INetU offers a new backup solution! Restore24, a full-service solution provided by INetU, delivers nothing less than peace of mind. Restore24 eliminates your risk of losing important information. We’ll keep your data safe so if disaster strikes, your system will be up and running much faster, saving you valuable time and money.
Restore24 engineers are available 24 hours of the day to implement your recovery needs. They can customize your backup and recovery solutions to meet your recovery point and time objectives, perform restores, and answer any of your Restore24 questions!
Build & Test! It’s not enough to simply implement a backup system; the system must be continually tested and monitored. Restore24 engineers perform daily automated test restores on your environment to ensure our system executes without any imperfections. Daily test restores makes sure your data is always available and provides you the comfort of knowing it works! Restore24 is fully managed by INetU, meaning you don’t have to do anything. Once you request a restore, engineers will start restoring your data immediately. Restore24 also provides the client the flexibility to perform on-demand backups and restores themselves.
While developing Restore24 our main objectives were to increase the reliability and performance from our old backup system – and we accomplished this! At INetU we are committed to providing the most up to date solutions for all of our clients.
When you start looking to purchase Enterprise Storage, you realize quickly that large scale, high performance storage isn’t cheap. Most people experience sticker shock the first time they price out five or six terabytes of SAN storage. If a two terabyte hard drive costs less than two hundred dollars, why does a five terabyte SAN cost tens of thousands?
The answer is pretty complex:
Read the full post »
It might seem obvious, but those with less data have arguably simpler storage requirements. Perhaps not so obvious is how many different areas can be impacted as data grows. Backup storage, backup duration, restoration, inter server network connectivity, DR plans, system disk I/O performance, and (of course) your primary storage. More often than not, a review of one’s data reveals things that can be archived or deleted. Some examples:
- E-commerce sites might look to save space by archiving older orders or discontinued products.
- Data reporting/analysis systems might be able to archive or delete the raw data that the reports or analysis are built from.
- Those affected by regulatory compliance should understand their requirements for keeping logs or other items “online” versus “available”. In many cases, only the most recent items need to be kept online. Older items can be archived.
Case study
A popular number crunching website used to try and keep everything online. This caused their database to grow until performance suffered and backups became unwieldy. Their database alone topped out at 300GB! INetU was asked to assist with tuning their database and scaling their backups. INetU found that over 75% of the data within the database was not regularly accessed – especially older than 3 months.
Read the full post »
January 20th, 2010 by Rich H. | View Comments
Tags: array, controller, database, DB, I/O, performance, RAID, RAID-10, RAID-5, rebuild, spindles, storage
RAID-5 was long hailed as the enterprise-level storage solution and a fit for nearly every application. The truth is, RAID-5 was designed back in the 80’s to save cost without completely sacrificing redundancy. Back then the cost per byte for storage on enterprise-class drives was so expensive that researchers were scrambling for a solution to store more data for less money.
Let’s say you needed 100MB of storage space and disk-level redundancy. Let’s also say, a 20MB SCSI drive cost $1,000.00. Before RAID-5, you’d buy 10 drives, create 5 RAID-1 arrays at 20MB each, and split your data set up to fit across these 5 separate arrays. Not only is this expensive at $10,000.00, but the storage space you require is split across 5 arrays. With RAID-5, 6 20MB disks gave you 100MB of space, and redundancy. That saves $4,000.00 per storage unit implemented! Sure, there were caveats, but with those kinds of savings, nobody was paying attention.
Welcome to the 21st century. The database is king, and everyone wants performance! Unfortunately, one of RAID-5’s biggest caveats is sacrificing performance, and developers and admins are finally starting to notice. Let’s take a look at the 5 biggest caveats of the RAID level most synonymous with enterprise storage for so many years:
- Performance, Performance, Performance! RAID-5 has significant write penalties all the time due to the requirement for parity calculation. Most implementations also suffer poor read performance, even though RAID-5 proponents consider this one of the “strengths” of RAID-5.
- Rebuild times are horrifying slow. Try days instead of hours for large storage arrays due to the need to read, calculate parity and write every disk in the array for each megabyte rebuilt. This can literally translate to days of downtime for a single disk failure depending on the I/O performance required for the storage to be usable.
Read the full post »
