Efficient Data Protection: Exploring Backup Appliances and Data Management

1. A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability and Data Availability A Guide to Backup Appliances

2. Table of Contents 3 4 Introduction History of Backup Appliances 5 8 Types of Backup appliances Threats to Backups and Backup Appliances 9 11 StoneFly Backup and Disaster Recovery Appliances What You Should do Next

3. Introduction Increased data growth leads organizations to rely on multiple backup and disaster recovery solutions. Even with their setup, they lack the confidence that their data will always be recoverable and highly available. can ensure better backup performance and recovery times. StoneFly’s innovative technology has empowered IT environments to ensure effective recovery of their enterprise workloads and reduce recovery times to less than 15 minutes. According to a report by Veeam in 2017, Veeam Availability Report 2017, a majority of organizations (82%) are facing a gap between user demand and what IT can deliver; in other words, an Availability Gap. This can result in unplanned downtime costs averaging up to $21.8M per year. Our purpose-built backup and disaster recovery appliances come equipped with Veeam’s enterprise-level availability software. The availability challenges of today are increasingly becoming difficult as user demand varies and data grows proportionally. In order to adapt and deliver, IT has to evolve and do more. This is where Backup appliances come in. Initially nothing more than a bandage, backup appliances have now become an integral part of every enterprise IT environment. Veeam’s availability software, focuses on innovation and delivers Always-On Availability for enterprises. StoneFly and Veeam, when used together, provide the industry’s leading combination of secondary storage and availability software, offering a wide range of benefits to customers such as faster backups, reduced RTPOs, cost saving and ease of use. With backup appliances, IT environments 3 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

4. History Of Backup Appliances 15 years ago, backup appliances came into the market and were a product of two introductions to the storage industry: SATA disk arrays and deduplication. Before the integration of SATA disks in disk arrays, arrays were more expensive and there wasn’t much sense in using them as backup targets. SATA disks, on the other hand, were more affordable, so companies introduced these products as a place to store older copies of data (archiving) and backups. Today’s backup-to-disk market is changing as customers shift from simply using disks to send backups to learning how that disk can enable better functionality for the enterprise IT environment. This is why StoneFly is always innovating and securing partnerships like with Veeam Amazon, and Microsoft Azure; so that we can deliver tightly integrated solutions that offer optimized and reliable backup and disaster recovery for the enterprise. Backup appliances started to gain popularity in the storage industry when the concept of deduplication entered the market. The way backups were traditionally made created an excess of duplicate data and the ability to identify and eliminate duplicate data significantly reduced the cost of using disk as a backup target. Backup technology has come a long way, orignating from expensive tape storage environments to cost effective and high performance disk environments. 4 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

5. Types of Backup Appliances There are two main types of backup appliances: backup targets and backup systems. Backup targets are those designed to accept backups from backup software. Backup systems, on the other hand, are complete systems that contain the backup software and sufficient storage to hold backups. appliances to be more “plug and play” tend to prefer backup systems over backup targets. Technically, any storage system accessible via NFS, SMB or other storage protocols can be used as a backup target. But typically, when we speak of backup targets, we are referring to disk systems specifically designed for backups. Being designed for backup means that these systems are designed to be cost-effective (at least more so than primary storage) and highly scalable - storing petabytes of capacity - and it means that they typically include deduplication as a core feature. Backup targets were designed initially for IT environments that already had an existing backup product and wanted to upgrade their storage hardware. Backup targets also provide the ability to refresh the computing side of the backup equation at different rates than the storage side. Backup systems, on the other hand, tend to put both functions in one place so traditionally it’s not possible to upgrade one and not the other. However, with our disaggregated High Availability (HA) cluster configurations, users can individually add performance capabilities and storage capacities to their backup systems. Companies that prefer their backup Deduplication identifes and eliminates data between backups, allowing a disk storage system to store much more backup history in the same amount of disk space. 5 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

