ST May-Jun 2021

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

May/June 2021 

Vol 21, Issue 3 

NAS VS. SAN: 

The future of shared storage 

INTERNET OF THINGS: 

Where will all the data go? 

STORAGE TIERING: 

Have your cake and eat it 

DR-AS-A-SERVICE: 

A primer for SMBs 

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 

NAS VS. SAN: 

DR-AS-A-SERVICE: 

A primer for SMBs 


Vol 21, Issue 3 

CONTENTS 

STOR 

MAGAZINE 


CONTENTS 

The future of shared storage 

INTERNET OF THINGS: 

Where wi l a l the data go? 

STORAGE TIERING: 

Have your cake and eat it 

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

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

Backup is not just for March 31st 

STRATEGY: HARD DISK DRIVES…..…….........................6 

The amount of data grows globally by several billion terabytes every year as more 

machines and devices generate data - in the age of IoT, argues Rainer Kaese of 

Toshiba, HDDs remain indispensable 

10 

INTERVIEW: INFINIDAT….............................................…8 

Storage magazine editor Dave Tyler caught up with Phil Bullinger, Infinidat's new CEO 

to discuss the challenges of taking on a new role in the middle of a global crisis 

CASE STUDY: TOTAL EXPLORATION & PRODUCTION.......10 

Total has migrated its offshore oil and gas platforms to a hyperconverged 

infrastructure that delivers space efficiencies along with improved replication and DR 

RESEARCH: DATA PROTECTION………...............................12 

New research shows 58% of backups are failing, creating data protection challenges 

and limiting the ability of organisations to pursue Digital Transformation initiatives 

12 

CASE STUDY: SAVE THE CHILDREN SPAIN………......14 

Non-profit organisation Save the Children Spain has reduced the costs of its backup and 

simplified disaster recovery thanks to NAKIVO Backup & Replication 

MANAGEMENT: STORAGE TIERING…………............................16 

The ideal 'storage cake' has three equally important tiers, argues Craig Wilson, Technical 

Architect at OCF 

CASE STUDY: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS……............18 

Lifecycle Management Software scans and moves inactive data from primary storage to 

'perpetual tier' for long-term access and archival 

16 

OPINION: DISASTER RECOVERY AS A SERVICE…...20 

As more and more SMBs are attracted to Disaster Recovery as a Service, Florian Malecki 

of StorageCraft outlines the key requirements of a DRaaS solution - what is important, 

and why 

CASE STUDY: TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TREDU..22 

A college in Finland has implemented a hybrid solution that offers a unified portal for 

storage and backup of multiple services, eliminating the need to jump from one 

application to another 

ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP……......................................…24 

This year's World Backup Day has come and gone, but it might be the lingering impact 

of Covid-19 that has a deeper effect on organisations' backup thinking. Storage 

magazine gathered the thoughts of industry leaders 

24 

MANAGEMENT: INTERNET OF THINGS……...............28 

From medical wearables through search-and-rescue drones to smart cities, CheChung 

Lin of Western Digital, describes ways to optimise ever-growing volumes of IoT data 

using purpose-built storage 

CASE STUDY: CANAL EXTREMADURA……............…30 

Spanish TV network Canal Extremadura has revamped its IT infrastructure with Quantum 

StorNext File System software and tape solutions 

TECHNOLOGY: NAS……………….....................................32 

With the greater performance, functionality and ease of use of NAS, it is increasingly 

hard to justify the need for a SAN in modern creative workflows, argues Ben Pearce of 

GB Labs 

32 

OPINION: CLOUD STORAGE…..................................….34 

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced businesses to evolve quickly and adjust to the new 

working dynamic - but some have been better prepared than others, explains Russ 

Kennedy of Nasuni 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards May/June 2021 


MAGAZINE 

03

COMMENT 

EDITOR: David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

SUB EDITOR: Mark Lyward 

mark.lyward@btc.co.uk 

REVIEWS: Dave Mitchell 

PRODUCTION MANAGER: Abby Penn 

abby.penn@btc.co.uk 

PUBLISHER: John Jageurs 

john.jageurs@btc.co.uk 

LAYOUT/DESIGN: Ian Collis 

ian.collis@btc.co.uk 

SALES/COMMERCIAL ENQUIRIES: 

Lyndsey Camplin 

lyndsey.camplin@storagemagazine.co.uk 

Stuart Leigh 

stuart.leigh@btc.co.uk 

MANAGING DIRECTOR: John Jageurs 

john.jageurs@btc.co.uk 

DISTRIBUTION/SUBSCRIPTIONS: 

Christina Willis 

christina.willis@btc.co.uk 

PUBLISHED BY: Barrow & Thompkins 

Connexions Ltd. (BTC) 

35 Station Square, Petts Wood 

Kent BR5 1LZ, UK 

Tel: +44 (0)1689 616 000 

Fax: +44 (0)1689 82 66 22 

SUBSCRIPTIONS: 

UK £35/year, £60/two years, 

£80/three years; 

Europe: £48/year, £85 two years, 

£127/three years; 

Rest of World: £62/year 

£115/two years, £168/three years. 

Single copies can be bought for £8.50 

(includes postage & packaging). 

Published 6 times a year. 

No part of this magazine may be 

reproduced without prior consent, in 

writing, from the publisher. 

©Copyright 2021 

Barrow & Thompkins Connexions Ltd 

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 

BACKUP IS NOT JUST FOR 

MARCH 31ST 

BY DAVID TYLER 

EDITOR 

Following on from last issue's thought-provoking and occasionally controversial 

interview with Eric Siron about backup, this time around we are pleased to 

feature an industry roundtable article developed in the weeks after World Backup 

Day. The storage sector has tried hard to make March 31st a significant date to 

remind people and organisations of the vital importance of backup, but it could 

perhaps be argued that by putting it on the same level as Star Wars Day or St. 

Swithin's Day, we are instead trivialising data protection and distracting users from the 

key point that, in fact, backup is something we should be constantly thinking about - 

and regularly testing! 

As Nick Turner of Druva says in the article: "Whilst we've celebrated a decade's worth 

of World Backup Days, this past year has tested the ability to protect business data like 

no other." If something as world-changing as Covid-19 can't make us focus on 

protecting critical assets, what might? 

Businesses have adapted remarkably rapidly to remote working, but while best 

practices around data protection and recovery are still there, it is critical that those 

businesses evolve their strategies just in the same way that our approach to data and 

access changes. Quest Software's Adiran Moir comments: "We also need to move away 

from the concept of focusing just on backup. In order to get this right, organisations 

need to consider continuity - ensuring they have a platform in place that will not only 

recover the data but will do so with minimal downtime." 

Does a shift to the cloud mean that everyone will move to a Backup-as-a-Service 

model? As is so often the case, the question gets an 'it depends' answer from most of 

the experts in our article. Scality's Paul Speciale describes what to be wary of when 

opting for the cloud approach: "As with all things in IT, we need to carefully consider 

the overall cost of ownership for backup solutions, including the trade-off between 

shifting capital expenditures to operational savings in the cloud. While it can be true 

that cloud backups save money, it can also be true that they are more expensive than 

on-premises solutions." 

It is surely no coincidence that World Backup Day falls just one day before April Fools' 

Day - there is a none-too-subtle suggestion that only an idiot isn't keeping a very 

watchful eye on how his backup processes are functioning. As Zeki Turedi of 

CrowdStrike concludes: "Milestones like World Backup Day act as reminders for IT 

professionals to look again at their IT architecture and confirm it's still fit for purpose." 

Amen to that. 

^ 

04 STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 


@STMagAndAwards 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

Performance Begins Now 

Introducing the Most Comprehensive Portfolio of X12 Server and Storage Systems 

with 3 rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors 

Learn More at www.supermicro.com 

© Supermicro and Supermicro logo are trademarks of Super Micro Computer, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: HARD DISK DRIVES 

RACK TO THE FUTURE 

THE AMOUNT OF DATA WORLDWIDE GROWS BY SEVERAL BILLION 

TERABYTES EVERY YEAR AS MORE AND MORE MACHINES AND 

DEVICES ARE GENERATING DATA - BUT WHERE WILL WE PUT IT ALL? 

EVEN IN THIS AGE OF IOT, ARGUES RAINER KAESE OF TOSHIBA 

ELECTRONICS EUROPE GMBH, HARD DRIVES REMAIN INDISPENSABLE 

Data volumes have multiplied in 

recent decades, but the real data 

explosion is yet to come. Whereas, 

in the past, data was mainly created by 

people, such as photos, videos and 

documents, with the advent of the IoT 

age, machines, devices and sensors are 

now becoming the biggest data 

producers. There are already far more of 

them than people and they generate data 

much faster than us. A single autonomous 

car, for example, creates several terabytes 

per day. Then there is the particle 

accelerator at CERN that generates a 

petabyte per second, although 'only' 

around 10 petabytes per month are 

retained for later analysis. 

In addition to autonomous driving and 

research, video surveillance and industry 

are the key contributors to this data flood. 

The market research company IDC 

assumes that the global data volume will 

grow from 45 zettabytes last year to 175 

zettabytes in 2025 (IDC "Data Age 2025" 

Whitepaper, Update from May 2020). 

This means that, within six years, three 

times as much data will be generated as 

existed in total in 2019, namely 130 

zettabytes - that is 130 billion terabytes. 

Much of this data will be evaluated at 

the point of creating, for example, in the 

sensors feeding an autonomous vehicle or 

production facility (known as edge 

computing). Here, fast results and 

reactions in real-time are essential, so the 

time required for data transmission and 

central analysis is unacceptable. However, 

on-site storage space and computing 

power are limited, so sooner or later, 

most data ends up in a data centre. It can 

then be post-processed and merged with 

data from other sources, analysed further 

and archived. 

This poses enormous challenges for the 

storage infrastructures of companies and 

research institutions. They must be able to 

absorb a constant influx of large amounts 

of data and store it reliably. This is only 

possible with scale-out architectures that 

provide storage capacities of several 

dozen petabytes and can be continuously 

expanded. And they need reliable 

suppliers of storage hardware who can 

satisfy this continuous and growing 

storage demand. After all, we cannot 

afford for the data to end up flowing into 

a void. The public cloud is often touted as 

a suitable solution. Still, the reality is that 

the bandwidth for the data volumes being 

discussed is insufficient and the costs are 

not economically viable. 

For organisations that store IoT data, 

storage becomes, in a sense, a 

commodity. It is not consumed in the true 

sense of the word but, like other 

consumer goods, it is purchased regularly 

and requires continuing investment. A 

blueprint of how storage infrastructures 

and storage procurement models can 

look in the IoT age is provided by 

research institutions such as CERN that 

already process and store vast amounts of 

data. The European research centre for 

particle physics is continuously adding 

new storage expansion units to its data 

centre, each of which contains several 

hundred hard drives of the most recent 

generation. In total, their 100,000 hard 

disks have attained a total storage 

capacity of 350 petabytes. 

THE PRICE DECIDES THE MEDIUM 

The CERN example demonstrates that 

there is no way around hard disks when it 

comes to storing such enormous amounts 

of data. HDDs remain the cheapest 

medium that meets the dual requirements 

06 STORAGE May/June 2021 


www.storagemagazine.co.uk 

MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: HARD DISK DRIVES 

"Although the prices for SSDs are falling, they are doing so at a similar rate to HDDs. 

Moreover, HDDs are very well suited to meet the performance requirements of highcapacity 

storage environments. A single HDD may be inferior to a single SSD, but the 

combination of several fast-spinning HDDs achieve very high IOPS values that can 

reliably supply analytics applications with the data they require." 

of storage space and easy access. By 

comparison, tape is very inexpensive but 

is not suitable as an offline medium and 

is only appropriate for archiving data. 

Flash memory, on the other hand, is 

currently still eight to ten times more 

expensive per unit capacity than hard 

disks. Although the prices for SSDs are 

falling, they are doing so at a similar rate 

to HDDs. Moreover, HDDs are very well 

suited to meet the performance 

requirements of high-capacity storage 

environments. A single HDD may be 

inferior to a single SSD, but the 

combination of several fast-spinning 

HDDs achieve very high IOPS values that 

can reliably supply analytics applications 

with the data they require. 

