Fujitsu Backup and Archiving Solutions

    Currently, the role of information technology in the business processes of modern enterprises cannot be overestimated. At the same time, the deeper their integration takes place, the more important the cost of the processed data becomes, the more expensive their loss is. Thus, the issue of data protection, archiving and storage now concerns not only system administrators, but also business leaders and business owners.

    Key Data Protection Issues


    In the event of any unforeseen failure (accident), modern realities require minimization of two main parameters: the amount of lost data and recovery time. Moreover, the amount of lost data actually depends on the time elapsed from the moment the last state of the system was saved until the moment of the accident. Thus, in order to minimize this parameter, it is necessary to back up as often as possible, in turn increasing the already growing volume of stored data. The organization of backup, at the moment, is becoming the main task of the system administrator.

    In addition to the avalanche-like growth of data, the windows for their backup are shrinking, this is due to an increase in the operating time of enterprises, opening branches in other time zones, an increase in the load on servers and other similar processes. All this leads to an increase in requirements for network bandwidth and storage device performance, as well as an increase in the number of backup processes performed in parallel.

    Backing up to tape under such conditions can no longer cope with the increased requirements, and ceases to be a solution to the problem. At the same time, backing up to hard drives, despite the increase in their volume and decrease in the cost of 1MB, is still too expensive a pleasure. In this situation, perhaps the only devices that can solve the backup problem are deduplication devices.

    Deduplication


    Deduplication devices store only unique data, excluding duplication. Their effectiveness is determined by the fact that a significant (or even large) part of the data is constantly duplicated. Let's look at simple examples.

    So, making a daily copy of the image, of a server or virtual machine, you are forced to constantly save the same set of files, plus some changes that occurred during the day. In most cases, the amount of different data will be negligible, while copies of the images will occupy almost the same place in the file storage. Potentially, deduplication preserves the original image, and then, instead of the next, only differences from the original. The potential for saving storage space for backups in this case increases significantly if you have many servers of the same type or virtual machines.

    Deduplication is also highly efficient when backing up databases. This is not only about the changed data, but also about the presence in the database itself of many identical records.

    Generally speaking, even a low deduplication coefficient allows you to save a huge amount of disk space. This is clearly seen from the graph below. In practice, in backup tasks, it is rarely lower than 10: 1, which means 90% saving space for backups.



    Deduplication in Fujitsu Solutions


    Fujitsu solutions use data splitting into blocks of variable length, after which each block receives a unique signature (checksum). At the same time, the blocks are also located inside the files, which helps to find data, including in Microsoft Exchange files and databases. Next, a signature sheet is compiled containing the signatures themselves and the place of blocks with such a signature in the original data sequence. At the end of the deduplication process, only unique blocks and a signature sheet are saved directly to the hard drives. Those. if the new data block corresponds to one of the previously recorded ones, then it will not be written, instead, the corresponding pointer is simply added to the existing block. After that, automatic compression of unique data blocks is performed, i.e.

    The described process is currently proceeding online. Those. all these steps are performed on the fly, invisible to the user, which allows you to immediately determine the remaining free space, because already deduplicated data is written to the disks. The rejection of offline deduplication was made possible due to the increased performance of modern processors and the memory subsystem used in turnkey server solutions.

    ETERNUS CS800 data backup system


    One of the best solutions to the deduplication problem is the Fujitsu ETERNUS CS800. It is a hardware-software complex, i.e. This is a complete solution that does not require the purchase of additional licenses, components or software. The ETERNUS CS800 system is designed for use by organizations of small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), as well as for installation in regional offices of large companies. The capabilities of this solution allow you to use it both instead of tape libraries, and together with them.

    ETERNUS CS800 is represented by two models: Entry and Scale. Entry has two modifications differing in the storage volume of 4.8 TB or 9.6 TB. At the same time, I’ll draw your attention to the fact that in this case we are talking about the amount of data actually available to the user - the RAID overhead in this case has already been taken into account. Fujitsu adheres to the specified strategy with a user-friendly volume for the entire ETERNUS CS line. The Scale model is an extensible solution (by connecting additional disk storage systems). In this case, depending on the hard drives used, options are available: 8-80 TB (when using one-terabyte drives), 16-160 TB (with two-terabyte) and 24-240 TB (with three-terabyte drives). Hardware ETERNUS CS800 consists of a rack-mount two-unit server Fujitsu PRIMERGY, and Scale models also have a Fujitsu ETERNUS DX 80 storage system with attached disk shelves. The number of shelves can be from 1 to 10 and dynamically increase during the operation of the system. Storage systems use RAID 6, which guarantees data safety in the event of failure of up to 2 disks from each (disk group) array.

    ETERNUS CS800 can be accessed via CIFS / NFS interfaces via Ethernet, VTL via Fiber Channel or Symantec OST. Therefore, configuration and integration into the existing environment of the enterprise should not cause problems.

    Another feature of the ETERNUS CS800 is the support of the Path To Tape (PTT) function, thanks to which it is possible to connect physical tape libraries to it and dump data on them intended for long-term storage, but not involving their operational use, for example, annual or monthly copies. In this case, the data on the tape will be thrown off the under-duplicated data, which will allow reading them without the deduplication device.

    ETERNUS CS High End Data Backup System


    Despite its advantages, the ETERNUS CS800 has some limitations. So, its scalability is limited only by the increase in disk space of the storage system (in the Scale model), while the scalability of deduplication processors is simply impossible here. For enterprises and organizations where the performance of one processor module is not enough, Fujitsu offers the ETERNUS CS High End deduplication device.

    This turnkey solution can grow flexibly with your enterprise up to 10 processor modules controlling incoming data streams, 16 internal RAID systems (3.6 PB data). Such a system is capable of processing up to 400 TB of data per day. In addition, this system supports up to 10 devices on which data can be dumped, for example physical tape libraries, thereby integrating tape libraries into a common data backup and archiving system. Such a system will be a solution with high fault tolerance, as there is no single point of failure in it, the system will remain operational until at least one of the deduplication processors is operational.

    It is not necessary that the ETERNUS CS High End system will be very expensive. The cost of a configuration with one computing node is not much higher than the cost of lower-class systems, but in your hands there will be practically unlimited possibilities for further expansion of the system depending on the needs of the business.

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