6. Types of Backup Appliances Inline vs. Post Process Backup targets deduplicate in one of two ways: inline or post-process (also referred to as ayshnchronous). An inline system deduplicates backup data before it is even written to disk. A post-process system first writes backup data to disk and then deduplicates it with a secondary process. Sometimes, the secondary deduplication process runs asychronously with the backups, and other times it occurs after all backups have completed. A challenge with the inline approach appears with the consideration that some newer backup applications require random read/write access to the backup repository in order to facilitate features such as instant recovery. Instant recovery is a feature that allows customers to mount a filesystem or start a VM directly from the backup repository, rather than requiring a restore. This type of restore is seen by many as the difference between next generation backup systems and traditional backup systems. With the old way, one must first repair the damaged server and/or storage, after which a restore can then be initiated. Then only once that restore is complete can operations be resumed. The downtime required by this method often forces IT personnel to do quick fixes, which then must be replaced with the real repair at a later date - requiring even more downtime. With instant recovery, one can immediately resume operations by running the VM from the backup system. Once operations are resumed, IT has the time to properly diagnose and repair what caused the failure. Once the repair is affected, they may initiate a full or partial restore and return the workload to the production server at a convenient time. The difference between the two recovery methods is phenomenal - as long as the performance of the instant recovery is sufficient - but if the storage it is running from has performance challenges, it may not even be possible. such as instant recovery that requires constant random reads and writes. The advantage of post-process systems is that they typically have the most recent backup stored in a native, not-yet-dedupli- cated format in a typical filesystem designed for random reads and writes. As most recent backup is the one that’s going to be used for an instant recovery situation, being able to read and write from a typical file system that is optimized for random reads and writes and does not have to be rehydrated can yield significant performance advantages. Each of these two have their advantages and disadvantages. The inline approach is more popular among vendors and appears to occupy a greater percentage of the backup target installed base. It is seen as a cleaner approach since backups are deduplicated before being written, which means they can be immediately replicated as well. This is in contrast to the post process approach, where backups cannot be replicated until they have been dedupli- cated. Post-process systems also require a disk staging area to hold the latest set of backups before they are deduplicated. The reasons that inline appliances might not be appropriate for such workloads starts with the fact that an inline appliance must be “re-duplicate” or rehydrate the data during a restore. The real problem with this is that the deduplication read and write processes were optimized for the serial reads and writes typical of traditional backup software since that is how all backup applications behaved when most of them were designed. The combination of the rehydration requirement and the fact that it was designed for serial work- loads is not conducive to an application This is not to say that it is not possible to use instant recovery with an inline approach but it is something that needs to be taken into consideration when consider- ing instant recovery. It is possible to address these challenges in other ways as well. 6 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

7. Types of Backup appliances Interfaces: NFS/SMB, iSCSI and Custom Backup targets can further be divided into how they can accept backup data. The most common interface is to accept data via NFS or SMB. The advantage to this approach is that any backup software that can write a POSIX-compliant file system can write to such an appliance. The disadvantage is that there is only a finite amount of performance enhancement that can be done across such an interface. Simply writing data via NFS or SMB can lead to poor random I/O performance during instant recoveries and slow backup or restore performance during traditional operations. as the protocl only understands backing up to tape. In contrast to backup targets, backup systems are easier to understand and classify. They are complete appliances that contain backup software and enough storage to hold the backups. In addition to some security and performance advantages, the main purpose of these systems is to be a turnkey system ready to do backups as soon as they’re turned on. Backup targets can also present themselves as a virtual tape library or VTL. This interface was popular at the time when backup targets first came out and backup software products were not adept at writing to a file system interface. Today, such an interface is used primarily for those who need a high speed block interface. The most common use of VTLs is when backing up a NAS filer via NDMP, 7 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

8. Threats to Backups and Backup Appliances Besides the age-old threats of failed media, disasters taking out an entire server or storage array, or simply human error or mischief, today’s backup servers have more threats to them than ever - especially if they are Windows-based systems. The biggest threat today comes in the form of ransomware, insider attacks or other malware that will delete or otherwise corrupt backups or the backup software’s configuration files. Another technique is to use a protocol between the backup software and backup appliance down their backup systems tighter than any other system in the data center. The backup system should have a different authentication system that is seperate from anything like Active Directory. So that someone compromising the corporate system would not be able to compromise the backup system as well. Finally, intrusion detection systems should treat the backup server as a high priority system from a security perspective, as it has a copy of everything in the environment. Regarding backup appliances, one of the biggest pitfalls that many of them face is that any data stored on a typical backup appliance is simply available via an SMB or NFS mount. If someone were to access that mount outside the backup process, they could encrypt or delete the backups along with the original data. For this reason, it is imperative that companies lock down access to that shared folder. This can be done via ACLs, VPNs and basic SMB and NFS controls that allow only the backup server to mount the directory in question. 8 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