In the end, price alone is the decisive 

criterion - especially since the data 

volumes to be stored in the IoT world can 

only be compressed minimally to save 

valuable storage space. If at all possible, 

compression typically takes place within 

the endpoint or at the edge to reduce the 

amount of data to be transmitted. Thus, it 

arrives in compressed form at the data 

centre and must be stored without further 

compression. Furthermore, deduplication 

offers little potential savings because, 

unlike on typical corporate file shares or 

backups, there is hardly any identical 

data. 

Because of the flood of data in IoT and 

the resultant large quantity of drives 

required, the reliability of the hard disks 

used is of great importance. This is less to 

do with possible data losses, as these can 

be handled using appropriate backup 

mechanisms, and more to do with 

maintenance of the hardware. With an 

Annualised Failure Rate (AFR) of 0.7 per 

cent, instead of the 0.35 per cent 

achieved by CERN with Toshiba hard 

disks, a storage solution using 100,000 

hard disks would require that 350 drives 

are replaced annually - on average 

almost one drive replacement more per 

day. 

HDDS STICK AROUND FOR YEARS 

TO COME 

In the coming years, little will change with 

the main burden of IoT data storage 

borne by hard disks. Flash production 

capacities will simply remain too low for 

SSDs to outstrip HDDs. To cover the 

current storage demand with SSDs alone, 

flash production would have to increase 

significantly. Bearing in mind that the 

construction costs for a single flash 

fabrication facility run to several billion 

Euros, this is an undertaking that is 

challenging to finance. Moreover, it would 

only result in higher flash output after 

around two years that would only cover 

the demand of 2020 and not that of 

2022. 

The production of hard disks, on the 

other hand, can be increased much more 

easily because less cleanroom production 

is needed than in semiconductor 

production. Additionally, the development 

of hard disks is progressing continuously, 

and new technologies such as HAMR 

(Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) and 

MAMR (Microwave-Assisted Magnetic 

Recording) are continuing to deliver 

capacity increases. Experts assume that 

HDD storage capacity will continue to 

increase at a rate of around 2 terabytes 

per year for a few more years at constant 

cost. Thus, IDC predicts that by the end of 

2025, more than 80 per cent of the 

capacity required in the enterprise sector 

for core and edge data centres will 

continue to be obtained in the form of 

HDDs and less than 20 per cent on SSDs 

and other flash media. 

More info: www.toshiba-storage.com 


@STMagAndAwards May/June 2021 


MAGAZINE 

07

INTERVIEW: INFINIDAT INFINIDAT 

BUILDING MOMENTUM 

PHIL BULLINGER WAS APPOINTED CEO AT INFINIDAT AT THE START 

OF 2021, HAVING PREVIOUSLY SHONE AT STORAGE INDUSTRY 

NAMES INCLUDING LSI, ORACLE, DELL EMC AND WD. STORAGE 

MAGAZINE EDITOR DAVE TYLER CAUGHT UP WITH PHIL TO DISCUSS 

THE CHALLENGES OF TAKING ON A NEW ROLE IN THE MIDDLE OF A 

GLOBAL CRISIS 

Dave Tyler: You have around 30 years of 

experience across many of the biggest 

names in the sector - which presumably 

was a large part of why Infinidat wanted to 

bring you in to helm the business. What was the 

draw from your side? 

Phil Bullinger: I was really attracted to the 

Infinidat opportunity because of their great 

reputation as well as the fantastic customer 

experience around the product: in my years in 

enterprise storage, whenever I came across an 

Infinidat customer they were never shy to talk 

about how much they loved the platform. I 

know - again from my own experience - that 

behind every great product is a great team, and 

since I joined the company in January these first 

few months have been incredibly positive - 

everything I had expected and hoped to find 

here has been reinforced. 

There is a real focus on innovation, but 

crucially the customer comes first in every 

conversation we have: it's genuinely a part of 

the DNA of the company. I know a lot of 

businesses say that, but so much of how 

Infinidat is organised pivots around the 

customer experience, whether it's our L3 support 

team, our technical advisers in the field, or how 

the product itself operates. I've been delighted 

to find the extent to which the company is 

organised around the customer. 

DT: Tell us a little more about the specifics of 

your role and how you fit in to Infinidat's 

strategy? 

PB: I've been blessed on many occasions in my 

career to lead companies through growth and 

scale: stepping into a business at a specific 

point in its lifecycle where it had good products 

and satisfied customers, and the task then was 

to efficiently scale the business to new levels of 

success. That is exactly what we're focussed on 

right now here at Infinidat: investing in 

engineering, sales, marketing, and raising the 

profile of the company in the markets that 

we're targeting. 

We have a lot of momentum as a business: 

throughout 2020 we had sequential growth - 

every quarter was larger than the one before. 




MAGAZINE

INTERVIEW: INTERVIEW: INFINIDAT 

Q4 saw very large growth, year over year, and 

having just completed our first calendar quarter 

of 2021 I'm really pleased to say it was a record 

for the company. That gives us a lot of 

confidence and impetus as we look ahead to 

the rest of 2021. 

DT: Given the global situation as we start to 

come out of the worst of the pandemic, how 

has the storage sector been affected? 

PB: There are some points that might look 

contradictory: from a macro-economic point of 

view there are emerging tailwinds in the global 

economy. There is no doubt that in the last year 

Covid-19 had both a positive and a negative 

impact on business. Large enterprise spending 

was constrained last year, and many enterprises 

were uncertain as to what the future held. But at 

the same time there were fundamental drivers 

of storage activity as well, because of the 

pressing need for digital transformation. 

Companies - of all sizes - were moving as fast 

as they could to transform their businesses 

around, what frankly, has become a digital 

economy, based around digital user experience 

and digital connectivity. 

How companies use their data is now the 

primary determinant not just of whether a 

company will be successful, but of whether it will 

even continue to exist going forward. What 

we're starting to see right now is projects that 

may have been on hold for a year coming back 

to the forefront. As a result, we're finding our 

own sales activity globally is seeing more 

'lubrication' in the process as customers are 

much more interested in investing in 

transformational projects. 

DT: What is Infinidat doing to address not just 

the post-Covid world, but the way businesses 

see data and storage more generally? 

PB: This is the key question for us at Infinidat: 

what are customers motivated now to do with 

their data infrastructure? The landscape looks 

very different today to ten years ago, with the 

advent of the public cloud where data and 

applications are accessed via the internet as 

opposed to locally. As new models have 

emerged, private cloud remains a crucial part 

of almost every business infrastructure - so 

almost every customer has a hybrid model. 

There has been a lot of hype around seamless 

movement of data and applications from onpremises 

to off-premises (and back again!), but 

the fact is that most enterprise customers tend 

not to pursue that line. They are more likely to 

think about which applications or data are 

super-critical to the business, need the highest 

levels of performance, availability and of course 

security - and those will go into a private cloud. 

For almost all of our customers, Infinidat forms 

the centrepiece of their private cloud 

infrastructure, because of our massive 

scalability, great reliability, and enterprise data 

features - all at lower costs than our competitors 

and often offering better performance than allflash 

systems. It's easy to see why Infinidat then 

becomes a compelling consolidation platform. 

As the intersection of digital transformation, 

private cloud architecture and Infinidat come 

together, that's what is creating such momentum 

around the business for us. 

DT: What about partners? I know Infinidat 

puts great store in its relationships with the 

likes of VMware and AWS - how important 

are those companies (and others) to your 

continued success? 

PB: Those two are really good examples of 

solution ecosystem partners for Infinidat. 

Customers don't generally buy just a platform - 

they buy a solution to a problem. Those 

solutions almost always involve an ecosystem 

web of ISVs, applications, compute, network, 

and storage - so we're very cognisant of the fact 

that Infinidat has to be tightly integrated and 

closely working with a whole range of different 

partner offerings. 

Infinidat has also always emphasised the very 

highest levels of integration with VMware: even 

from our very first release we had an 

exceptional level of native integration. These 

days some of the largest VMware deployments 

at enterprise customers are on Infinidat simply 

because we integrate so well and provide the 

scale that those customers need. I believe we 

are solving the long-standing issue between 

application administrators and storage 

administrators: when you can give the VMware 

administrator the native ability to manage our 

storage, snapshots, replication etc., that can 

really help them to manage the overall 

application infrastructure of that enterprise. 

As well as VMware and AWS we also have 

critical relationships with companies such as 

Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, Red Hat, and tight 

integrations with SAP and Oracle and other 

enterprise ISVs. 

DT: Who would you say Infinidat views as its 

primary competition in today's market? 

PB: At its simplest our competitive landscape is 

other primary storage systems you would find 

in an enterprise sovereign secure data centre - 

but there's more to it than that. You can look at 

the Gartner Magic Quadrant for primary 

storage and see all the 'usual suspects'. We 

compete against the best and most capable 

primary storage products that branded system 

OEMs and storage companies are bringing to 

the market. 

The public cloud has raised the tide for all the 

boats; the world currently only stores a fraction 

of all the data that it generates. This means that 

companies are constantly striving to work out 

how to collect, and reason over, and drive 

insight from, more and more data. Public cloud 

models have certainly accelerated that, and 

therefore more data is being created in the 

enterprise, and some of that data - usually the 

most important parts - will almost always be onpremises, 

or in a colocation, in a private cloud 

architecture. The way I look at it is that the 

cloud is a driver for business activity, and 

business activity drives data, and data of course 

drives storage, which is good for Infinidat and 

our business opportunity. 

Our customers trust our products and support 

to protect petabytes of their most important data 

- data that they 'hold most dearly', and which 

needs the very highest levels of availability, 

protection, and security. 

More info: www.infinidat.com 




MAGAZINE 

09

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: TOTAL EXPLORATION & PRODUCTION 

DELIVERING A TOTAL SOLUTION 

TOTAL EXPLORATION & PRODUCTION HAS MIGRATED ITS OFFSHORE OIL AND GAS PLATFORMS TO A 

HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE THAT DELIVERS SPACE EFFICIENCIES AS WELL AS IMPROVED 

REPLICATION AND DISASTER RECOVERY CAPABILITIES 

Nutanix has announced the 

completion of a project for Total 

Exploration & Production UK Limited 

(TEPUK) to deploy its market-leading 

hyperconverged infrastructure both in 

Aberdeen and to its North Sea oil and gas 

installations. TEPUK operates across the 

entire oil and gas value chain, aiming to 

provide hydrocarbons that are more 

affordable, more reliable, cleaner and 

accessible to as many people as possible. 

Offshore oil and gas platforms are a 

challenging environment in which to install, 

manage and support IT of any description. 

Due, not least, to logistical challenges and 

strict safety requirements, but also because 

physical space, Internet connectivity and 

manpower are at a premium. 

TEPUK chose to replace end-of-life legacy 

servers and storage networks on its rigs with 

Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure. 

Requiring less than half the equivalent rack 

space of alternative solutions, the Nutanix 

infrastructure isn't just space efficient. Other 

benefits include on-demand scalability, selfhealing 

high availability, integrated Prism 

Central remote management and hypervisor 

neutral virtualisation capabilities. 

Aberdeen-based Nutanix partner NorthPort 

Technologies was also involved. With its 

extensive experience in this field, it is able to 

provide engineers fully trained and certified 

to meet the critical safety requirements of the 

offshore industry. 

"Our engineers don't just have to be 

trained in IT, they need to be physically fit 

and pretty committed to do this kind of job," 

explains Russell Robertson, Consulting IT 

Specialist at NorthPort Technologies. "Not 

least because they have to travel to and 

from the rigs in all weathers and be 

prepared to undergo the same rigorous 

training as anyone working offshore." 

The principal role of the offshore equipment 

is to host local infrastructure services, such as 

Windows domain controllers, file and print 

sharing and all the usual business 

productivity apps. These are supported using 

VMs alongside other specialist industrial 

control and safety workloads. 

