

data protection strategies. They are 




MAGAZINE

MARKET FOCUS: FOCUS: 

CLOUD BACKUP 

"Even though cloud solves many problems for organisations, it does come with data 

protection challenges. One answer to this problem involves using dedicated cloud 

backup solutions to protect data. The other answer lies in market education about how 

best to secure cloud applications and data." 

crucial and help address this growing risk 

of data loss that takes place, be that 

through accidental or malicious means. 

ADVANTAGES OF CLOUD BACKUP 

Using cloud backup solutions offers 

organisations a host of benefits. Many 

modern backup tools include enhanced 

security features and the ability to scale 

backups as required. They also generally 

offer quicker recovery times if and when 

backed up data is needed. Further, better 

security protocols, encryption, software 

patches and updates mean that there are 

more effective security options for ITCs to 

provide to their end user customers in the 

cloud too. 

Moreover, by using the cloud, 

organisations can scale more easily too. 

They have the option and capability to 

move their data efficiently and quickly 

across the world. However, as with all 

technology there are security risks to 

consider, which ITCs need to advise 

clients on. 

This is where the relationship between 

CSP and ITC is important. Modern and 

effective CSPs work with their ITCs to 

support them with cloud deployment 

consultancy and execution to customers. 

This usually includes providing 

collaborative insights about managing 

data privacy, security and infrastructure 

maintenance. Equally, this is an area 

where the SMB market requires more 

support - since 37 percent of SMBs, 

according to Forrester, are not adopting 

cloud due to security concerns. 

SUPPORTING SMBS IN A COVID 

WORLD 

Throughout the pandemic many 

organisations have turned to remote 

working to maintain productivity. Many of 

these applications are cloud-based; and 

for some, this meant that their IT estate 

had to evolve; and across the world there 

was an explosion in the use of 

collaboration technologies. And this is set 

to continue: research from the Cloud 

Industry Forum indicates that 88 percent 

of organisations expect their adoption of 

cloud services to increase in the next 12 

months. 

This trend towards cloud application 

adoption amplifies the need to move away 

from depending on on-premise backups 

and towards cloud backup solutions 

instead. Further, since technology operates 

in an 'always on' state of play, businesses 

can't afford to wait for someone to 

physically attend an on-premise site to 

perform maintenance, especially during a 

pandemic. 

Aside from this, it is crucial to note that 

during any crisis malevolent actors will 

seek to cause mayhem and exploit 

vulnerable situations. For instance, 

according to the Office of National 

Statistics cybercrime greatly increased 

during the last year - added to that, not a 

week goes by either without hearing about 

a high-profile cyber security incident. 

Recently for instance, North Korean 

hackers attacked Pfizer, and Serco 

experienced a cyber-attack related to NHS 

Test and Trace. 

Clearly, Covid-19 has created the perfect 

situation for cyber criminals to exploit. 

With many IT teams stretched - either by 

work at home restrictions, cloud/digital 

transformation projects or cyber-attacks - 

they have their work cut out for them. The 

pressure they face is unprecedented and 

emphasises the importance of putting in 

place robust data recovery and business 

continuity strategies to support their 

businesses. Evidently, there is a significant 

opportunity for the channel to step in and 

provide advisory and execution support 

and services to SMB customers. 

TRUSTED ADVISORS 

Even though cloud solves many problems 

for organisations, it does come with data 

protection challenges. One answer to this 

problem involves using dedicated cloud 

backup solutions to protect data. The 

other answer lies in market education 

about how best to secure cloud 

applications and data. Within this 

scenario, CSPs and ITCs must work 

together to educate the market - 

especially SMBs - about how to secure 

and back up data effectively. By doing 

this, ITCs can take advantage of their CSP 

partner's knowledge - positioning 

themselves as trusted advisors to clients - 

and also take advantage of the available 

lucrative recurring revenue generating 

opportunity. 

More info: www.cloudmarket.com 




MAGAZINE 

21

CASE STUDY: WESTCOAST STUDY: 

AT YOUR SERVICE 

DATABARRACKS' BACKUP-AS-A-SERVICE OFFERING IS HELPING TECH DISTRIBUTOR WESTCOAST TO SAVE 

RESOURCES AND ADD AN ADDITIONAL LAYER OF SECURITY TO ITS BACKUPS 

Established in 1984, the Westcoast 

Group remains privately held with its 

distributor arm, Westcoast Limited, 

distributing leading IT brands to a broad 

range of resellers, retailers and office 

product dealers in the UK and beyond. 

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of 

its staff, the Group is flourishing with 

revenues reaching £2.8 billion in 2019. It 

is consistently ranked in the Sunday Times 

Top Track of the 100 Largest Privatelyowned 

UK Companies, and is the largest 

privately-held business in the Thames 

Valley region. 

THE BACKUP CHALLENGE 

Karl Harris is Westcoast's CIO. He joined 

the business four years ago with a brief to 

modernise its IT: "There are some 

incredible people here at Westcoast 

driving the business and it had grown so 

rapidly that IT needed to catch up. That is 

the job I was tasked with and that meant 

building a team and developing the 

competencies vital for modern IT. We 

wanted to focus on developing these 

competencies but backup was consuming 

a lot of the team's time. Backup is 

absolutely critical, but there is really no 

glory in it. It's a disaster if it goes wrong, 

so we can't allow that to happen, but it's 

not necessarily the most exciting task for 

the team." 

