Features
Business Continuance from Pillar: Protecting data with a reliable infrastructure
Increased government regulations and discovery rules. Geographically-dispersed workforces. Greater corporate reliance on data assets. 24/7-uptime requirements. In today’s environment, data administrators must develop business continuance processes that are very fast and reliable while accommodating budget constraints, allowing for data growth, and minimizing complexity. The Pillar Axiom™ is the system of choice for business continuance applications, including:
Most data centers today feature a wide variety of storage systems, including DAS, NAS, and SAN systems. The Pillar Axiom is heterogeneous, supporting multiple drive types, which reduces the number of systems needed as well as the management complexity of your business continuance assets.
The Pillar Axiom design ensures a very competitive price because it gets fibre-channel performance from SATA disk drives, all while using off-the-shelf components. This design helps ensure that the solution is cost-effective at initial acquisition. Despite its competitive price, the Axiom can modularly scale to over 800 TBs of raw capacity, which allows a single system to address the disk backup needs of even the largest enterprise. And with the Axiom one-time licensing fee, the Pillar solution remains affordable as it scales to accommodate growing business continuance needs.
Enhanced Snapshot and Clone Features
The Snap FS feature feature allows you to take a point-in-time snapshot of a LUN that can assume the identity of its parent LUN. You can then easily revert a LUN to a snapshot using the Snap Revert feature, returning the LUN to that previous point in time represented in the snapshot. This makes recovery as seamless as possible in the event of accidental deletion, file corruption.
SnapFS snapshots have their place in the data center but provided limited functionality due to their read-only limitation; they are primarily used to recover data on a file-by-file basis. For a point-in-time read-write block-level snapshot of a file system, look to CloneFS. This tool creates a snapshot that points to the original data and can be mounted as a standalone file system and immediately used. Like SnapFS snapshots it retains all the attributes of the source file system and requires no cache and only minimal physical capacity. However the writeable clones made with CloneFS can be used to enhance many processes such as application testing, data mining, parallel processing, and online recovery.
Disk-to-Disk Backup
More enterprises are turning to disk-based backup solutions either as a replacement for or to use in conjunction with existing tape technologies. Replacing or supplementing your tape backup environment with disk-to-disk backup technologies reduces backup windows, shrinks restoration from days to minutes, provides seamless integration with existing applications, and offers simplification of offsite data transfers. Read more about disk-to-disk backup.
Configurable as Virtual Tape Library (VTL)
When storage administrators integrate disks into their backup operation, they frequently want to minimize the impact to their existing backup infrastructure. Pillar has partnered with a leading VTL vendor to make the Axiom configurable as a VTL, which allows end users to benefit from the faster backups and restores which disk technology enables without requiring changes to the processes they have in place.
When combined with the affordability, scalability, performance, ease-of-use, and multi-hosting benefits of the Axiom, VTL provides a compelling solution for end users with legacy tape.
Disaster Recovery Solutions
Whether a malicious virus attack or a natural disaster, sometimes even the best laid plans don’t quite safeguard your systems. Thank goodness you had it all backed up! In the event that you must recover from a disaster, the Pillar Axiom is there.
In addition to low initial acquisition costs and one-time licensing, another cost advantage of the Axiom as your business continuance infrastructure is that it can act as a replication target for many different arrays—including expensive, high-end arrays. Using an Axiom for disaster recovery in a remote site instead of purchasing a second high-end array for remote replication can result in significant savings for IT managers.
And if you lose a RAID 10 drive, the Axiom’s Accelerated Drive Rebuild feature can rebuild a drive with average utilization approximately 50% faster than other systems by monitor the extent of the drive’s use and matching that on the rebuilt drive. This gets you back up and running faster—which is what disaster recovery is all about. Read more about disaster recovery solutions.
Consolidated Backups and Data Archiving
Each year, the amount of data stored by a company grows and much of that data is accessed infrequently. The result of growing storage archives is that more primary storage devices need to be purchased and managed, and backing up these increasing storage pools can slow a network and user productivity.
The answer is the Pillar AxiomONE™ File Replicator, which archives infrequently-accessed files from Windows, Unix, and Linux machines.
By leaving stubs in the original datastore and migrating archived data to the Pillar Axiom, AxiomONE File Replicator can decrease future storage purchases while ensuring rapid, user-initiated recoveries. And it can do it with both local and remote servers. With AxiomONE you get centralized policy management, data inventory management, and heterogeneous server and storage support. Read more about Consolidated Backups and Data Archiving.
Auditing Features to Meet Retention Requirements
Retention regulations, especially to meet the needs of legal discovery processes, require businesses to retain a significant amount of data – even email records—for longer amounts of time. These records are kept in a read-only format to ensure the integrity of the data. The SecureWORMfs tool helps you with this data-retention need, and includes auditing features with immediate verification and cache journaling options. These features enable you to capture an audit log of events that occur outside of the archiving application. This also helps speed migration from non-Axiom retention storage.
Remote Office Backup
Critical requirements such as backups and disaster recovery of data and applications in remote offices may not be adequately covered despite the efforts of IT administrators. This is due to interruption in connectivity, or because of a need to rely on non-technical staff in remote locations to change backup tapes, initiate processes, and take other actions they are neither trained nor compensated to perform. In fact, companies report that as much as 60 percent of their remote backups may fail on a nightly basis. This represents operational, litigation, and compliance risks that few companies can afford.
Business continuance plans must include remote offices in order to protect all of the company’s data assets. Managing remote data effectively requires that you accommodate network variability, dissimilar computing platforms, security and data-integrity needs, and that you implement process automation to overcome the lack of trained IT staff at remote locations.
Centralizing backup with policy-based processes give you the control you need to ensure that appropriate data protection is in place. Automated “lights-out” backups are performed reliably and consistently on the Pillar Axiom using AxiomONE File Replicator, with features such as WAN network bandwidth utilization with security and data integrity safeguards. This system transfers and guarantees a second copy of remote data in a central hub or data center—whether you have three offices, or three thousand. Read more about Remote Office Backup Storage Solutions. |
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