Despite the many challenges plus 

additional issues associated with the Covid- 

19 lockdown, the NorthPort team has now 

completed installation of the last set of 3- 

node offshore clusters, bringing the total 

installs to nine. In addition, the Aberdeen 

reseller has configured a coordinating 15- 

node Nutanix cluster on-shore with another 

at a separate TEPUK site for replication and 

disaster recovery (DR). 

"With this announcement we are delighted 

to welcome TEPUK to a growing list of oil 

and gas companies using Nutanix 

hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver 

industrial strength IT services in some of the 

most challenging environments around the 

globe," commented Dom Poloniecki, Vice 

President & General Manager, Sales, 

Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa 

region, Nutanix. 

"More than that, it reflects the versatility of 

the Nutanix platform which is equally at home 

providing core IT services on an offshore oil 

rig as it is supporting leading edge hybrid 

cloud in a corporate data centre." 

More info: www.nutanix.com 




MAGAZINE

Copyright ©2021 QNAP UK Limited All rights reserved 

uksales@qnap.com

RESEARCH: 

RESEARCH: DATA PROTECTION 

CAN YOU RELY ON YOUR BACKUP? 

NEW RESEARCH SHOWS THAT 58% OF BACKUPS ARE FAILING, CREATING DATA PROTECTION CHALLENGES 

AND LIMITING THE ABILITY OF ORGANISATIONS TO PURSUE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES 

URGENT ACTION ON DATA 

PROTECTION REQUIRED 

Respondents stated that their data 

protection capabilities are unable to keep 

pace with the DX demands of their 

organisation, posing a threat to business 

continuity, potentially leading to severe 

consequences for both business reputation 

and performance. Despite the integral role 

backup plays in modern data protection, 

14% of all data is not backed up at all, and 

58% of recoveries fail, leaving 

organisations' data unprotected and 

irretrievable in the event of an outage by 

cyber-attack. 

Data protection challenges are 

undermining organisations' ability to 

execute Digital Transformation 

initiatives globally, according to the 

recently-published Veeam Data Protection 

Report 2021, which has found that 58% of 

backups fail leaving data unprotected. 

Veeam's research found that against the 

backdrop of COVID-19 and ensuing 

economic uncertainty - which 40% of CXOs 

cite as the biggest threat to their 

organisation's DX in the next 12 months - 

inadequate data protection and the 

challenges to business continuity posed by 

the pandemic are hindering companies' 

initiatives to transform. 

The Veeam Data Protection Report 2021 

surveyed more than 3,000 IT decision 

makers at global enterprises to understand 

their approaches to data protection and 

data management. The largest of its kind, 

the study examines how organisations 

expect to be prepared for the IT challenges 

they face, including reacting to demand 

changes and interruptions in service, 

global influences (such as COVID-19), and 

more aspirational goals of IT 

modernisation and DX. 

"Over the past 12 months, CXOs across 

the globe have faced a unique set of 

challenges around how to ensure data 

remains protected in a highly diverse, 

operational landscape," said Danny Allan, 

Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice 

President of Product Strategy at Veeam. "In 

response to the pandemic, we have seen 

organisations accelerate DX initiatives by 

years and months in order to stay in 

business. However, the way data is 

managed and protected continues to 

undermine them. Businesses are being held 

back by legacy IT and outdated data 

protection capabilities, as well as the time 

and money invested in responding to the 

most urgent challenges posed by COVID- 

19. Until these inadequacies are 

addressed, genuine transformation will 

continue to evade organisations." 

Furthermore, unexpected outages are 

common, with 95% of firms experiencing 

them in the last 12 months; and with 1 in 4 

servers having at least one unexpected 

outage in the prior year, the impact of 

downtime and data loss is experienced all 

too frequently. Crucially, businesses are 

seeing this hit their bottom line, with more 

than half of CXOs saying this can lead to a 

loss of confidence towards their 

organisation from customers, employees 

and stakeholders. 

"There are two main reasons for the lack of 

backup and restore success: Backups are 

ending with errors or are overrunning the 

allocated backup window, and secondly, 

restorations are failing to deliver their 

required SLAs," said Allan. "Simply put, if a 

backup fails, the data remains unprotected, 

which is a huge concern for businesses given 

that the impacts of data loss and unplanned 

downtime span from customer backlash to 

reduced corporate share prices. Further 

compounding this challenge is the fact that 

the digital threat landscape is evolving at an 

exponential rate. The result is an 

unquestionable gap between the data 




MAGAZINE

RESEARCH: 

RESEARCH: DATA PROTECTION 

"In response to the pandemic, we have seen organisations accelerate DX initiatives by 

years and months in order to stay in business. However, the way data is managed and 

protected continues to undermine them. Businesses are being held back by legacy IT 

and outdated data protection capabilities, as well as the time and money invested in 

responding to the most urgent challenges posed by COVID-19." 

protection capabilities of businesses versus 

their DX needs. It is urgent that this shortfall is 

addressed given the pressure on 

organisations to accelerate their use of cloudbased 

technologies to serve customers in the 

digital economy." 

I.T. STRATEGIES IMPACTED BY 

COVID-19 

CXOs are aware of the need to adopt a 

cloud-first approach and change the way IT is 

delivered in response to the digital 

acceleration brought about by COVID-19. 

Many have already done so, with 91% 

increasing their cloud services usage in the 

first months of the pandemic, and the majority 

will continue to do so, with 60% planning to 

add more cloud services to their IT delivery 

strategy. However, while businesses recognise 

the need to accelerate their DX journeys over 

the next 12 months, 40% acknowledge that 

economic uncertainty poses a threat to their 

DX initiatives. 

UK-specific highlights from the Veeam 

research included: 

Hybrid-IT across physical, virtual and 

cloud: Over the next two years, most 

organisations expect to gradually, but 

continually, reduce their physical servers, 

maintain and fortify their virtualised 

infrastructure, while embracing 'cloud-first' 

strategies. This will result in half of 

production workloads being cloud-hosted 

by 2023, forcing most firms to re-imagine 

their data protection strategy for new 

production landscapes. 

Rapid growth in cloud-based backup: 

Backup is shifting from on-premises to 

cloud-based solutions that are managed 

by a service provider, with trajectory 

reported from 33% in 2020 to 50% 

anticipated by 2023. 

Importance of reliability: 'To improve 

reliability' was the most important driver of 

a UK organisation to change its primary 

backup solution, stated by 33% of 

respondents. 

Improving ROI: 33% stated that the most 

important driver for change was 

improving the economics of their solution, 

including improving ROI and reducing 

TCO. 

 

Availability gap: 78% of companies have 

an 'availability gap' between how fast they 

can recover applications and how fast 

they need to recover them. 

Reality gap: 77% have a 'protection gap' 

between how frequently data is backed-up 

versus how much data they can afford to 

lose after an outage. 

Modern data protection: Over half (51%) 

of organisations now use a third-party 

backup service for Microsoft Office 365 

data, and 43% plan to adopt Disaster 

Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) by 2023. 

TRANSFORMATION STARTS WITH 

DIGITAL RESILIENCY 

As organisations increasingly adopt modern IT 

services at rapid pace, inadequate data 

protection capabilities and resources will lead 

to DX initiatives faltering, even failing. CXOs 

already feel the impact, with 30% admitting 

that their DX initiatives have slowed or halted 

in the past 12 months. The impediments to 

transformation are multifaceted, including IT 

teams being too focused on maintaining 

operations during the pandemic (53%), a 

dependency on legacy IT systems (51%), and 

a lack of IT staff skills to implement new 

technology (49%). In the next 12 months, IT 

leaders will look to get their DX journeys back 

on track by finding immediate solutions to 

their critical data protection needs, with 

almost a third looking to move data 

protection to the cloud. 

"One of the major shifts we have seen 

over the past 12 months is undoubtedly an 

increased digital divide between those who 

had a plan for Digital Transformation and 

those who were less prepared, with the 

former accelerating their ability to execute 

and the latter slowing down," concluded 

Allan. "Step one to digitally transforming is 

being digitally resilient. Across the board 

organisations are urgently looking to 

modernise their data protection through 

cloud adoption. By 2023, 77% of 

businesses globally will be using cloud-first 

backup, increasing the reliability of 

backups, shifting cost management and 

freeing up IT resources to focus on DX 

projects that allow the organisation to excel 

in the digital economy." 

More info: www.veeam.com/wp-executivebrief-2021.html 




MAGAZINE 

13


CASE STUDY: SAVE THE CHILDREN SPAIN 

CHILD'S PLAY 

NON-PROFIT ORGANISATION SAVE THE CHILDREN SPAIN HAS REDUCED THE COSTS OF ITS BACKUP AND 

SIMPLIFIED DISASTER RECOVERY THANKS TO NAKIVO BACKUP & REPLICATION 

Save the Children Spain is a member 

of Save the Children International, a 

non-profit organisation that is aimed 

at making the world a better place for 

children through better education, 

healthcare, and economic opportunities. 

Nowadays, with 25,000 dedicated staff 

across 120 countries, Save the Children 

responds to major emergencies, delivers 

innovative development programs, and 

ensures children's voices are heard 

through campaigning to build a better 

future for and with children. Save the 

Children Spain has 10 locations across 

Spain and two main data centres in 

different locations. 

The organisation has a hybrid 

infrastructure with a mix of private cloud 

services and on-premises servers. A part of 

the infrastructure is virtualised with nearly 

40 virtual machines storing file servers, 

databases, reporting services, and other 

applications. The main objective of the IT 

department is to ensure consistency and 

reliability of all data. As Save the Children 

is a non-profit organisation, all money 

spent on projects must be properly justified 

to donors, while all invoices, transfer 

orders, and project reports kept safe. That 

is why data protection is imperative for the 

organisation to continue to be successful 

in the future. The organisation's goal is to 

be able to back up all data and services 

every day and restore those services easily 

and quickly in case of a disaster. 

Until recently, Save the Children Spain 

was using a different backup product to 

protect its data. However, the cost of that 

software was too expensive for a nonprofit. 

The organisation also wanted to 

take advantage of its NAS servers, but the 

previous software did not support NAS 

installation. Installation on NAS servers 

was essential for reducing the overall 

complexity of the backup strategy and 

freeing up a server from the environment. 

When Save the Children understood that 

the costs of updating its licensing with the 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: SAVE THE CHILDREN SPAIN 

"Simplifying the disaster recovery strategy was our main goal. Today, we can 

recover data on the same day in a minimum amount of time. We replicate VMs 

across our data centres. This allows us to have source VMs and VM replicas. 

Thus, if we lose one data centre, we can always power on VMs in another and the 

organisation will be operational within a few hours." 

previous vendor were too excessive, and its 

budget only allowed them to cover a 

particular number of hosts, it was time to 

look for an alternative solution. The goal 

was to save costs, simplify disaster 

recovery, and achieve simplicity. 

FUNCTIONAL YET AFFORDABLE 

NAKIVO Backup & Replication was Save 

the Children's backup solution of choice 

for several reasons. Not only is NAKIVO 

Backup & Replication affordable, but the 

total invoiced price allowed the 

organisation to protect all the virtual hosts 

with the same functionality that was 

provided by the previous vendor. Overall, 

the organisation saved money by switching 

to NAKIVO Backup & Replication. It can 

now use that money to finance other 

projects. Since NAKIVO Backup & 

Replication is compatible with various NAS 

servers, Save the Children installed the 

software on its Synology NAS. This allowed 

the organisation to free up resources and 

reduce backup strategy complexity. 

A backup appliance based on Synology 

NAS combines backup software, 

hardware, backup storage, and 

deduplication. With this installation, there 

are multiple advantages, including higher 

performance, smaller backups, faster 

recovery, and storage space savings. "The 

previous solution was installed on 

Windows, but we always wanted to take 

advantage of already available hardware. 

The whole installation process was so 

simple. We just had to add a package 

manager, find it, and click install. The 

whole process took 15 minutes at most. 