The incumbent backup solution was 

using a well-known but traditional backup 

solution provider between Westcoast's sites 

but management had become 

problematic, as Harris explains: "The 

solution we had worked, but it was a 

significant overhead with one of our 

engineers spending their entire time on it. 

That's bad for the engineer because it's 

not the most stimulating task. It's bad for 

the organisation because that deep 

expertise is limited to one person. Our IT 

operating model is 24/7 so we could not 

afford to have such a critical task 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: WESTCOAST 

"There are two key benefits of the service. Firstly it saves our resources, letting us 

do more with less. Secondly, by working with an external service provider we add 

an additional layer of security to our backups. Backups are critical to our ability to 

recover from several types of incident so we must keep them secure. Using a 

third-party service provider take the management of backups outside our domain 

and keeping further copies in Azure adds additional protection." 

supported by one person." 

"We decided to move to a Backup-as-a- 

Service model as soon as possible as this 

would solve these issues," he went on. 

"Databarracks was already a Westcoast 

partner so we investigated with them 

whether the solution could fit our specific 

needs." 

Westcoast chose Backup-as-a-Service 

powered by Commvault across its data 

centres and into Microsoft Azure. 

Databarracks managed the installation 

and implementation for approximately 

1,000 servers and 2,000 Office 365 

users. Databarracks takes responsibility for 

the day-to-day health of backups checking 

successes and failures with proprietary 

tools and trouble shooting issues. 

Databarracks' experts are also available 

24/7 to carry-out recoveries. 

NON-STANDARD SOLUTION 

"We mostly run on-prem with some 

services in the cloud that run our high 

volume workloads," says Harris. "We did 

not think about using the cloud specifically 

for backup though, but it made sense as 

we could use it as part of our strategy to 

maintain high availability across our sites. 

We could leverage the cloud to securely 

store and facilitate fast recovery of backup 

volumes even though we run mostly 

on-prem." 

Westcoast's unique requirement required 

a bespoke approach, according to Harris: 

"The way we wanted our backups 

architected and deployed wasn't standard. 

It was an edge-case for Databarracks but 

the team were brilliant. They were flexible 

to adjust how it was deployed for us. It 

extended the timeline a little, but it's built 

the way we wanted." 

THE PERFECT CANDIDATE 

"There are two key benefits of the service," 

says Harris. "Firstly, it saves our resources, 

letting us do more with less. Secondly, by 

working with an external service provider 

we add an additional layer of security to 

our backups. Our Information Security 

Team war-game the different scenarios we 

face. Backups are critical to our ability to 

recover from several types of incident so 

we must keep them secure. Using a thirdparty 

service provider take the 

management of backups outside our 

domain and keeping further copies in 

Azure adds additional protection." 

Harris goes on: "Backup is a perfect 

candidate for outsourcing. It's critical, but 

it's not a value-adding IT service and so 

not competency we want to spend 

resource on developing. We get access to 

the team of experts at Databarracks who 

do an amazing job, and can reassign our 

people." 

Westcoast were able to make a 

compelling business case for the change: 

"Backup-as-a-Service costs more than our 

internal solution did, as should be 

expected. Our business case, however 

took into account more than just the 

immediate cost-comparison. We improved 

our resilience, gained access to experts 

and were able to reassign a valuable, 

skilled internal resource." 

"We are still working through our digital 

roadmap - modernising our backup to be 

resilient and reliable was definitely part of 

that effort," says Harris in conclusion. 

"Today we are focusing on the things that 

help the business be more streamlined, 

efficient, compete in new markets and help 

the customer experience. Collaboration 

initiatives, bots, new warehouse 

technologies and software along with 

mapping new business models are just 

some of the many projects we are involved 

in as we digitise our business. IT resilience 

underpins everything. If we're offline, we 

don't get back the revenue that we lose. 

Downtime translates very linearly to lost 

revenue. Backup-as-a-Service from 

Databarracks is a vital component in 

keeping us secure, prepared and resilient." 

More info: www.databarracks.com 




MAGAZINE 

23

ROUNDTABLE: STRATEGY 

TAKE YOUR PARTNERS 

VALENTINE'S DAY SEEMS LIKE A DISTANT MEMORY ALREADY, SO IN THE SPIRIT OF TRUE ROMANCE 

STORAGE MAGAZINE TALKS TO A PANEL OF INDUSTRY EXPERTS ABOUT HOW TO FIND 'THE RIGHT 

MATCH' WHEN LOOKING FOR A STORAGE SOLUTION THAT SUITS YOUR NEEDS 

When a single product can easily 

cost hundreds of thousands of 

dollars and have a significant 

impact on the rest of the IT infrastructure, 

selecting the right storage solution can be 

a daunting affair. When successful 

organisation/storage solution partnerships 

are based on trust and long-term 

commitment, how can IT administrators 

find the solution for them, rather than end 

up disappointed after a flash in the pan 

(pun intended)? 

