A New Niche For NAS

Consolidating data backups at the branch or remote office is emerging as the next big trend in providing customers with business-continuity services. A new crop of networked-based storage appliances promises to offer solution providers new methods of providing continuous data protection, the ability to perform quick data restores and ease of management.

The latter is especially important at the branch-office level where there may be limited IT support, as well as at mid-size businesses, which don't have the resources to manage data protection. With a growing amount of online data, coupled with quickly emerging compliance requirements, there is a willing audience for these new solutions.

And like everything else in storage, there are numerous approaches to providing that simplicity. We'll walk you through a host of new solutions that allow VARs to deploy these appliances, perhaps bundled with systems and/or network-integration services.

One approach that's getting a lot of buzz these days is wide-area file services (WAFS). On that front, Cisco Systems is notable. The company recently started shipping its Cisco File Engine Series Appliances. Based on WAFS technology it acquired from Actona last year, the Cisco solution consists of three components. The first is the Edge File Engine, which is a file-caching appliance deployed at the branch office. The engine replaces file-and- print servers with a device that provides views of data that's stored centrally and cached at the remote or branch office.

The Edge File Engine connects at near-LAN speeds to the second component, the Core File Engine, which resides at the central data center. The Core File Engine is a server-side module that connects directly via the WAN to file servers or to NAS appliances. It conducts file requests on behalf of the remote Edge File Engines.

The third component is the WAFS Central Manager, a management module that provides central management, configuration and monitoring of all the remote file engines.

Hot Protocols

In addition to caching, WAFS uses compression and network optimization of file-system protocols, notably the Windows Common Internet File System (CIFS) and the Unix Network File System (NFS), while providing continuous data access over the WAN.

"WAFS enables enterprises to consolidate all of their file-based data," says John Henzee, director of marketing for Cisco's caching services business. More important, it addresses a key point of concern among customers--the ability to provide data backup at the branch office.

Greg Bowden, director of data center and storage solutions at Cisco partner Dimension Data, is bullish on the benefits of WAFS.

"This provides the ability for organizations to take data protection out of the hands of people who are not necessarily IT experts and put it back into the realm of the data center," he explains.

Cisco is by no means the only player bullish on the WAFS concept. Riverbed Technology and Tacit Networks also are key providers of acceleration technology, which allows for continuous data connections over WAN links.

BlueArc, a supplier of enterprise-class NAS solutions, is OEMing Tacit's WAFS Wellspring architecture into its Remote Data Acceleration (RDA) product family. As with Cisco's offering, BlueArc's RDA devices allow remote offices to use centrally managed storage systems without impacting network performance.

For its part, Cisco has entered into a nonexclusive licensing agreement with EMC where it will offer the storage vendor's Clariion NS500 and NS700 NAS systems. A solution bundled with Cisco's WAFS will be offered as a complete Cisco-branded solution, Henzee says.

Officials at Network Appliance, the leading supplier of NAS systems, pointed out that the company is evaluating Cisco's solution, as well as those of Riverbed and Tacit. Each uses different compression methods, meaning they are not interoperable. While hedging his bets on whether the company will ink a deal with Cisco at some point, Rob Matthews, NetApp's senior director of strategic technology, says that NetApp's NAS gear can already support Cisco's WAFS protocols.

"The reality is that most customers who are looking at [that] type of solution already have a NAS infrastructure in their data center, and in all likelihood it's going to be a Network Appliance infrastructure," Matthews says.

New Foundation

While WAFS is emerging as a new foundation for self-managing appliances, which handle branch-office backup and recovery, several vendors are offering different approaches to the same problem.

LiveVault, a company that has offered a managed data-protection service through VARs, last month took the wraps off a premises-based product. As with WAFS, it supports centralized protection of remote offices. TurboRestore is a cache-based appliance; it can recover data at a remote office by accessing data mirrored from a centrally located data storage vault.

The appliance itself is a NAS-type device running Windows XP Embedded Edition with support for two drives or 400 GB of storage. In operation, the appliance connects to a server at the remote office and mirrors data over the WAN to a data storage vault based on commodity servers from Dell, HP or IBM, running Windows Server 2003.

Another vendor of note, Overland Storage, has recently started shipping multisite versions of its REO disk-to-disk backup offering. The company is a longtime supplier of disk and tape-based backup and recovery hardware and software solutions. Its new Multi-SitePAC is a remote-backup mirroring solution, which automates the process of backing up, consolidating and managing remote data.

Multi-SitePAC offers virtual tape mirroring, dynamic tape, which automatically allocates disk space based on specific backup jobs, centralized management, compressed incremental backups and iSCSI connectivity between REO devices.

Multi-SitePAC fits easily into existing backup-and-recovery software environments, including those built around CA's ArcServe, IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager, EMC's Legato software and Veritas' backup and replication solutions.

"Our position is very specific for people who want to take multiple backups happening on multiple sites and consolidate them," says Michael Kerman, Overland's vice president and chief strategy officer.

Finally, Tandberg Data's Inostor subsidiary offers its M series InteliNAS appliances for Microsoft's Windows Storage Server. Intended for installation at branch offices, the appliances come with Serial ATA (SATA) drives in 1U and 2U form factors. Storage capacities range from 480 GB to 4.8 TB. The 1U units are entry-level systems that scale up to 1.6 TB, come with dual-Gigabit Ethernet ports and four hot-swappable frontloading SATA drives.

Inostor's higher-end 2U unit includes 12 hot-swappable SATA drives. Both models offer optional autoloaders or tape libraries, as well as disk-to-disk and disk-to-tape backup.