With the Synology NAS installation, we 

freed up production resources that were 

previously spent on backup," explained 

Alejandro Canet, IT Project Coordinator at 

Save the Children Spain. "Today, a full 

initial backup takes the organisation 

roughly 24 hours, while a daily 

incremental backup takes around 3 hours. 

Storage space is always expensive, so 

global data deduplication reduced space 

and saved money on storage systems for 

Save the Children. Moreover, instant 

granular recovery is a key functionality that 

saves a lot of time when recovering files or 

objects from shared resources." 

The IT department's objective was to 

create a simple disaster recovery strategy 

with the NAKIVO Backup & Replication 

functionality, as Alejandro went on: 

"Simplifying the disaster recovery strategy 

was our main goal. Today, we can recover 

data on the same day in a minimum 

amount of time. We replicate VMs across 

our data centres. This allows us to have 

source VMs and VM replicas. Thus, if we 

lose one data centre, we can always power 

on VMs in another and the organisation 

will be operational within a few hours. 

Ensuring near-instant recovery and 

uninterrupted business operations with 

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is important 

for us. NAKIVO Backup & Replication also 

allows us to keep recovery points for 

replicas and backups that we can rotate on 

a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis." 

SIMPLER, FASTER, BETTER 

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Save 

the Children simplified its disaster recovery 

strategy with VM replication and instant 

recovery. All data and applications are 

backed up daily, while VMs are replicated 

to a different data centre to ensure nearinstant 

recovery in case of a disaster. With 

a backup appliance based on Synology 

NAS, Save the Children freed up 

production resources and achieved 

business continuity. Instant granular 

recovery is also as simple as opening the 

web interface, clicking a couple of buttons, 

and recovery is done in minutes. 

"The licensing costs that were offered by 

NAKIVO turned out to be cheaper than the 

yearly maintenance costs of our previous 

product," Alejandro concluded. "NAKIVO 

Backup & Replication may be almost 10 

times cheaper. Regarding installation and 

setup time, we just spent 15 minutes and 

everything was working. With the previous 

product, installation could be over 2 

hours, plus the software was more difficult 

to use. Overall, we were able to simplify 

disaster recovery, save costs, and utilise 

existing NAS servers with NAKIVO Backup 

& Replication." 

More info: www.nakivo.com 




MAGAZINE 

15

MANAGEMENT: STORAGE TIERING 

HAVING YOUR CAKE AND EATING IT 

THE IDEAL 'STORAGE CAKE' HAS 

THREE EQUALLY IMPORTANT 

TIERS, ARGUES CRAIG WILSON, 

TECHNICAL ARCHITECT AT OCF 

As hard disk drives have grown in 

capacity we are presented with an 

interesting problem. Only a few years 

ago a petabyte of capacity would require an 

entire rack of equipment. Indeed, my first 

project with OCF involved a storage solution 

that clocked in at 1PB per 45U rack, but with 

single drive capacity soon to hit 20TB we will 

be able to house a petabyte of capacity in a 

single storage shelf. This incredible 

achievement presents a new problem - hard 

drive performance is not improving in 

lockstep with capacity. 

In fact, per TB performance is going down 

dramatically so hard drive storage is 

effectively getting slower. 10 years ago, it 

took 500 hard drives for a single petabyte of 

storage and now it only takes 50 drives for 

the same capacity. There has simply not 

been a 10x increase in hard drive 

performance in that time. Seagate has set 

out a roadmap to 120TB HDDs by 2030 

and while it has detailed some plans to 

increase performance with its Mach.2 dual 

actuator technology the per TB performance 

will still decrease as capacities increase 

beyond 30TB. 

Today you must consider if the capacity 

you require will provide the expected 

performance or if smaller capacity drives 

would be more appropriate - which not only 

increases the rack space required but also 

the power consumption and in turn the 

TCO. But if hard drives are no longer the 

go-to answer for large scale storage any 

more, what is? 

"FLASH, A-AH, SAVIOUR OF THE 

UNIVERSE!" 

We are all aware of the benefits that flash 

storage brings to the party: you only need to 

read the marketing material from any of the 

flash vendors, they clearly believe that flash 

is the future. The improvements on 

throughput and IOPS performance is huge 

when compared to hard drives and unlike 

hard drives this shows no signs of stopping 

with PCIe Gen4 NVMe drives now on the 

market and hitting an incredible 7GBps 

sequential read performance per drive. 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: STORAGE TIERING 

"A flash tier is always going to provide the most performance - however not 

many projects need to utilise all storage data. Data is important and most 

organisations need to keep data for longer than it is being actively used. 

Have you considered how much of your data is used on a daily or weekly 

basis? This is where tiering comes in. If you can identify a small percentage 

of your data that needs to be accessed on a regular basis then you can start 

to build a solution that takes the benefits from each storage technology and 

truly maximise the ROI." 

Capacities are increasing too, with 

15.36TB drives available from Lenovo's DE 

series storage arrays and IBM producing 

38.4TB FlashCore modules for FlashSystem 

storage arrays that are both available 

today. With the increase in capacities we 

can now get higher capacity density with 

flash storage than we can with traditional 

hard drives. 

The downside to this of course is price; 

per TB pricing on flash storage continues to 

vastly exceed hard drive pricing and an allflash 

storage solution can be a huge 

investment when everyone is under everincreasing 

pressure to maximise the return 

on investment for any large-scale solution. 

There is, of course, a third player in this 

game: tape. Like hard drives, tape capacity 

has continued to grow: IBM is due to 

launch its LTO9 Ultrium Technology in the 

first half of 2021 with 18TB native capacity 

or 45TB compressed capacity per cartridge. 

Unlike hard drives, performance has 

continued to increase as well. For a typical 

upgrade path LTO9 is offering a 33% 

increase on uncompressed performance 

over LTO7. Tape storage also has some 

unique advantages. The ability to air-gap 

data to protect from modern ransomware 

attacks and the ability to have huge 

capacities with minimal power usage is 

often overlooked when comparisons are 

made to traditional hard drive storage. 

SO WHICH IS BEST FOR YOUR 

PROJECT? 

How do you maximise ROI? A flash tier is 

always going to provide the most 

performance - however not many projects 

need to utilise all storage data. Data is 

important and most organisations need to 

keep data for longer than it is being actively 

used. Have you considered how much of 

your data is used on a daily or weekly 

basis? This is where tiering comes in. 

If you can identify a small percentage of 

your data that needs to be accessed on a 

regular basis then you can start to build a 

solution that takes the benefits from each 

storage technology and truly maximise the 

ROI. A solution with, for example, 20 per 

cent flash storage would present hot data 

that is used regularly with maximum 

performance to your compute environment 

while warm data could be stored on a 

cheaper hard drive-based storage array. 

Data that has not been accessed in the last 

six months could then be offloaded onto a 

tape tier using the same physical 

infrastructure as the backup process, which 

would reduce overall power consumption. 

The most popular parallel filesystems such 

as IBM Spectrum Scale, BeeGFS and Lustre, 

have support for tiering either directly or via 

integration with the RobinHood Policy 

Engine. There is also additional software 

such as IBM's Spectrum Protect and 

Spectrum Archive, Atempo's Miria or Starfish 

that can augment these features. 

Caching is also an option. IBM's Spectrum 

Scale especially offers great flexibility in this 

area with features such as local read-only 

cache (LROC) and highly available write 

cache (HAWC). LROC uses a local SSD on 

the node as an extension to the buffer pool, 

which works best for small random reads 

where latency is a primary concern, while 

HAWC uses a local SSD to reduce the 

response time for small write operations - in 

turn greatly reducing write latency 

experienced by the client. 

Deploying a single storage solution will 

always be a strong proposition from a 

management overhead. However, I don't see 

hard drive storage ever being beaten by 

flash storage on a pure capacity-to-cost 

ratio basis any time soon. By deploying 

tiering, caching or both it will be possible to 

improve storage performance and thus 

maximise ROI. 

More info: www.ocf.co.uk 




MAGAZINE 

17


CASE STUDY: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS 

PRESERVING PRICELESS MEMORIES OF 

GLOBAL CONFLICTS 

LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE SCANS AND MOVES INACTIVE DATA FROM PRIMARY STORAGE TO 

'PERPETUAL TIER' FOR LONG-TERM ACCESS AND ARCHIVAL 

Spectra Logic has announced that 

Imperial War Museums (IWM) 

deployed Spectra StorCycle Storage 

Lifecycle Management Software to 

enhance the Museums' existing storage 

infrastructure, which supports its audiovisual 

and exhibitions departments to 

preserve invaluable data, including 

thousands of films, videotapes, audio 

recordings and photographs that would 

otherwise disintegrate and be lost forever 

were they not digitised. StorCycle software 

is being used to manage a large amount 

of unstructured data that resides on 

expensive SAN and NAS storage outside 

of IWM's existing DAMS (digital asset 

management system) platform. 

EVER-GROWING COLLECTION 

Imperial War Museums tells the story of 

people who have lived, fought and died 

in conflicts involving Britain and the 

Commonwealth since the First World War. 

Its five branches attract over 2.5 million 

visitors each year and house a collection 

of over 10 million objects. The five sites 

across the UK - IWM London, IWM 

North, IWM Duxford, Churchill War 

Rooms and HMS Belfast - are home to 

approximately 750,000 digital assets, 

representing a total of 1.5PB of data as 

uncompressed files. 

Their digital asset collection includes 

5,000 film and video scan masters, 

100,000 audio masters dating back to 

the 1930s, nearly 500,00 image masters 

and thousands of lower resolution 

versions (access versions for commercial 

and web use) of the above assets. This 

volume is constantly growing, with new 

scans in the Museums' film collection 

generating an additional 10TB of data 

per month, and its videotape scanning 

project expected to create more than 

900TB of data over the next four years. 

A Spectra customer since 2009, IWM has 

implemented a large-scale data archiving 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS 

solution to reliably preserve and manage 

its substantial digital archive pertaining to 

UK and Commonwealth wartime history. 

IWM's current archive infrastructure 

consists of two Spectra T950 Tape 

Libraries, one with LTO-7 tape media and 

drives, and one with IBM TS1150 tape 

media and drives, along with a Spectra 

BlackPearl Converged Storage System, 

BlackPearl Object Storage Disk and 

BlackPearl NAS solution. 

MANAGING THE LIFECYCLE 

"When we set out on our search to find a 

storage solution capable of preserving 

Imperial War Museums' substantial digital 

archive, there were specific criteria on 

which we were not willing to compromise," 

explained Ian Crawford, chief information 

officer, IWM. "Spectra met all of our 

requirements and then some, and now 

continues to deliver with StorCycle's 

storage lifecycle management 

capabilities." 

IWM is on track to realise significant 

long-term cost savings by deploying 

Spectra StorCycle Storage Lifecycle 

Management Software to optimise their 

primary storage capacity through the 

offloading of inactive data to the 

Museums' archive infrastructure. Spectra 

StorCycle identifies and moves inactive 

data to a 'Perpetual Tier' of storage 

consisting of object storage disk and tape. 

StorCycle scans the IWM departments' 

primary storage for media file types older 

than two years and larger than 1GB, and 

automatically moves them to the IWM 

archive, maximising capacity on the 

primary storage system. 

Rob Tyler, IT infrastructure manager 

(DAMS) at IWM said, "Spectra's StorCycle 

storage lifecycle management software 

has empowered us to move our data into 

reliable, long-term storage, offloading our 

primary storage and preserving media 

files and unstructured data - all with the 

push of a button." 

"When we set out on our search to find a storage 

solution capable of preserving Imperial War 

Museums' substantial digital archive, there were 

specific criteria on which we were not willing to 

compromise. Spectra met all of our requirements and 

then some, and now continues to deliver with 

StorCycle's storage lifecycle management 

capabilities." 