The approach to finding the right match 

when it comes to data storage products 

should be similar to that a person would 

apply to finding a suitable romantic 

partner: there are some qualities an IT 

solution has to have that are nonnegotiable, 

others less so. 

Eric Polet, product marketing manager at 

Spectra Logic, explains, "There are some 

traits that your match must absolutely 

have, such as honesty, kindness, sense of 

humour, intelligence, etc. These essentials 

will vary from person to person." He 

compares this human element to the 

search for a storage solution: "An end 

user organisation must go through the 

same initial process: the IT team must 

determine what it requires for its long-term 

success and happiness such as business 

priorities, critical needs, future plans, 

shared values, preferences and 

limitations." Polet also gives us an 

example of such match-making when it 

comes to technology: "Choosing between 

a private cloud, hybrid cloud, pure cloud, 

or multi-cloud is a good example of how 

it is essential to identify your nonnegotiable 

criteria during the selection 

process." 

Saimon Michelson, field CTO at CTERA, 

takes a slightly different approach. "A 

good way to start is to conceptualise the 

finish." He continues: "Decide what you're 

trying to get out of the new solution. Are 

you looking for more cost-effective means 

of storing unused data? Are you trying to 




MAGAZINE


"A good way to start is to conceptualise the finish. 

Decide what you're trying to get out of the new solution. 

Are you looking for more cost-effective means of storing 

unused data? Are you trying to enhance the productivity 

of remote workers post-COVID?" - Saimon Michelson, CTERA 

enhance the productivity of remote 

workers post-COVID?" 

COME TOGETHER 

Those 'deal-breakers' Polet mentions are 

crucial when putting together a plan, be it 

for a potential life partner or a storage 

solution. Ensuring they are taken care of 

means that organisations can relax 

knowing that their must-haves are 

covered. 

Scott Sinclair, principal analyst at ESG 

Global, tells us what he believes some of 

these priorities should be: "For data 

storage, the essentials, such as high 

availability, performance, cost, and ease 

of use, are still important, but those are 

really just the beginning of finding the 

right solution." Sinclair went on to explain 

how some organisations can 

underestimate their growth: "Once the 

essentials are met, prioritise storage 

solutions that provide the most flexibility to 

change with the needs of your 

organisation, and not just in terms of 

adding capacity or even more 

performance." 

As Veniamin Simonov, director of 

product management at NAKIVO 

explains, success depends on both the 

storage solution and the organisation 

involved: "A good understanding from the 

organisation, explaining its needs, and 

fairly accurate projection for the next few 

years are crucial. Then it's a matter of 

searching for a solution which is not only 

a good fit at present, but is also likely to 

be suitable in the coming years. 

Afterwards, one or more selected products 

should be evaluated and tested." 

This is useful advice: as many people in 

the dating game will tell us, sometimes 

you may think you know what you are 

looking for in a partner, but it is only when 

you sit down and write a list of priorities 

that you form a clear idea of the attributes 

your match needs to bring to the table. 

Another consideration when trying to 

identify 'the one', is how much you are 

willing to invest in the relationship. 

Spectra Logic's Polet spells out what 

should be examined in terms of cost: "The 

initial and ongoing costs, the time 

requirements, and the flexibility of the 

solution must all be weighed before 

choosing." 

STAND BY ME 

Whether the chosen one will be reliable is 

another factor: lack of reliability can lead 

to a severe breakdown of trust and 

reputation, leading to the demise of the 

relationship and damaging future ones. In 

this case that could be an end user 

discounting a particular technology 

altogether due to a bad experience. 

Doug Williams, Northern Europe 

alliance & channel director at Scality, 

commented: "It is vital to find a reliable 

match that will always show up for you, 

whether that is your partner or your data 

storage array; this is a deal breaker. IT 

organisations should also look for 

longevity in their chosen solutions to allow 

for growth and development over the 

years." 

Any IT administrator wishing to enjoy a 

fruitful, long-term relationship with its IT 

environment also needs to think of anyone 

else who may be affected by this 

partnership. If their new match is going to 

affect other users in their company it is 

important that their needs are also taken 

into consideration during the selection 

stage. 




MAGAZINE 

25


"A good understanding from the organisation, 

explaining its needs, and fairly accurate projection for 

the next few years are crucial. Then it's a matter of 

searching for a solution which is not only a good fit at 

present, but is also likely to be suitable in the coming 

years. Afterwards, one or more selected products 

should be evaluated and tested." - Veniamin Simonov, NAKIVO 

CTERA's Michelson explains: "It's also 

important to engage with business folks to 

understand their requirements. After 

collecting/analysing the data and getting 

business input, it's time to formulate your 

functional requirements and start looking 

for the most appropriate storage 

solution(s)." 

ARE YOU GONNA GO MY WAY? 

Another essential step when looking to 

build a long-term relationship, is to look 

ahead: an IT organisation scouting around 

for a new match should look beyond the 

here and now. Just like a person may not 

tick all the boxes on the first date, upon 

learning more about them, additional, 

desirable, highly-compatible aspects may 

come to light. The same goes for a data 

storage product: an IT administrator 

should not dismiss a solution because it 

may not tick all the boxes at the start 

because new, useful features may be on 

the roadmap. 