9. StoneFly Backup and Disaster Recovery Systems StoneFly offers purpose-built backup and disaster recovery (DR) appliances built to withstand cyber-security threats like ransomware and deliver RTOs and RPOs of less than 15 minutes. our backup & DR appliances deliver highly secure data protection for terabytes to petabytes of enterprise data. With our backup & DR appliances users can backup Windows and Linux servers, relational databases (MySQL, NoSQL, PostGreSQL, etc.) and CRM, EHR/EMR applications as well. Our range of backup and DR systems include: - DR365V™ - Veeam-Ready Backup & DR Appliance - DR365™ - Backup & DR Solution (DR Site in a Box) - DR365U™ - Universal Backup & DR Appliance To simplify our customer experience, we offer a one-stop-shop for all data protection needs, including: Purpose-Built Enterprise Backup & DR Systems - Backup software licenses - Hypervisor licenses - Storage Operating System - Enterprise Server Configured with high-end processors, robust storage drives, and built-in cloud connect to public and private clouds, our backup and DR appliances enable users to protect business-critical NAS and SAN volumes and Virtual Machines (VMs) running on VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and Citrix (formerly XenServer) hypervisors. The robust combination of enterprise backup software, our patented storage operating system and enterprise servers 9 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

10. StoneFly Backup and Disaster Recovery Appliances Appliance Configurations: Integrated, HA Cluster & Scale Out Integrated Configuration The integrated hardware delivers backup & DR in a box experience. It’s a single aggregated harwdare chassis with the storage controller, RAID controller, and storage operating system. HA Cluster Configuration The HA Cluster configuration is a disaggregated hardware system and a perfect fit for IT environments that require high availability and instant recovery. Scale-out Node Configuration Best suited for large enterprises and large volumes of big data, this configuration starts with three nodes and can scale out to virtually unlimited number of appliance nodes. Our HA cluster appliances comprise of three hardware chassis: The appliance supports our storage operating system, backup software, hypervisors, cloud connect to Azure cloud and AWS (Amazon Web Services) along with the ability to scale up by adding JBODs or EBODs and scale out by adding virtually unlimited number of appliace nodes for additional performance capabilities and petabytes of storage capacities. The addition of each appliance node in the system adds more processors, more system memory, and more storage drives; consequently this delivers a proportional increase in performance as storage capacities grow to petabytes in scale. This makes it a good fit for organizations with continuously growing volumes of data and instant recovery needs. - Two Storage Controllers (SCs) - One or More HA RAID Expansion Arrays The two SCs provide multi-path access and ensure data availability even in the event of hardware failure. And with two processors, the compute capabilities are doubled; making it a good fit for the most demanding workloads and RTPO requirements. With increased performance capabilities, no matter the volume, enterprises instantly recover mission-critical VMs to reduce downtime and enhance business continuity. 10 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

11. What You Should Do Next To effectively protect your mission-critical enterprise workloads, backup and disaster recovery appliances are necessary. If you’re looking for an innovative backup and disaster recovery system that delivers everything within a single box, is easy to setup and deploy and delivers reduced RTPOs while keeping costs in check, contact us today and let us offer you purpose-built and customized solutions. StoneFly’s enterprise-level backup and disaster recovery solutions facilitate businesses around the globe including corporate and government clients. To explore StoneFly’s partial list of customers, click here: Partial Customer List http://bit.ly/2L6c27r 11 A Guide to Backup Appliances and Data Availability | www.stonefly.com

12. StoneFly, Inc. 26250 Eden Landing Rd, Hayward, CA 94545 USA. +1 (510) 265 1616 sales@stonefly.com www.stonefly.com www.iscsi.com http://bit.ly/2L6c27r