Craig Bungay, vice president of EMEA 

sales, Spectra Logic, commented on the 

project: "IWM preserves invaluable 

historical data and it is vital that their data 

storage infrastructure be failsafe and 

reliable in addition to providing flexibility 

and affordability. This is achieved by 

storing multiple copies of the Museums' 

data on different media, and by 

automatically offloading inactive data 

from expensive primary storage to its 

archive solution using StorCycle." 

More info: www.SpectraLogic.com 




MAGAZINE 

19

OPINION: 

OPINION: DISASTER RECOVERY AS A SERVICE 

A DRAAS PRIMER FOR SMBS 

AS MORE AND MORE SMBS ARE ATTRACTED TO DISASTER RECOVERY 

AS A SERVICE, FLORIAN MALECKI OF STORAGECRAFT OUTLINES THE 

KEY COMPONENTS AND REQUIREMENTS OF A DRAAS SOLUTION - 

WHAT IS IMPORTANT, AND WHY 

Regardless of size, every business gets 

hurt when downtime strikes. Small 

and medium sized businesses (SMBs) 

take a big hit when their systems go down. 

An ITIC study found that nearly half of 

SMBs estimate that a single hour of 

downtime costs as much as US$100,000 

in lost revenue, end-user productivity, and 

IT support. That's why more and more by 

SMBs are adopting Disaster Recovery as a 

Service (DRaaS). One study shows 34 

percent of companies plan to migrate to 

DRaaS in 2021. 

Cloud-based backup and disaster 

recovery solutions are often at the top of 

the list when considering DRaaS solutions. 

Such an approach allows businesses to 

access data anywhere, any time, with 

certainty because the best disaster 

recovery clouds are highly distributed and 

fault-tolerant, delivering 99.999+ percent 

uptime. This article is intended to help 

SMBs understand the key elements of a 

DRaaS solution, beginning with an 

explanation of the basics of DRaaS. 

DISTRIBUTED BACKUPS MAXIMISE 

PROTECTION 

Data replication is the process of updating 

copies of data in multiple places at the 

same time. Replication serves a single 

purpose: it makes sure data is available to 

users when they need it. 

Data replication synchronises data 

source - say primary storage - with backup 

target databases, so when changes are 

made to source data, it is quickly updated 

in backups. The target database could 

include the same data as the source 

database - full-database replication - or a 

subset of the source database. 

For backup and disaster recovery, it 

makes sense to make full-database 

replications. At the same time, companies 

can also reduce their source database 

workloads for analysis and reporting 

functions by replicating subsets of source 

data, say by business department or 

country, to backup targets. 

MANAGING BACKUP IMAGES 

As companies continue to add more 

backups over time, they'll need to manage 

these accumulated images and the storage 

space the images consume. Image 

management solutions with a managedfolder 

structure allow companies to spend 

less time configuring settings on backups. 

But that's just the start. These solutions 

can also provide image verification so that 

backup image files are ready and available 

for fast, reliable recovery and advanced 

image verification that delivers regular 

visual confirmation that backups are 

working correctly. 

To reduce restoration time and the risk of 

backup file corruption, and also reduce 

storage space required, image management 

solutions can automatically consolidate 

continuous incremental backup image files. 

Companies can also balance storage space 

and file recovery by setting policies that suit 

their needs and easily watch over backup 

jobs in the user interface, with alerts sent 

when any issues arise. 

Image management solutions allow the 

management of system resources to 

enable throttling and concurrent 

processing. Backups are replicated onto 

backup targets - local, on-network, and 

cloud - so companies are always prepared 

for disaster. The solution also allows prestaging 

of the recovery of a server before 

disaster strikes to reduce downtime. 

CORE DRIVER FOR BUSINESS 

CONTINUITY 

Failover is a backup operational mode 

that switches to a standby database, 

server, or network if the primary system 

fails or is offline for maintenance. Failover 

ensures business continuity by seamlessly 

redirecting requests from the failed or 

downed mission-critical system to the 

backup system. The backup systems 

should mimic the primary operating system 

environment and be on another device or 

in the cloud. 




MAGAZINE

OPINION: 

OPINION: DISASTER RECOVERY AS A SERVICE 

"Companies also need to ensure that data stored in their disaster recovery site is 

always secure. If a disaster strikes, it may be impossible to recover quickly. 

Suppose a failover does occur and the company's operations are now running 

from a disaster recovery cloud. In that case, they need to protect the data in that 

virtual environment by replicating it to their backup targets immediately. That's 

why network bandwidth is the next concern." 

With failover capabilities for important 

servers, back-end databases, and networks 

can count on continuous availability and 

near-certain reliability. Say the primary onsite 

server fails. Failover takes over hosting 

requirements with a single click. Failover also 

lets companies run maintenance projects, 

without human oversight, during scheduled 

software updates. That ensures seamless 

protection against cybersecurity risks. 

WHY FAILOVER MATTERS 

While failover integration may seem costly, 

it's crucial to bear in mind the incredibly 

high cost of downtime. Think of failover as 

a critical safety and security insurance 

policy. And failover should be an essential 

part of any disaster recovery plan. From a 

systems engineering standpoint, the focus 

should be on minimising data transfers to 

reduce bottlenecks while ensuring highquality 

synchronisation between primary 

and backup systems. 

GETTING BACK TO NORMAL 

Failback is the follow-on to failover. While 

failover is switching to a backup source, 

failback is the process of restoring data to 

the original resource from a backup. Once 

the cause of the failover is remedied, the 

business can resume normal operations. 

Failback also involves identifying any 

changes made while the disaster recovery 

site or virtual machine was running in place 

of the primary site or virtual machine. 

It's crucial that the disaster recovery 

solution can run the company's workloads 

and sustain the operations for as long as 

necessary. That makes failback testing 

critical as part of the disaster recovery 

plan. It's essential to monitor any failback 

tests closely and document any 

implementation gaps so they can be 

closed. Regular failback testing will save 

critical time when the company needs to 

get its house back in order. 

Companies need to consider several 

important areas regarding the failback 

section of their disaster recovery plan. 

Connectivity is first on the list. If there isn't 

a reliable connection or pathway between 

the primary and backup data, failback 

likely won't even be possible. A secure 

connection ensures that a failback can be 

performed without interruption. 

Companies can be sure that their source 

data and backup target data are always 

synchronised, so the potential for data loss 

is minimised. 

Companies also need to ensure that data 

stored in their disaster recovery site is 

always secure. If a disaster strikes, it may 

be impossible to recover quickly. Suppose 

a failover does occur and the company's 

operations are now running from a 

disaster recovery cloud. In that case, they 

need to protect the data in that virtual 

environment by replicating it to their 

backup targets immediately. That's why 

network bandwidth is the next concern. If 

they don't have sufficient bandwidth, 

bottlenecks and delays will interfere with 

synchronisation and hamper recovery. 

Testing is the most critical element for 

ensuring failback is successful when 

businesses need it. That means testing all 

systems and networks to ensure they are 

capable of resuming operations after 

failback. It's advisable to use an alternate 

location as the test environment and use 

knowledge obtained from the test to 

optimise the failback strategies. 

FINAL THOUGHTS 

Whether it's a natural disaster like a 

hurricane or a flood, a regional power 

outage, or even ransomware, there is little 

doubt about the business case for DRaaS. 

With DRaaS ensuring business continuity, 

no matter what happens, recovery from a 

site-wide disaster is fast and easy to 

perform from a disaster recovery cloud. 

Add up the cost to a business in dollars 

and cents: lost data, lost productivity and 

reputational damage. Just an hour of 

downtime could pay for a year - or many 

years, for that matter - of DRaaS. 

More info: www.storagecraft.com 




MAGAZINE 

21


CASE STUDY: TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TREDU 

ENSURING THE SAFETY OF DATA IN THE CLOUD 

TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TREDU IN FINLAND HAS IMPLEMENTED A HYBRID SOLUTION THAT 

OFFERS A UNIFIED PORTAL FOR STORAGE AND BACKUP OF MULTIPLE SERVICES, ELIMINATING THE NEED 

TO JUMP FROM ONE APPLICATION TO ANOTHER 

With Microsoft 365's retention policy for 

deleted items of 30 days, Tampere's 

technical team needed to find a solution 

to house, and always be able to retrieve, 

this vital data. Meanwhile another factor 

that needed to be addressed was the 

operational expense for any solution 

being deployed. 

Tampere Vocational College Tredu is 

a college based in Tampere, the 

second largest city in Finland. The 

college offers vocational programmes in 

Finnish secondary education in various 

fields including Technology, Natural 

Sciences, Communications and Tourism. 

Tampere's student population increased 

significantly in 2013 when Pirkanmaa 

Educational Consortium and the existing 

Tampere College merged, and today 

Tampere hosts approximately 18,000 

students and 1,000 staff members across 

its curriculum and campus. 

A SERIES OF CHALLENGES 

As an educational institution, Tampere 

has a legal obligation to retain data 

generated by both students and staff. 

With an increasing reliance on services 

such as Microsoft 365, this means more 

data is being generated on the cloud 

than ever. Coupled with the challenges 

the global pandemic has brought, remote 

working and offsite learning means 

services such as these are leveraged even 

more keenly and have become a 

significant part of the educational 

landscape. 

Aside from the accounts of the 18,000 

students and 1,000 faculty members, 

Tampere college also need to protect 

data in accounts of former students and 

academic projects. This means they have 

to contend with over 34,000 Drive, 

Contact and Calendar accounts and in 

excess of 68,000 mailboxes and over 

11,000 SharePoints. Added to the 

pressure of this, the school has a massive 

domain system in which new accounts are 

created frequently and old accounts are 

closed, which in turn creates 

management complexities. 

Arttu Miettunen, Systems Analyst at 

Tampere, began his search and 

benchmarked various solutions from 

major backup providers. Eventually it was 

clear Synology could not only resolve the 

issues of data storage, but also offered 

backup for Microsoft services with no 

license costs. Having the storage 

hardware and backup as an integrated 

solution brings further reassurance to the 

team managing this task. 

MEETING ALL REQUIREMENTS 

An SA3600 unit was deployed with 12 x 

12TB Enterprise HDDs, along with the 

added benefit of 2 x SNV3500 400G, 

Synology's M.2 NVMe SSDs to create a 

cache. The current backup occupies 

15TBs of storage, however, as Tampere's 

data needed to grow, the team was 

acutely aware that the solution also had 

to offer scalability. This was an obstacle 

that the SA3600 can readily handle, with 

12 existing bays in the base unit and the 

facility to scale up to 180 drives with use 

of Synology expansion units. In addition, 

Active Backup for Microsoft 365 comes 

with de-duplication in place, which cuts 

down the backup by 7 terabytes in the 

first run, achieving 46% saving on 

storage media. 

Arttu and his team knew they wanted 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: TAMPERE VOCATIONAL COLLEGE TREDU 

"It could have been difficult to predict how performance might have been affected 

as the number of users and amount of data increased, but this was resolved by 

deploying an SSD cache with the Synology NVMe SSDs in place. This handled 

substantial caching workloads in this multi-user environment by making the data 

available on the lower latency NVMe SSDs instead of having to retrieve it from the 

slower hard disk drives. By deploying a shrewd hybrid storage system with HDDs 

and SSDs, Tampere enjoy maximum value from their disk array." 

it from the slower hard disk drives. By 

deploying a shrewd hybrid storage system 

with HDDs and SSDs, Tampere enjoy 

maximum value from their disk array. 

MANAGEABLE & FUTUREPROOF 

By utilising Synology's Active Backup for 

Microsoft 365, Tampere benefit from: 

Comprehensive protection and backup 

for Teams, SharePoint Online, 

OneDrive and Exchange Online 

Full integration with Azure AD 

Easy and centralised management 

portal with advanced permissions 

controls 

Cost saving with license-free software 

and data deduplication 

Future-proofing with scalable storage 

via expansion 

one unified portal for the storage and 

backup of multiple services to eliminate 

the need to jump from one application to 

another. When new students and faculty 

join onto the school's Azure AD, accounts 

must be detected and protected 

automatically. The IT team wanted to 

give restoration privileges to some users 

but not all, and had to be able to tweak 

the setting easily. After a trial with 

Synology, Arttu is confident that this 

solution covers all their requirements and 

will last them for many years. 