NAKIVO's Simonov spells it out: "While, 

for example, a product may appear to lack 

a critical feature required in the next two 

years, there is a chance it may be on the 

roadmap, or in development." Having said 

that, if one of the end user's deal-breakers 

is not on the cards for the potential 

product match in the foreseeable future, 

they should walk away, he says. "In case 

the organisation needs a deal-breaking 

feature today, and the vendor does not 

offer it, it is probably better to go on 

looking for another supplier." 

The IT admin has a right to expect the 

product to offer a number of appealing 

features to the partnership, such as 

reliability, ease of communications and 

integration from the product. At this point, 

with all of that in mind, what would make 

an IT organisation 'swipe right?' 

HEY, BIG SPENDER 

Reviews are a great source of first-hand 

feedback: whilst they are quite hard to 

come by when it comes to romantic 

candidates, in the case of IT products they 

are easier to come by. These reviews (such 

as those found in Storage magazine, of 

course) can often help sway an 

organisation who is to-ing and fro-ing 

between two or three different solutions. 

NAKIVO's Simonov mentions the benefits 

of reviews and customer opinion: "It makes 

great sense to look for online reviews and 

case studies, paying specific attention to 

negative reviews. The goal of such 

research is making sure the selected 

vendor is customer-centric and is focused 

on user satisfaction." 

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is another 

important factor in an IT organisation/data 

storage solution relationship. Whilst TCO 

is something couples may often laugh 

about as they once again spend money on 

each other for anniversary gifts and 

spontaneous presents, it is no laughing 

matter for vendors, as Simonov 

summarises: "Organisations with limited 

budget may prefer to go with a more 

affordable product, provided that it meets 

the critical needs." 

Finding the ideal partner takes a fair 

investment of time and effort: however, 

before starting their searches, 

organisations need to be very clear with 

regard to what their needs and constraints 

are and what they are prepared to 

compromise on. If the process is given the 

commitment it warrants, the storage 

solution and organisation can work 

together happily ever after! ST 




MAGAZINE

PRODUCT REVIEW REVIEW 

EXAGRID EX84 

Enterprises struggling with rapidly growing 

data centre storage capacities need to 

find new ways to energise their data 

protection strategies. If backup and restore 

performance can't keep up with these 

demands then their disaster recovery plans and 

service level agreements are unachievable. 

ExaGrid offers an ideal solution as its Tiered 

Backup Storage family of EX appliances 

delivers a smart backup and data recovery 

solution with a sharp focus on performance. 

The unique architecture allows it to scale out 

easily as storage capacities increase without 

impacting backup and recovery speeds. 

Tiered Backup Storage is superior to 

competing solutions which use a single 

intelligent controller head unit and dumb disk 

expansion shelves. Each EX appliance within a 

scale-out site is a complete system with its own 

storage, CPU, memory and networking so 

compute power and network bandwidth 

increase in step with capacity. 

Even more compelling is ExaGrid's data 

deduplication technology. It's well known that 

standard inline data reduction techniques hit 

backup and restore performance hard, but 

ExaGrid's patented Landing Zone feature with 

Adaptive Deduplication avoids all these 

problems. 

Data received from the backup application is 

written directly to a disk cache in 

undeduplicated format. As backups complete, 

the data in the Landing Zone is 'tiered' and 

written to a separate long-term retention 

repository where it is compressed and 

deduplicated. This process happens in parallel 

with the backups running but not inline in 

order to avoid a performance impact. 

This process has no impact on performance 

and as copies of the most recent backups are 

retained in the Landing Zone, most restore 

operations are much faster, as data doesn't 

need rehydration and decompression. Data 

security is also enhanced as while the Landing 

Zone is network facing, the repository has a 

tiered air gap between the network-facing 

Landing Zone and the non-network-facing 

retention repository and therefore is only visible 

to the ExaGrid software. 

This tiered air gap really comes into its own 

with ExaGrid's new Retention Time-Lock 

feature, which provides a solid defence 

mechanism against ransomware attacks. It's a 

simple yet elegant solution as it delays any 

delete requests to the offline repository that 

come into the Landing Zone via the user 

network or backup app. 

Delete requests will be carried out in the 

Landing Zone but once a time-lock period has 

been applied, they will have no impact on the 

retention repository. The period defaults to 10 

days but can be as long as 30 days and at the 

default setting ExaGrid states it will only result 

in a 10% increase in capacity requirements. 

This delayed delete setting is separate from the 

system's backup retention policy that can be 

any number of days, weeks, months and years. 

If a ransomware attack gains control of the 

backup software, the hacker could conceivably 

delete all backups with a single PowerShell 

command. Using delete request thresholds, the 

ExaGrid system issues warnings and if an 

attack is detected, administrators can respond 

immediately by suspending all further share 

access and taking them offline. 

Should an attack succeed in encrypting data, 

ExaGrid has immutable data objects that are 

not modified or overwritten so all previous 

retention does not change. It's a simple 

process to recover it as you browse the 

repository to find the latest unencrypted 

backup. Even the Retention Time-Lock setting 

is protected from tampering as any changes to 

this must be verified by a user assigned the 

ExaGrid Security Officer role. 

