For Databases, Email and Virtualization
Transactional SQL and Oracle databases are often very demanding of storage resources, which is also true of email systems such as Microsoft Exchange. Combined with the major trend of server and workstation virtualization, these technologies are a “perfect storm” of demands on storage resources. Requirements for these environments include high performance and high reliability, combined with ease of provisioning and management. In the past the performance requirements could only be met through over-provisioning of storage resources, which wastes money on excess capacity and adds needless complexity.
Recent advances such as solid state disk-based cache, tiering and inline deduplication, along with innovative management features, have dramatically reduced the cost per GB and the cost per I/O of high-performance storage, while simultaneously making it easier to manage, maintain and use. Southern Data Storage is proud to partner with these innovators in high-performance storage, who are rapidly reshaping the storage landscape for small and medium enterprises.
The Nimble Storage approach is based on the concept of converged storage, providing what one reviewer called the “Holy Grail of high-performance data storage: a single box that delivers primary and secondary iSCSI storage along with off-site backup that does not involve tape, optical media or even backup time.” Nimble’s CS-Series arrays replace an enterprise’s expensive high-RPM drives with a hybrid architecture that combines high-performance flash memory with low-cost, high-density SATA drives. And by deploying a second Nimble array in an off-site location, enterprises of any size can now obtain a complete, cost-effective data protection solution incorporating WAN-efficient primary-to-primary replication.
NexGen Storage has combined a powerful new storage architecture with the latest technology to deliver a storage system that overcomes two key issues that have limited the adoption of virtualization — the long-standing drawback of performance uncertainty associated with shared storage and the high operational cost of disk sprawl. With NexGen’s enterprise-class storage system, administrators of large virtualized infrastructures can:
- Virtualize business critical applications with confidence
- Achieve 76 times the virtual machine storage density of other solutions
- Reduce storage operating expenses by up to 90 percent for large virtual environments
File Storage (Unstructured Data)
IT industry analysts are predicting that the growth of file storage (also known as unstructured data) will exceed 500% over the next five years, and that storage of unstructured data – document files, images, PDFs, videos, etc. – is the single fastest growing problem facing IT administrators today. Performance is not necessarily a concern with unstructured data but capacity, density, cost-per-GB and reliability certainly are. Southern Data Systems is proud to partner with these unstructured data storage leaders and innovators.
An original innovator in Fibre Channel RAID arrays, Nexsan has a well-earned reputation for incredibly dense, super reliable, surprisingly affordable storage for files and other fixed-content data. The Nexsan E-Series arrays lead the industry in density – often expressed as TB per U of rack space – and are well known for their bulletproof reliability. Combined with their simplicity and ease of use, the E-Series arrays are ideal for storage of large repositories of fixed-content data.
Nasuni is the breakout innovator in the “Storage-as-a-Service” sector, providing a highly secure, super reliable, 100% guaranteed file storage resource that can be implemented in as little as 15 minutes, and is scalable in 1TB increments to whatever size a customer requires. Nasuni is also an ideal solution for customers requiring secure access to file data from multiple sites.
For Archiving and Long-Term Storage
Archiving and long-term storage is a rapidly growing market, driven largely by the need for data storage that meets legal or regulatory compliance requirements. Businesses are increasingly concerned about the liability incurred in the retention of data, and also about the security of critical internal or client information. Southern Data Storage is proud to partner with these leaders in archiving and long-term data storage.
Nexsan’s Assureon® is a highly secure archive storage system that meets three critical business needs:
- Storage Optimization – offload primary storage to free up space for active data and reduce the size, time and costs of monthly full backups.
- Regulatory & Corporate Compliance – comply with governmental regulatory requirements including HIPPA, SOX and SEC-17. Enforce company data retention, privacy and protection policies.
- Long-Term Archive – store managed data for days or decades with unsurpassed integrity and protection in an easy to administer system that resides on-premise, in the cloud, or both.
In addition to it’s usefulness as an online file storage resource, Nasuni is ideal for use as a long-term archive of file-level data. Once stored online via the Nasuni filer, file data can be removed from normal backup and DR schema because it is securely and redundantly protected in the cloud. Data is immutable (i.e., not changeable) and every version of a file can be made available, depending on customized preferences for data retention. In addition, the Nasuni solution is incredibly easy to use and administer, dramatically reducing the cost of storage management for the entire enterprise.
For Data Protection & DR
Data protection & DR, while always being key to the health of a business IT environment, have also traditionally been the most overlooked part of the environment. Why? Because traditional backup & DR solutions are complex, unreliable, difficult to implement and difficult to test. That has changed with the new solutions that have come to market in recent years. At Southern Data Systems we bring 20 years of data protection & DR experience to bear in judging which solutions are truly worthy of our line card.
Veeam is the market leader in backup and replication solutions for virtualized environments. Veeam’s ground-breaking solution takes advantage of the key attributes of virtualized environments, enabling fast, 100% verified backups of VM images, applications and data. Restore operations are amazingly fast and reliable. Replication to an offsite location and/or failover to a DR site is simple and fast. In short, Veeam offers a ground-breaking solution for protection of virtualized environments.
Unitrends is a rapidly-growing leader in all-inclusive backup, recovery and archiving solutions. Available as either an appliance or as a virtual server, Unitrends offers disk-to-disk (D2D) data protection that scales from the smallest to the largest business, and they have accomplished the near-impossible task of integrating a massive feature set into a simple-to-deploy, simple-to-use package. Built-in capabilities include:
* Disk-to-disk-to-any backups
* Instant recovery with failover
* Deduplication
* Disaster recovery
* Remote replication between two Unitrends devices
* Bare metal recovery
* Point-in-time file recovery
Unitrends also offers a cloud backup option, making the solution the most complete data protection solution available today.