It could have been difficult to predict 

how performance might have been 

affected as the number of users and 

amount of data increased, but this was 

resolved by deploying an SSD cache with 

the Synology NVMe SSDs in place. This 

handled substantial caching workloads in 

this multi-user environment by making the 

data available on the lower latency 

NVMe SSDs instead of having to retrieve 

With Synology Active Backup for 

Microsoft 365 deployed, the Tampere 

team is now able to protect the school's 

cloud workloads and lower ongoing costs 

substantially. 

"Synology is providing us a way to ensure 

the safety of our data in the cloud," 

concludes Arttu Miettunen. "With Synology, 

we're able to safeguard and restore our 

data in Microsoft 365 services in case of 

accidental deletion or data loss." 

More info: www.synology.com 




MAGAZINE 

23

ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP BACKUP 

EVERY DAY IS A BACKUP DAY 

THIS YEAR'S WORLD BACKUP DAY HAS COME AND GONE, BUT IT MIGHT BE THE LINGERING 

IMPACT OF COVID-19 THAT HAS A DEEPER EFFECT ON ORGANISATIONS' BACKUP THINKING. 

STORAGE MAGAZINE GATHERED THE THOUGHTS OF INDUSTRY LEADERS 

Just as a dog isn't just for Christmas, it is 

increasingly clear that backup isn't 

something we should only think about on 

World Backup Day. This March saw the 

landmark tenth WBD, but it is fair to say that 

we haven't seen ten years of measurable 

improvements in how organisations plan and 

manage their backup and restore processes. 

As data volumes soar and interconnectivity 

spreads ever wider it might look like those 

who evangelise about backup are fighting a 

losing battle. 

But the recent changes to all our working 

patterns forced on us by the pandemic and 

lockdown have brought a renewed focus for 

many at board level on the importance of a 

defined - and tested - backup strategy. 

According to Nick Turner, VP EMEA, Druva: 

"Whilst we've celebrated a decade's worth of 

World Backup Days, this past year has tested 

the ability to protect business data like no 

other. According to our Value of Data report, 

since the onset of the pandemic, IT leaders in 

the UK and US have reported an increase in 

data outages (43%), human error tampering 

data (40%), phishing (28%), malware (25%) 

and ransomware attacks (18%)." 

IS YOUR BACKUP FIT FOR PURPOSE? 

So is World Backup Day really anything more 

than a PR opportunity for vendors? Zeki 

Turedi, CTO EMEA at CrowdStrike says: 

"Milestones like World Backup Day act as 

reminders for IT professionals to look again 

at their IT architecture and confirm it's still fit 

for purpose. Like so many organisations 

around the world, the last year taught us that 

workers can adapt how they work, but our IT 

infrastructure in some cases is not as flexible. 

What the pandemic hasn't done at all is slow 

the growth in threats posed to organisations." 

It is important to understand the difference 

between backup and business continuity, 

argues Adrian Moir, Lead Technology 

Evangelist at Quest Software: "Businesses 

have rapidly adapted to remote working, and 

many employees are now operating and 

accessing data away from the traditional 

corporate office. While the best practices 

around data protection and recovery are still 

there, it is critical that business evolve their 

strategies just in the same way that our 




MAGAZINE

ROUNDTABLE: ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP 

"On-premises backup solutions have run out of favour due to 

their expensive hardware requirements and inability to scale. 

Cloud backup enables tapping into cloud economies of scale, 

as well as being off premises, thus protecting against 

catastrophic site failures such as fire or flood." - Aron Brand, CTERA 

approach to data and access changes. We 

also need to move away from the concept of 

focusing just on backup. In order to get this 

right, organisations need to consider 

continuity - ensuring they have a platform in 

place that will not only recover the data but 

will do so with minimal downtime." 

Has the growth in home-working pushed 

more enterprise data into the cloud? 

Though the move to public and hybrid 

clouds is still seeing growth, the demand for 

on-premises data backups is still buoyant, 

as Alexander Ivanyuk, technology director at 

Acronis explains: "Companies that deal with 

very sensitive data such as government, 

military, research, pharmaceuticals, and so 

on, still prefer to keep data on site or in a 

private cloud." 

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS 

Aron Brand, CTO at CTERA, supports the 

thinking that on-premise backups may fade 

over time in favour of cloud-based options: 

"On-premises backup solutions have run out 

of favour due to their expensive hardware 

requirements and inability to scale. Cloud 

backup enables tapping into cloud 

economies of scale, as well as being off 

premises, thus protecting against 

catastrophic site failures such as fire or 

flood." That said, hybrid solutions can help 

organisations enjoy the best of both worlds; 

with a backup on-premises and one in the 

cloud, IT teams can back up sensitive data 

(safely in house) and maintain cost-effective 

and flexible scalability during major demand 

increases (through the cloud). More and 

more hybrid options are coming to market, 

in response to the trend seeing organisations 

often hesitant to lock all of their 

organisations' data into the cloud. Hybrid 

could indeed be the way to go according to 

Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at ESG 

Global: "Everything's going to be hybrid, and 

for a long time. Especially in terms of backup 

and recovery." 

Sascha Giese, Head Geek at SolarWinds, 

highlights the importance of testing, wherever 

your data is being backed up to: "From both 

a business and personal point of view, we 

are well placed to take advantage of the 

cloud technologies that make data backup a 

very simple process. That said, we still need 

to treat data backup as a top priority. Despite 

having the cloud platforms in place that 

enable fairly quick recovery, IT professionals 

should still be taking matters into their own 

hands and ensuring in today's data heavy 

environment, everything is backed up. 

"This year, more than ever, I encourage IT 

professionals everywhere to do two things. 

First, take the '3, 2, 1' approach - create 

three working backups, stored in two 

different places, with one always being stored 

offsite. Second, test! Treat and plan for a 

data loss in the same way that you would for 

a fire drill. Make sure you are regularly 

testing for any disasters that cause data loss 

and try to find ways that you can improve 

disaster recovery. If you take these small 

steps, any data loss can be rectified very 

quickly with minimum downtime." 

AT YOUR SERVICE? 

The rush to cloud and containerisation brings 

new risks, argues Druva's Turner: "The secret 

to supporting a successful hybrid workforce 

will be in recognising how the industry has 

evolved and the gaps which may have been 

overlooked in the rush to complete projects. 

As we've surged the deployment of SaaS 

applications, we need to acknowledge that 

being the target of a cyber attack is now 

almost inevitable. Therefore, prioritising data 

protection in the cloud to prepare is vital. 

"Remember, a robust approach to data 

resiliency should include detection, 

remediation, and recovery. Relying on 

preventative measures is no longer sufficient. 

With critical data, including ongoing research 

around COVID-19 and vaccination trials, 

being shared around the world, the stakes for 

data protection have never been higher. It's 

time we take a hard look at the existing 

frameworks and leverage the latest 

technologies to meet this moment." 

Does a shift to the cloud mean that everyone 





MAGAZINE 

25

ROUNDTABLE: BACKUP BACKUP 

"Businesses have rapidly adapted to remote working, and many 

employees are now operating and accessing data away from the 

traditional corporate office. While the best practices around data 

protection and recovery are still there, it is critical that business 

evolve their strategies just in the same way that our approach to 

data and access changes. We also need to move away from 

the concept of focusing just on backup." - Adrian Moir, Quest Software 

will move to a backup-as-a-service model? 

As is so often the case, the question gets an 'it 

depends' answer from most of our experts. "UK 

organisations are aware that over-reliance on 

legacy IT and data protection tools poses an 

immediate threat to their ongoing DX 

initiatives," said Dan Middleton, Vice President 

UK&I at Veeam. "Over half of firms across the 

country now use a third-party backup service 

to help protect the data of critical remote work 

applications such as Microsoft Office 365, 

according to the Veeam Data Protection 

Report 2021. Moving to subscription-based 

data protection services will enable UK 

companies to take advantage of more costeffective 

solutions with the flexibility to pay only 

for the services they use. This can ensure 

processes such as software updates, patching 

and testing are automated as opposed to 

relying on manual protocols, providing 

greater data protection while allowing 

businesses to de-risk their transformation and 

business continuity initiatives." 

SEEING THE TRUE COSTS 

Krista Macomber, senior analyst at the 

Evaluator Group, describes some of the 

factors organisations should consider if 

thinking about switching to the cloud: "There 

are a whole host of factors that go into 

determining the total cost of ownership of a 

backup solution that leverages the public 

cloud. Egress fees, how much data is being 

protected, how much that data is growing, 

and how long it must be retained for, are just 

a few factors." 

Egress fees are indeed not a cost to be 

ignored, as the migration of significant 

amounts of data back to on-premises can 

easily run into very considerable sums. In 

addition, the cost of hosting backups in the 

cloud goes beyond the fees attached to the 

storage of that data, as ESG's Bertrand 

explains: "I don't think we're there yet in terms 

of fully understanding the actual costs of cloud 

backup. The one thing that's more important 

than the cost of the backup and recovery is the 

cost to the organisation if they are not able to 

recover data." 

Scality's Chief Product Office Paul Speciale 

concurs with this view, describing what to look 

out for when opting for the cloud approach: 

"As with all things in IT, we need to carefully 

consider the overall cost of ownership for 

backup solutions, including the trade-off 

between shifting capital expenditures to 

operational savings in the cloud. While it can 

be true that cloud backups save money, it can 

also be true that they are more expensive than 

on-premises solutions. Hosted backups or 

Backup-as-a-Service (BUaaS) offerings are 

popular and widely embraced and do indeed 

reduce the burden on IT administrators from a 

time perspective, which has a bearing on 

backup cost. Also, the cloud promises more 

choices of classes of storage with 

performance and cost trade-offs." 

Looking ahead, both Evaluator Group's 

Randy Kerns and Krista Macomber suggest 

that Backup-as-a-Service will be popular in the 

coming months, with Kerns saying: "I think the 

key for IT operations will be evaluating Backup 

as a Service options. Vendors will work on 

developments in this area," and Macomber 

adding: "I also think we'll see an ongoing tick 

towards service-based delivery. This may mean 

a public cloud-based solution, or it might 

mean a managed services-based approach." 

The last word goes to Sarah Doherty of iland 

who sums up what many of our commentators 

have said: "The importance of backup is often 

overlooked by the latest security scare or large 

attack making headlines. In most cases, the 

focus is on other details rather than creating a 

plan to keep all data safe and available from 

any of these events. Both internal and external 

threats are on the rise. In today's uncertain 

times, keeping data safe and recoverable is 

more important than ever. Let's take World 

Backup Day as a reminder for your 

organisation to create a backup and recovery 

plan of action. The increase in disastrous 

events, whether from nature, human error, 

cyber-attacks or ransomware, makes it that 

much more critical for organisations to 

consider all that they have to lose and 

highlights the need to create the right backup 

and recovery solution." ST 




MAGAZINE

The Way We Use Data Is Changing… 

So Why Hasn’t Storage? 

Break the status quo and rethink storage – with StorCycle ® Storage 

Lifecycle Management software. 

StorCycle is a software solution that identifies data, specifically 

inactive data, and allows you to migrate it to the right tier of 

storage. It helps you store your data for the long term, for 

ransomware preparedness, or to preserve it for its future value 

and use. And finally, StorCycle allows users to easily access data 

when they need it. 

Schedule a Demo

MANAGEMENT: INTERNET OF THINGS 

AS IOT EXPANDS, ONE SIZE WON'T FIT ALL 

FROM MEDICAL WEARABLES THROUGH SEARCH-AND-RESCUE DRONES TO SMART CITIES, CHECHUNG 

LIN, DIRECTOR OF TECHNICAL PRODUCT MARKETING AT WESTERN DIGITAL, DESCRIBES WAYS TO 

OPTIMISE THE EVER-GROWING VOLUMES OF IOT DATA USING PURPOSE-BUILT STORAGE 

Whilst the digital environment has 

been expanding rapidly for many 

years, the pandemic ushered in, 

by necessity, a degree of digital 

transformation that is unprecedented in 

both its scale and scope. With 

organisations throughout private and public 

sectors alike forced to roll out digital 

systems, there has been a sharp uptake in 

the adoption of connected technologies. 