ExaGrid is highly flexible as a single scale-out 

system can comprise up to 32 appliances and 

you can mix any of the EX models together 

allowing you to tailor expansion to your 

budget and backup requirements. Existing 

customers needn't worry: all the older EX 

models from the previous range are supported 

so they can preserve their investment. 

The latest EX family comprises seven models 

with the flagship EX84 on review offering a 

truly staggering storage potential. This 4U 

rackmount appliance presents a usable 

backup capacity of up to 168TB and when 




MAGAZINE

PRODUCT REVIEW 

PRODUCT REVIEW 

scaled out to 32 appliances, increases this to 

an industry-leading 5.37PB. The system can 

take in a 2.7PB full backup in the Landing 

Zone and can keep long-term retention in 

deduplicated form in the repository. 

The EX84 serves its storage up on enterpriseclass 

SAS hard disks configured in a RAID6 

plus hot spare array. The appliance comes as 

standard with dual Gigabit and 10GbE data 

ports and upgrade options extend to 25GbE 

or 40GbE. 

Deployment is swift as all appliances are 

100% customer installable with ExaGrid 

claiming typical unboxing to implementation 

times of around one hour to three hours with 

initial backups occurring the same day. We 

can vouch for this as in previous tests, we 

confirmed that these times are easily 

achievable. 

Appliances are grouped together in scale-out 

systems where ExaGrid uses a hub and spoke 

architecture. The hub is the central site while 

spoke sites provide off-site replication for 

disaster recovery. Adding new appliances to a 

system is equally painless as the site web 

console provides a wizard to guide you 

through this process. It's so easy to use that 

ExaGrid has been able to cover all customer 

support requests during the pandemic with 

web conference calls. 

Having reviewed the previous EX appliances, 

we can safely say that ExaGrid's new web 

management console looks a lot smarter and 

is even easier to use. It lists all sites and servers 

in the left navigation pane and provides 

colour-coded status views of site capacities and 

free space plus Landing Zone and retention 

repository utilisation. 

To configure a site Retention Time-Lock period 

you simply click on its icon in the dashboard 

and enter the value in days. The request is sent 

to the ExaGrid Security Officer where it 

appears in their console awaiting approval. 

Storage is presented as CIFS, NFS, OST or 

Veeam Data Mover shares and creation is swift 

as for primary shares, you select a host 

appliance and choose your backup software. 

ExaGrid supports over 25 backup applications 

and utilities including Veeam, Commvault, 

Veritas NetBackup and Oracle RMAN Direct. It 

can also utilise higher-level functions such as 

Veritas OST, Oracle RMAN channels and 

Veeam Data Mover. 

Restore features are equally impressive as the 

Landing Zone allows Veeam VMs to be booted 

in seconds to minutes as opposed to the hours 

that traditional inline solutions take due to only 

storing deduplicated data and needing to 

rehydrate the data for every request. ExaGrid is 

the only solution that reconstitutes a full 

NetBackup Accelerator backup in the 

appliance's Landing Zone to provide instant 

VM boots, fast offsite tape copies and quick 

data restore operations. 

Access security is tight as ExaGrid integrates 

with Active Directory (AD) and also supports 

two-factor authentication (2FA). AD 

authentication can also be used for CIFS target 

share access control and the Veeam Data 

Mover. 

Product: EX84 

Supplier: ExaGrid 

Web site: www.exagrid.com 

Tel: +44 (0) 1189 497 051 

VERDICT: ExaGrid's Tiered Backup Storage is the ideal data protection solution for enterprises as its scale-out architecture teams 

up the highest capacities in the industry with the best performance. Its innovative Landing Zone avoids all the problems associated with 

legacy inline deduplication solutions and the new Retention Time-Lock feature provides essential ransomware protection. It's very easy 

to deploy and ExaGrid's price protection promise sweetens the deal even further. It guarantees ongoing maintenance costs won't be 

more than 3% per year and the price you pay for your first appliance will be the same for additional units over the following five years. 




MAGAZINE 

29

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT 

DATA: THE BEATING HEART OF AN 

ORGANISATION 

MARK RADFORD, DIRECTOR ENTERPRISE SALES UK, INFINIDAT, DISCUSSES THE VARIOUS GROWING 

PAINS FACING THE MODERN I.T. LEADER 

Big Data and the need for near 

continuous availability has changed 

the way businesses approach their 

capacity requirements. Driven by market 

forces and expected to reach 150 

zettabytes stored globally by 2025 - 

according to IDC - data is growing at 

unprecedented rates. This has created an 

explosion in long-term data retention and 

archive access challenges like never 

before. But how can IT decision makers 

effectively and economically archive data, 

automate it, instantly access it and 

monetise it in the modern age? 

GROWING COST OF UNPLANNED 


Budget tightening and the global 

economic downturn has increased the 

need for IT organisations to utilise new 

'intelligent enterprise data storage' 

technologies that automate essential IT 

infrastructure components and mine more 

real value from their existing data centres. 

The old ways are making way for the 

new generation at an accelerated pace 

and traditional models of storage 

management and purchasing are 

consigned to the past. Clearly, the future 

lies within effective, efficient infrastructure 

and data management. With the cost of 

acquisition now driving most IT decision 

makers' business decisions never has 

there been such a pressing need to have 

secure data solutions and cost-effective, 

flexible payment options that scale with 

the business needs. The focus has shifted 

to de-risking any initial expenditure from 

CapEx to OpEx which allows businesses 

to adapt successfully to unexpected 

change. 

The need to install storage systems 

within a 'pay as you need' structure seems 

obvious to drive down costs. The global 

pandemic has rewired the traditional 

systems within business and a key element 

is to build in more capacity than you need 

at the start, so that scalable growth is at 

your fingertips and customers are not 

exposed to any potential shortfall or 

outage. 

CLEAR SKIES OR CLOUD? 

Almost all CIOs understand the need to 

take the longer-term view of their IT 

infrastructure and existing architecture in 

terms of its adaptability to grow with the 

business and deliver on specific business 

goals. Modern IT leaders also demand a 

storage solution that works on-premises 

and in the Cloud, with the capability to 

seamlessly transition between both these 




MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT 

"This new era will be made possible by software-defined storage that has the 

ability to access and upload data anywhere, with near-zero latency. It can be 

moved in a simplified, intelligent process based on satisfying real business 

needs. Continued software innovations will ensure legacy storage systems 

are more economical and easier to manage, while enabling the infrastructure 

to be future-ready and optimised for business." 

platforms. Many IT departments are 

struggling to cope with a plethora of new 

activities, trying to leverage existing 

archiving systems while embracing new 

workflows such as remote collaboration or 

data distribution across disparate 

geographies and locations, as well as the 

increasing threat of security breaches. 

Re-imagining the new structure demands 

increasingly smarter thinking about what 

belongs in the Cloud and what does not. 

Enabling modern data management tools 

and software-defined storage helps 

provide the path forward. Increasingly 

businesses have embraced public clouds, 

private clouds, multi-cloud deployments, 

and essentially on-premises infrastructure 

which has forced cloud technology to 

evolve and diversify. 

This new era will be made possible by 

software-defined storage that has the 

ability to access and upload data 

anywhere, with near-zero latency. It can 

be moved in a simplified, intelligent 

process based on satisfying real business 

needs. Continued software innovations 

will ensure legacy storage systems are 

more economical and easier to manage, 

while enabling the infrastructure to be 

future-ready and optimised for business. 

I.T. HEROES SAVE THE DAY… AGAIN 

Specific job roles within all levels of IT are 

also changing - most have become more 

strategic roles that are less about the 

technological structure and build, and 

more about how to create new services for 

the business and bottom line. Longer term 

data storage planning raises the themes of 

data protection, simplification, 

monetisation, latency and flexibility. All of 

these must be addressed while also 

keeping costs to a minimum and building 

in the ability to grow possibly exponentially 

with no down time. 

The focus has shifted to the management 

of this flood of data and how a business 

can generate tangible value from it that 

can be passed directly on to customers. 

This includes data that is stored onpremises 

or in the cloud, whether that's 

automating their critical data and archives 

or even applying AI to ask it questions and 

gain competitive advantage. 

HOW SECURE IS MY DATA? 

When faced with constant head spinning 

change too many IT departments have 

almost impossible choices to make and 

must compromise when making significant 

investments. Because of this costconsciousness, 

security can then become a 

secondary priority. 

The number of aggressive cyber-attacks 

from hackers that target backup and 

archive data is set to increase steeply in the 

next decade. Best practices include 

multiple copies on different technologies 

and destinations, and a call to establish 

proper assessments of an organisation's 

vulnerabilities. Intelligent investment in 

preventative and remediation type 

technologies, such as secure data backup, 

rapid recovery and protection through 

immutable snapshots, combined with 

'always-on' data availability will mean 

businesses are protected from data 

unavailability as well as from increased 

cyber-security risks. 

To meet the demands of contemporary 

digital landscapes and profitable business 

practices an innovative approach to 

storage and data management is needed. 

Moving organisations towards performance 

driven yet simplified 'on-premises' and 

hybrid cloud-based solutions is the goal - 

where the future of storage infrastructure, 

software and management will need 

automation, security and cost-effective 

solutions for future-proofing the new era of 

data storage architecture. 

More info: www.infinidat.com 




MAGAZINE 

31

TECHNOLOGY: ALL-FLASH NAS 

LOW LATENCY, FAST ACCESS, HIGH 

PERFORMANCE 

FRANK LEE, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT PLANNING AT INFORTREND, EXPLAINS HOW TO GET THE 

ULTIMATE PERFORMANCE GAINS FOR YOUR APPLICATIONS WITH ALL-FLASH NVME SCALE-OUT NAS 

Increasing IT infrastructure performance is 

one of the top benefits that every business 

aims to obtain in order to eventually 

receive higher ROI. Not only that, but also 

given phenomenal growth rate of data, 

sufficient capacity for its storage is extremely 

important. To achieve these objectives, 

enterprises increasingly prefer all-flash array 

scale-out file NAS cluster systems, which 

increase performance, capacity, and 

throughput with the number of connected 

nodes. 