As the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape 

experiences large-scale growth - from 

automated supply chains to help maintain 

social distancing, to more efficient and 

convenient smart cities and vehicles - the 

amount of data produced grows rapidly, 

as well. It is estimated that by 2025, 

connected IoT devices will generate 

73.1 zettabytes of data. 

Not only does this data need to 

be captured, it also needs to be 

stored, accessed and transformed 

into valuable insights. This process 

requires a comprehensive data 

architecture that can 

accommodate the demands of a 

large range of use applications 

throughout the data journey. 

WHAT IS THE IOT DATA 

JOURNEY? 

The vast majority of IoT data is 

stored in the cloud where highcapacity 

drives - now reaching 20TB - 

store massive amounts of data for big 

data and fast data workloads. These 

could include genomic research, batch 

analytics, predictive modelling, and supply 

chain optimisation. 

For some use cases, data then 

migrates to the edge, 

where it is often 

cached in 

distributed, edge 

servers for realtime 

applications 

such as autonomous vehicles, cloud 

gaming, manufacturing robotics, and 

4K/8K video streaming. 

Finally, we reach the endpoints, where 

data is generated by connected machines, 

smart devices, and wearables. The key aim 

here is to reduce network latencies and 

increase throughput between these layers 

(cloud-to-endpoints and endpoints-tocloud) 

for data-intensive use cases. A 

potential solution could be 5G, by using 

millimetre wave (mmWave) bands between 

20-100 GHz to create "data 

superhighways" for latency and bandwidthsensitive 

innovations. 

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF YOUR 

IOT DATA? 

Data infrastructure is critical in our digital 

world as data must be stored and analysed 

quickly, efficiently, and securely. Thus, data 

architectures need to go beyond simple 

data capture and storage to data 

transformation and creating business 

value, in a 'value creation' approach. 

Examples include: 

Autonomous vehicles - These vehicles 

are loaded with sensors, cameras, 

LIDAR, radar, and other devices 

generating so much data that it is 

estimated it will reach 2 terabytes per 

day. That data is used to inform realtime 

driving decisions using 

technologies such as 3D-mapping, 

advanced driver assistance systems 

(ADAS), over-the-air (OTA) updates, and 

vehicle-to-everything (V2X) 

communication. In addition, IoT data 

creates value in personalised 

infotainment and in-vehicle services that 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: INTERNET OF THINGS 

improve the passenger experience. In 

order to enable real-time decision 

making, which is crucial for passenger 

safety, the priority for this data 

architecture is reducing network 

latencies, along with enabling heavy 

throughput to facilitate predictive 

maintenance. 

Medical wearables - It has been 

predicted that in 2021, worldwide enduser 

spending on wearable devices will 

total US$81.5 billion. These devices 

generate important data to track sleep 

patterns, measure daily movements, 

and identify nutrition and blood oxygen 

levels. This IoT data can be transformed 

into daily, monthly, and yearly trends 

that can identify opportunities to 

improve health habits using datainformed 

decisions. Such data could 

also create more personalised and 

proactive treatments, especially as 

telehealth and remote healthcare 

continue to progress, even after the 

pandemic subsides. Here, the storage 

priority for data architecture is offering 

long-term retention for critical health 

records. 

In addition, the following IoT applications 

provide key examples as to why storage 

considerations vary according to each 

specific case, and how the requirements 

can be met. 

Search-and-rescue drones - This is a 

key example of an IoT use case which 

requires a very specific data storage 

solution to get maximum value from the 

application. Such drones are often 

required to operate in harsh natural 

environments with extreme temperatures 

and weather patterns. Therefore, the 

storage solutions used in these 

technologies must be especially durable 

and resilient, such as the highendurance 

and highly reliable 

industrial-grade e.MMC and UFS 

embedded flash drives. 

Search-and-rescue drones are also 

commonly used in combination as part of a 

wider network, utilising optimised routes 

and shared automated missions. This 

means that the data architecture must be 

scalable, enabling the operation of multiple 

technologies in conjunction with extreme 

efficiency, performance, and durability. 

Smart cities - For smart cities to 

function, they require the storage of 

huge amounts of both archived and 

real-time data. In order to analyse and 

act on real-time data, IoT technologies 

are relying on storage at the edge and 

endpoints. For example, smart public 

transport systems require real-time data 

on traffic, in order to quickly and 

accurately adjust to spikes in demand, 

such as rush-hour traffic. This means 

that, similar to smart cars, this 

application requires data storage that 

facilitates low network latencies. 

The storage for archival data, in 

comparison, requires less of a focus on 

real-time rapid transfer, instead prioritising 

long-term retention. Here, cloud solutions 

come into play. Intelligent carbon mapping 

tools enable another IoT use case which 

relies on historical data of carbon emissions 

in order to identify trends and deploy 

carbon reduction measures. 

GENERAL-PURPOSE TO PURPOSE- 

BUILT ARCHITECTURE 

Various connected technologies have 

different requirements when it comes to 

how data must be stored in the most 

appropriate way and how to get the best 

value from it. For example, NVMe storage 

solutions are ideal for use cases that 

require very high performance and low 

latency in the data journey. Specialised 

storage is therefore necessary in order to 

create optimum value from IoT data, which 

must be considered when building out the 

wider data infrastructure. 

Many businesses, however, still use 

general-purpose architecture to manage 

their IoT data. This architecture does not 

fully meet the varying needs of IoT 

applications and workloads for consumers 

and enterprises. 

For example, whilst search and rescue 

drones prioritise endurance and resilience, 

storage solutions in digital healthcare 

applications must focus on offering longterm 

retention and security for critical health 

records. Therefore, there must be a move 

from general-purpose storage, to purposebuilt 

data storage and different solutions for 

different needs. 

For any data architecture, the goal is to 

maximise the value of data. For real-time 

IoT use cases, your storage strategy has to 

be designed specifically for IoT, and 

address the following considerations: 

1. Accessibility: what is its serviceability, 

connectivity and maintenance? 

2. Wear endurance: It is WRITE-intensive or 

READ-intensive? 

3. Storage requirements: what data and 

how much needs to be processed, analysed 

and saved at the endpoints, at the edge, 

and in the cloud? 

4. Environment: what is the altitude, 

temperature, humidity and vibration levels 

of the environment in which data will be 

captured and kept? 

SPECIALISATION FOR OPTIMISATION 

Taking optimal advantage of the evolving 

IoT data landscape means using specialised 

storage solutions to bring unique business 

value. It is no longer sufficient to rely on 

standard, 'one size fits all' storage solutions, 

when the requirements for different IoT 

applications vary so drastically. The 

deployment of innovative and specific data 

storage solutions will help businesses and 

enterprises to navigate the accelerating 

journey of the IoT landscape, and will 

ensure that the value of data isn't lost 

unnecessarily in the process. 

More info: www.westerndigital.com 




MAGAZINE 

29


CASE STUDY: CANAL EXTREMADURA 

FOCUSED ON DELIVERING CONTENT, 

INSTEAD OF WORRYING ABOUT WHERE IT'S 

STORED 

SPANISH TV NETWORK CANAL EXTREMADURA HAS REVAMPED ITS I.T. INFRASTRUCTURE WITH 

QUANTUM STORNEXT FILE SYSTEM SOFTWARE AND TAPE SOLUTIONS 

Headquartered in Merida, Spain, 

Canal Extremadura is in the middle 

of a large-scale digital 

transformation. To make the transition from 

a traditional radio and TV business to a 

modern multimedia corporation, the 

company needed to upgrade its outdated 

and complex IT infrastructure. By adopting 

the Quantum StorNext File System software 

as part of its archive solution, it has 

accelerated the retrieval of media projects 

and achieved scalability for its rapidly 

growing business. 

The company's existing archive had 

become a significant pain point. "We ran 

out of room in the tape library and had to 

migrate some video to a NAS just to free 

up space," said Francisco Reyes, technical 

chief at Canal Extremadura. 

Unfortunately, expanding the system was 

not financially feasible. 

Canal Extremadura's new archive 

solution needed to merge 

seamlessly with 

its 

preferred media asset management (MAM) 

system from Dalet, which is at the centre of 

its media production and post-production 

workflow. Additionally, the new archive 

needed to enable a smooth transition from 

the existing large-scale environment, which 

contained a huge volume of old files in 

legacy media formats. 

SCALABILITY IN THE ARCHIVE 

Canal Extremadura's IT group requested 

proposals from multiple storage vendors, 

but ultimately chose Quantum based on 

Dalet's recommendation. This carried 

significant weight, especially given the 

importance of integrating the archive with 

the MAM system in order to achieve the 

flexibility and scalability needed. 

"We tend to keep solutions for a very long 

time-we had been using the 

previous system for 

about 12 

years - so we needed to be very confident 

in a new solution before making the 

selection," says Reyes. "The advice and 

technical information we received from the 

Dalet and Quantum teams was very 

helpful. They gave a very clear picture of 

how the solution would work and how it 

would be implemented." 

After consulting with Dalet and Quantum, 

the IT group decided on a solution based 

on Quantum StorNext File System software 

with Xcellis storage servers, an Xcellis 

metadata array, a QXS disk storage array, 

and a StorNext AEL6000 tape library. The 

tape library, which has 400 slots, uses LTO- 

8 drives - a notable upgrade from the LTO- 

3 drives the company was using previously. 

The environment is fully integrated with the 




MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: CANAL EXTREMADURA 

"We have more than 100 TB of online storage from Quantum. So if someone has 

completed a project six months ago, it will probably still be online. Adding online 

storage to our previous system would have been much too costly - that's really not 

how that system was designed. For us, the Quantum StorNext approach works 

much better. In the past, users knew they had to wait for content to be retrieved from 

the archive. Now it's much faster than before. We have more drives and faster 

drives with the Quantum archive." 

Dalet Galaxy MAM system. 

The networking flexibility of the 

Quantum platform has been beneficial 

for the IT group in supporting a range of 

client systems. Specifically, the storage 

environment is configured to offer Fibre 

Channel connectivity to 10 SAN clients 

plus 10-GbE connections to multiple NAS 

clients, while the metadata network uses 

1 GbE. 

MAKING CONTENT READILY 

AVAILABLE 

Thanks to the StorNext File System 

software and integrated online storage, 

Canal Extremadura's journalists, 

producers, and other team members can 

now retrieve content much faster than 

before. 

"We have more than 100 TB of online 

storage from Quantum. So if someone 

has completed a project six months ago, 

it will probably still be online," says Reyes. 

"Adding online storage to our previous 

system would have been much too costly - 

that's really not how that system was 

designed. For us, the Quantum StorNext 

approach works much better." 

Even when content has been archived to 

tape, the IT group can deliver it to users 

swiftly. "In the past, users knew they had to 

wait for content to be retrieved from the 

archive," says Reyes. "Now it's much faster 

than before. We have more drives and 

faster drives with the Quantum archive." 

Transitioning to the latest LTO 

technology has also helped expedite 

retrieval. By upgrading from LTO-3 to 

LTO-8, Canal Extremadura can store 

significantly more data on each tape. 

Consequently, there is a greater chance 

that each retrieval request can be satisfied 

without having to load multiple tapes. 

Explaining the benefit of faster archival 

retrieval for users, Reyes says, "Journalists 

might be in a hurry to assemble a new 

video for that day's news broadcast. With 

a faster archive, we can help them meet 

their deadlines." 

GET UP TO SPEED FAST 

To ensure Canal Extremadura gets the 

most of out of its new archive solution, 

Quantum provided multi-day onsite 

training. At the same time, the Dalet 

implementation team helped Canal 

Extremadura migrate its existing archive to 

the Quantum environment-a process that 

involved transcoding some archived 

content from legacy formats. "The process 

took some time because we had a lot of 

data to migrate, but it was quite smooth," 

says Reyes. 