Today, for applications that are slowed 

down by storage nodes' read/write speed, 

you can gain both lightning-speed 

performance and expandable capacity by 

deploying Infortrend's EonStor CS scale-out 

NAS cluster, including our new all-flash 

array model EonStor CS 4014N which 

supports the newest generation of NVMe 

U.2 SSD and, thus, provides better 

performance/price ratio than SAS/SATA 

SSD. CS 4014N is a worthwhile investment: 

its performance is impressive, and end users 

will notice the difference immediately. 

EonStor CS (CS) is a scale-out NAS 

storage system that can expand capacity 

and linearly increase performance by 

adding more nodes. To satisfy extremely 

high IOPS and throughput requirements, 

Infortrend has developed this brand-new 

model, the all-flash NVMe storage system 

CS 4014N. We upgraded software to 

extend SSD lifespan and notify users about 

timely SSD replacement. To prevent systems 

from data loss and ensure high availability 

on node and disk levels, CS offers various 

data protection mechanisms, such as RAID, 

Erasure Code, and Replica. CS comes with 

intuitive EonOne management software for 

centralised management of multiple 

systems, monitoring of performance and 

capacity usage, and completion of all 

related system configurations. Efficiently 

storing and managing data, CS is suitable 

for various enterprise applications. It can 

flexibly increase the number of nodes as an 

enterprise grows to meet higher demands. 

Moreover, CS 4014N supports hybrid 

configuration with HDD JBOD for deploying 

a more cost-effective solution. 

HIGHER PERFORMANCE 

Each node CS 4014N is loaded with 14 

SSDs (2U 14-bay form factor), so users do 

not need as many SSDs to build a highperformance 

cluster. Also, unlike HDD, SSD 

storage has no moving parts, so it consumes 

less power and does not encounter vibration 

and thermal issues. SSDs are characterised 

by low latency; CS 4014N provides 40% 

performance improvement in comparison 

with traditional HDD models. CS 4014N 

supports the newest generation of NVMe 

U.2 SSD, providing better performance/price 

ratio than SAS/SATA SSD. 

Since NVMe uses the PCIe interface to 

directly communicate with the CPU without 

an additional controller, instructions to 

process I/O requests are faster, the I/O 

latency is lower and IOPS higher than those 

of SAS/SATA SSD. And because the PCIe 

interface can provide higher bandwidth, 

throughput is also higher. Each node can 

reach up to 210K IOPS and Read/Write 

speed of about 4.1GBps/3.1GBps. This 

ensures much faster storage response time, 

and users can immediately notice when 

opening and browsing files, which now 

happens more smoothly, without any lag. 

BETTER SSD LIFETIME 

Due to the nature of SSD operation, data 

cannot be directly overwritten as it can in 

hard drives: old data must be erased before 

the location it occupied can be written 

again, which increases Write Amplification 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: ALL-FLASH NAS 

"To satisfy extremely high IOPS and throughput requirements, Infortrend has 

developed this brand-new model, the all-flash NVMe storage system CS 4014N. We 

upgraded software to extend SSD lifespan and notify users about timely SSD 

replacement. To prevent systems from data loss and ensure high availability on node 

and disk levels, CS offers various data protection mechanisms, such as RAID, Erasure 

Code, and Replica. CS comes with intuitive EonOne management software for 

centralised management of multiple systems, monitoring of performance and capacity 

usage, and completion of all related system configurations." 

Factor of SSD. Because each SSD cell can 

only tolerate a finite number of 

program/erase cycles before becoming 

unreliable, the higher the Write 

Amplification Factor, the closer SSD is to 

end-of-life. 

To reduce the Write Amplification Factor of 

SSD and extend SSD wear life, CS 4014N 

supports over-provisioning function which 

provides additional capacity specifically for 

data to be erased from an SSD, without 

interrupting system performance. For the 

same purpose of improving wear-levelling 

and sustaining long-term SSD endurance 

and performance, CS 4014N supports the 

UNMAP/TRIM command to reclaim unused 

free space from the storage by cleaning 

invalid data blocks. Moreover, CS 4014 

reduces the amount of write operations on 

SSD by using 'write-back' cache method with 

cache backup module and supercapacitor: 

frequently modified data will be stored in the 

memory and only final results will be written 

to SSD. 

DON'T WORRY ABOUT DATA LOSS 

Thanks to the fact that CS 4014N supports 

RAID 5/6, parity blocks are arranged in 

such way that some SSDs will withstand 

more writes; this prevents multiple SSDs 

from being damaged at the same time so 

that you can be sure in integrity of your 

valuable data. Also, users can see at a 

glance the condition of their storage: SSD 

lifespan monitoring function displays the 

real-time status of the SSDs and predicts the 

remaining days of the SSD life based on the 

workload. Moreover, it proactively sends 

notification alerts to users when SSD lifespan 

is about to end to allow timely SSD 

replacement. 

For achieving high performance and more 

cost-saving solution, enterprises can utilise 

hybrid mode by expanding the all-flash CS 

4014N with HDD expansion enclosures and 

set up the auto-tiering function to 

automatically allocate frequently accessed 

hot data in the SSD pool for faster access 

and cold data onto HDDs. 

POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS 

The CS 4014N all-flash NVMe model is 

applicable to a wide range of performance 

and capacity demanding applications, e.g. 

Media and Entertainment, High Performance 

Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), 

Electronic Design Automation, file sharing, 

medical care (PACS), and others. 

In M&E industry, CS 4014N is able to 

stably play back a large number of 

4K/8K high-resolution video on the 

stage of collaborative media postproduction. 

For HPC, thanks to low latency and 

high performance, CS all-flash NVMe 

model allows many servers to 

simultaneously access storage system 

for extracting data for computing and 

stores analysing results. 

As an example of AI application, CS 

4014N accelerates the process of 

Deep Learning training by quickly 

processing I/O requests from users 

collecting large amounts of data. 

In IC design, which uses EDA tools 

assisting in the development process, 

more than 500 TB of many small files 

with intricate directory access are 

generated. The CS all-flash NVMe 

model can provide fast access to all 

these files and metadata, 

considerably enhancing chip 

development efficiency. 

Other applications, like file sharing, 

medical care (PACS), can also enjoy 

the benefits of low latency and fast 

data access from CS 4014N. 

More info: www.infortrend.com 




MAGAZINE 

33

MANAGEMENT: BACKUP BUDGETS 

DON'T CUT BACK ON BACKUP 

JOE NOONAN, GENERAL MANAGER, UNITRENDS, OFFERS SOME 

INSIGHTS INTO HOW BEST TO BUDGET FOR BACKUP IN 2021 

As the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic 

continues to stretch IT budgets to 

breaking point, organisations are 

analysing areas of their business where they 

can cut costs - especially as continued 

lockdowns continue to place further pressure 

on finances. While it is tempting to place 

backup on the back burner, the risks of doing 

so can be detrimental both financially and by 

means of reputational impact should data be 

lost or compromised. An additional 

consideration for businesses is the many 

sources of risk, particularly around data 

availability. 

Data losses can prove potentially fatal to a 

business in the event of a high-profile erasure 

of crucial information. This can take place via 

human action such as intentional or 

unintentional deletion of files, hardware failures 

such as system crashes, natural disasters, or 

even malicious targeted cyber-attacks. 

Failure to integrate a backup strategy in these 

situations can result in downtime that leads to 

employees being unable to work, cutting off 

contact with customers, suppliers and partners 

and creating the potential for huge financial 

losses. With this in mind, it's imperative for 

organisations to integrate a cost-effective data 

backup and disaster recovery solution to 

mitigate risk, both in the sense of data 

availability from an off-site facility and the 

contingency to resume operations at an 

alternate site in the case of a physical disaster. 

Data backup services don't need to involve a 

capital expense, which is crucial for many 

organisations during this current period when 

purse strings are being tightened. Pricing 

models can reflect the increased need for value 

and be flexible in their nature to meet 

organisational needs and the limited budgets 

that IT professionals are facing. 

Subscription-based backup services are an 

affordable option that can be fully customised 

to requirements. In addition to reduced 

downtime, utilisation of these services can ease 

the data burden on management via cloudbased 

solutions that can be scaled up or down 

depending on future business strategy. Due to 

the changing IT landscape brought on by the 

pandemic, subscription pricing now 

encompasses the full spectrum of backup 

solutions, from appliances to direct-to-cloud. 

Due to the remote work landscape, cloud 

storage has become more crucial for many 

organisations as they look to store data from a 

number of devices. But while public cloud may 

at first seem like the most affordable option for 

an organisation, it can be challenging to 

accurately price - and costs can quickly add 

up. Though each organisation has its own 

unique needs, a hybrid approach that includes 

both public and private cloud tends to be a 

cost-effective solution that provides the ability to 

scale public cloud infrastructure to manage less 

predictable workloads without impacting the 

workloads running on the private cloud. A 

hybrid approach also allows more sensitive 

data to be deployed on the private cloud while 

less sensitive data can run on public 

clouds concurrently. 

One crucial element to consider is the time 

technicians will spend managing backup 

solutions. If multiple disparate solutions are 

chosen due to lower price points, the overall 

savings will likely be minimal as technicians 

must spend hours manually reviewing multiple 

interfaces to confirm backups are working 

properly. By focusing on integrated backup 

solutions that provide a centralised 

management platform, organisations can 

better allocate limited resources. 

While economical influences are creating 

financial pressures for organisations across 

industries, it remains the case that data loss 

caused by human error, natural disaster or 

cyber-attack can cause financial hardship that 

can prove impossible to bounce back from. In 

fact, the average cost of cyber-crime for an 

organisation increased by US$1.4bn to $13bn 

in 2019. 

Organisations can protect their data on tight 

budgets by assessing subscription-based 

solutions, thoroughly reviewing their cloud 

options and focusing on integrated backup 

solutions where possible. Not only can this 

approach help future-proof a business, but IT 

professionals can convince their leadership 

teams that it's a convenient, affordable and 

suitable investment for the organisation - 

particularly in the context of the current 

economic climate where business frugality is 

more important than ever. 

More info: www.unitrends.com 




MAGAZINE

ST Mar-Apr 2021

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