SIMPLIFYING SUPPORT, 

ENHANCING COMPATIBILITY 

The StorNext File System software has 

helped consolidate a complex archive 

environment that was previously 

comprised of systems from multiple 

vendors. Collaborating with a single 

vendor removes some of the possible 

compatibility problems from the multivendor 

environment. It also simplifies the 

provision of ongoing support as the IT 

group has a single point of contact for the 

Quantum environment if it ever needs to 

address issues or make changes. 

The StorNext software platform facilitates 

seamless data movement from online disk 

storage to the tape library. The integrated 

environment works with the Dalet MAM 

system to support a complete production 

and post-production workflow, from ingest 

to archiving. The new archive environment 

provides the long-term scalability to 

support the organisation's multimedia 

transformation. 

"If we ever need to expand the archive in 

the future, we can simply add tapes-it's 

very straightforward," says Reyes in 

conclusion. "With a scalable archive, our 

company can stay focused on delivering 

engaging content instead of worrying 

about where to store it." 

More info: www.quantum.com 





MAGAZINE 

31

TECHNOLOGY: NAS 

NAS 

THE FUTURE OF 

SHARED STORAGE? IT 

HAS TO BE NAS 

WITH THE GREATER PERFORMANCE, FUNCTIONALITY AND 

EASE OF USE OF NAS, IT IS INCREASINGLY HARD TO 

JUSTIFY THE NEED FOR A SAN IN MODERN CREATIVE 

WORKFLOWS, ARGUES BEN PEARCE OF GB LABS 

As technology moves forward and IP 

connectivity continues to revolutionise 

workflows in the media industry, we are 

starting to see SAN (Storage Area Network) as 

an inconvenient and overly complicated way 

of sharing our digital storage amongst the 

various platforms that most businesses use. 

This article looks at the differences between 

the two technologies and highlights the major 

advantages that NAS (Network Attached 

Storage) offers to modern businesses. 

SAN LIMITATIONS 

A SAN architecture is required when 

providing 'block level' shared access to hard 

drive storage for multiple workstations. 

Access and management of the storage 

comes from the MDC (Meta Data Controller) 

which introduces a big limitation to how 

many users can simultaneously access a 

particular share point. 

This number is generally no more than 20 

machines, and this problem is known as 

meta data contention. Whilst MDCs can 

failover to another backup MDC, there can 

be only one active MDC and its workload 

cannot be load balanced across multiple 

machines, so additional MDCs are literally 

redundant until required. 

SANs tend to suit particular operating systems 

meaning that it is rare to have PC, Mac and 

Linux machines working together. Also the fact 

that software needs to be installed prevents 

certain workstations or servers being 

connected at all and limits the compatibility 

with the many generations of operating 

systems used. 

Most SANs are Fibre Channel based, 

therefore cards need to be installed into 

workstations and specific cables, switches and 

transceivers are needed. In addition to this the 

management of the SAN is done through 

standard Ethernet networks. 

THE NAS DIFFERENCE 

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a storage 

server that can offer its own connected storage 

as 'file level' shares to a network of Ethernet 

connected clients using various different 

sharing protocols for maximum compatibility 

and flexibility. No software needs to be 

installed and no hardware (such as a Fibre 

Channel card) needs to be installed. NAS 

works with standard Ethernet networks which 

keeps costs low and flexibility high. 

NAS can potentially connect to anything and 

encourages collaboration between all the 

platforms within an organisation. Unlike SAN, 

NAS does not suffer meta data contention and 

therefore allows many more users on a share 

point and much greater scalability in terms of 

users and performance. 

The functionality of a NAS is far greater than 

a SAN; Analytics, bandwidth control, quotas, 

cloud integration, AD synchronisation, profiles 

and monitoring are just some of the additional 

features a NAS can bring. As mentioned 

before the NAS is a storage server and can 

therefore run many beneficial applications and 

workflow tools that are just not possible with a 

SAN MDC. 

EASIER SCALABILITY 

More users means more switch ports and more 

cost, but the really big problem is the uplinks 

between switches. The uplinks in Fibre Channel 

switches create bottlenecks that cannot be 

ignored. Every switch port should be able to 

deliver full bandwidth, but if the uplink from 

another switch is a fraction of the total port 

bandwidth, then the performance per port 

becomes truly sub optimal. 

Ethernet switches are easier to deploy with 

faster uplinks and ultrafast backplanes 

available within blade switches. Multiple 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: TECHNOLOGY: NAS 

"NAS can potentially connect to anything and encourages 

collaboration between all the platforms within an organisation. 

Unlike SAN, NAS does not suffer meta data contention and 

therefore allows many more users on a share point and much 

greater scalability in terms of users and performance. 

The functionality of a NAS is far greater than a SAN; 

Analytics, bandwidth control, quotas, cloud integration, AD 

synchronisation, profiles and monitoring are just some of the 

additional features a NAS can bring." 

networks can easily be attached to the NAS 

allowing good network design to eliminate 

bottlenecks. 

Some NAS platforms support dynamic scaling 

of capacity meaning almost no down time. 

Whereas adding storage to a SAN, especially 

resizing existing volumes is usually a 'data off, 

expand and then copy back' procedure, 

wasting days of downtime. 

FLEXIBLE COST 

Licenses are a big part of the cost and 

inflexibility of SAN ownership. Each user, 

including the MDC and any failover MDCs 

must be licensed as either a one-off cost or 

annual ongoing expenditure. Specific 

additional hardware is also required, such as 

Fibre Channel switches and cards. 

NAS does not require software licenses and 

most likely requires no additional hardware or 

software installation. Almost all computers 

come standard with at least one 1Gb Ethernet 

port and standard network hardware is cheap 

and easy to source. For higher bandwidth 

usage 10Gb, 40Gb or 100Gb Ethernet can 

be added to a client machine in the form of a 

PCI card or Thunderbolt/USB C interface to 

dramatically improve performance. 

MAKING CONNECTIONS 

Looking at the speed of connections 

available today, it is easy to see how NAS is 

surpassing SAN; 

NAS options: 100Gb, 40Gb, 10Gb and 

1Gb Ethernet. 

SAN options: 32Gb, 16Gb, 8Gb and 4Gb 

Fibre Channel 

Copper or optical cables can be used with 

SAN or NAS and very large distances can be 

achieved with optical cable and advanced 

transceivers. 

As seen in the example above, Ethernet 

connectivity has surpassed Fibre Channel many 

years ago and additionally server end 

connections can be channel bonded to 

produce very fast interfaces to serve large 

numbers of clients and provide cable 

redundancy. Load balancing connections in a 

SAN is far less flexible and not truly compatible 

across platforms, such as Mac OS. 

COMPLEX SUPPORT 

SAN is comparatively complicated and involves 

many more elements, which in turn bring about 

many more possible points of failure. 

Operating systems need to be matched and 

software needs to remain compatible after 

updates or data is simply not available, as the 

storage cannot be mounted. Deployments are 

very involved and installation time, training and 

ongoing support is considerable. 

CLEAR CHOICE 

The biggest potential issue with NAS is that 

most systems are not built for demanding 

usage and large scalability, so the choice of 

NAS is restricted to manufacturers that actually 

understand high bandwidth usage and also 

provide genuine sustained performance for 

mission critical usage. By comparison a SAN is 

very restrictive, complicated and expensive and 

only really achieves the simple function of 

sharing storage. 

'Block level' access can be beneficial for 

certain uses, but the reduced latency and 

improved efficiency found in modern high 

performance NAS storage systems means that 

this marginal benefit has lessened over time. 

If you are looking for large capacity, scalable 

shared storage that will connect to everything in 

your facility then the choice is clear. 

More info: 

www.gblabs.com/component/k2/the-future-ofshared-storage-is-nas 




MAGAZINE 

33

OPINION: CLOUD STORAGECLOUD STORAGE 

PANDEMIC ACTS AS 'CLOUD 

CATALYST' FOR REMOTE 

WORKING 

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS FORCED BUSINESSES TO EVOLVE 

QUICKLY AND ADJUST TO THE NEW WORKING DYNAMIC - BUT 

SOME HAVE BEEN BETTER PREPARED THAN OTHERS, EXPLAINS RUSS 

KENNEDY, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER, NASUNI 

Since 2017, the Microsoft Teams user 

base has grown astronomically by far 

beyond 100 million users and Virtual 

Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop 

as a Service (DaaS) take-up has exploded, 

as a consequence of work moving out of 

the office. Organisations have had to find 

ways to ensure workers can remain 

productive as part of this shift. In the past, 

VDI deployments were sold as IT cost 

savings efforts, which didn't always play 

out. Performance also suffered, because 

virtual infrastructures had to reach over 

the wire to access the files end users 

needed. With VDI and DaaS now being 

delivered from the cloud, flexibility and 

performance are now enabling the 'work 

from anywhere' use case. 

The game has changed dramatically 

however, with desktop virtualisation now 

more about business continuity and 

remote productivity than cutting costs - 

and the pandemic has forced many 

companies to move in this direction. Three 

businesses we've worked with recently 

provide good examples of how to use a 

combination of cloud file storage and a 

powerful cloud VDI provider to maintain 

productivity in difficult circumstances. 

The first is global oil and gas services 

firm Penspen which rapidly transitioned to 

VDI at the start of the pandemic, standing 

up Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) 

instances in the Azure regions closest to its 

employees. During the same period, 

professional services provider SDL also 

transitioned 1,500 global workers to 

Amazon WorkSpaces over the course of a 

weekend. And, after pandemic-related 

events shut engineering giant Ramboll out 

of a key data centre, the firm deployed a 

Nasuni VM in Azure and restored access 

to 300 remote users within two hours. 

These examples prove the transformative 

change at work across different industries - 

the incredible climb in cloud adoption and 

towards cloud-centric infrastructure. 

Moving servers and applications to the 

cloud has been the focus of infrastructure 

modernisation efforts for the past several 

years. But now companies, large and 

small, are looking for ways to leverage the 

benefits of the cloud for file storage. 

Cloud file storage is clearly helping 

enterprises deliver file data to users when 

and where needed with great performance 

as a productivity enabler. 

The shift to remote or hybrid work is here 

to stay. From a file access and storage 

perspective, this is clear from the way 

Google Cloud now makes use of the same 

network that evolved to support YouTube. 

The same technology that loads an 

obscure video in less than a second works 

to ensure users can access the files they 

need on demand. 

This is important because files are often 

the hardest piece of the puzzle. That's why 

enterprises need to be able to deliver file 

data to their users when and where they 

need it, with great performance. Cloud file 

storage makes that possible; and the 

latest approaches to enterprise file storage 

can drive efficiencies and lower costs by 

up to 70%. 

At the same time, many large enterprises 

managing multi-petabyte environments 

need to be able to scale up without being 

constrained by hardware limits. The 

pandemic has driven a dramatic 

acceleration and transition of anything onprem 

in physical data centres to the cloud. 

That transition has put a significant strain 

on organisations as they need to ensure 

they have all the capabilities they've grown 

accustomed to in the on-prem world, in 

the cloud. 

No one's dipping their toes into the cloud 

world any more - they're diving in. 

Enterprises need to be able to deliver file 

data services to users when and where 

they need it with great performance - and 

the evolution of cloud file storage is 

making that possible. 

More info: www.nasuni.com 




MAGAZINE

ENTERPRISE STORAGE AND 

SERVERS FROM LENOVO 

Now at Northamber 

• The UK’s SMB, Mid-Market, Education and Local Government 

Infrastructure Specialists 

• In-house configuration, design, demo and training centre 

• Easy access to Lenovo’s Alliance Partners 

• Flexible payment options with Hardware as a Service 

Talk to the Northamber Solutions experts today or 

for more details visit northamber.com/lenovo 

Call us on 

020 8296 7015 

northamber.com/lenovo | follow us 

©Northamber 2021 E and O.E. June ‘21

ST May-Jun 2021

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?