RDX Storage Blog
Online Retailer Grows with Removable Data Storage
BackupWorks.com Does Big Business with Small Business
Reprint of Imation Case Study,
In Orange County, California, BackupWorks.com runs an efficient e-commerce operation. They are an online seller of data storage solutions specializing in backup products, serving small and medium-sized businesses, as well as government, military and educational institutions.
Recognizing that many of their customers do not have dedicated IT staff, BackupWorks.com works with them directly to find the right storage solutions and also ensures that they are implemented correctly the first time.
With more than a decade in business, an established customer base, and select product lines in NAS, SAN, Tape and disk, BackupWorks.com is now becoming an important seller and supporter of the RDX® storage system technology. Evan Sackstein, Vice President of Sales for BackupWorks.com, is enthusiastic about the growing acceptance of the removable hard disk format.
“When we started the company 12 years ago, we were primarily a tape company,” he said. We didn’t really do any kind of disk-based backup, and our first few times entering that market were challenging. But when people started asking us about RDX media for drives from several manufacturers, we took a closer look.”
What started out as an experiment quickly became an important part of the business. “It just took off,” Sackstein said. “We got to the point where a lot of people were contacting us using old 4mm tapes, 8mm tapes, and they were looking to get away from tape. They had bad experiences with tapes. They didn’t feel it was reliable, and they wanted something different—and RDX was just the perfect fit.”
For many of these customers, reliability, ease of use, and cost were the main deciding factors. Sackstein estimates that customers who don’t already have backup hardware can save as much as 75 percent by choosing RDX instead of tape. “When I speak to clients about LTO tape drives,” he said, “they’re looking at a minimum of $1500, plus media, plus cleaning tapes, plus backup software, plus connectivity such as SCSI or SAS—that’s at least a $2000 investment. Then I show them how they can get complete RDX solution for under $500.”
RDX: RUGGED, EXPANDABLE STORAGE FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES
According to Sackstein, RDX is ideal for home offices and small businesses with up to 10 or 15 employees. These customers often lack the resources to hire full-time information technology staff, and need to handle technology problems on their own. “It’s a very easy system to use, Sackstein said. “Anybody who has used a USB hard drive to drag and drop files will be able to use a USB RDX drive.”
That familiarity is a large part of the appeal. Sackstein said that tape drives are uncommon in people’s daily home and work lives, so they are often perceived as too complicated or challenging. “People get scared of that,” Sackstein said. “Especially small business people. Not IT guys, but small business, medium business. They’re a little bit skeptical of tape.”
MULTIPLE SALES CHANNELS, PRIVATE AND PUBLIC — AND ALL GROWING
One of the most important sales channels for BackupWorks.com is independent IT consultants, who provide advice and support for other companies. Equipped with demonstration models of RDX docking stations and cartridges, these consultants make test installations at customer sites. “As soon as they see the success,” Sackstein said, “they end up buying it for all their clients.”
In addition to small and medium sized businesses, BackupWorks.com is receiving more orders for RDX products from the public sector. Government agencies with specific requirements sometimes manage their own backups locally. These already include one of the National Laboratories and a regional Veterans’ Affairs office. They value the same benefits as business customers, and represent another growing market segment. And, as Sackstein says, “If the whole removable disk storage industry is based on RDX technology, it’s got to be good. That’s what we sell it on — what customers are looking for. It’s really easy to sell.”
Since this interview was conducted, RDX® hard disk-based storage libraries have been introduced and Sackstein and his team are excited because it allows their customers to operate in either JBOD or tape emulation mode. With the A8’s introduction to the RDX family, BackupWorks can now provide greater capacity solutions for small and medium sized businesses. In fact, they are currently conducting case studies with many satisfied customers.
RDX FILLING THE REQUIREMENTS FOR REMOVABLE
By Randy Kerns, Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group
Technology changes over time and the operational workflows for companies change as well. Data protection is one area that is a constant in that the requirements to protect data will continue. What is changing is the method for protecting information. The current workflows used by many in performing backups are unsustainable given the increase in the amount of data and the operational cost increases. New approaches using backup to disk and remote replication to create the protected data copies are more prevalent now and continue to be improved with new technologies introduced.
What has not changed is the requirement for most organizations to have retained backups or copies of information that can be removed to a safe place, outside of the data center. True physical vaulting of copies of information is still a requirement and must be addressed even with the other data protection technology changes. The RDX removable disk technology is a new technology answer to meeting the removable storage requirement for protection of data. Available from different vendors, the RDX is an ideal choice for protected copies of information that needs to be retained for long periods of time. The RDX disk cartridges and the RDX USB-3 docks can be used to store information for years and still be able to connect the dock and read the cartridges.
The requirements for removable storage have not gone away and if anything, have proven to be necessary for true protection in disaster situations. The performance of disk with USB-3 speed and the random access of disk provide technology advances over previous removable solutions. And, the capacity increases with the RDX disk cartridges continue to track the overall disk capacity increases. RDX cartridges are also offered with Solid State Devices for greater speed and durability. As that technology continues to advance, the RDX removable technology follows.
In addition to the removable data protection, the RDX technology continues to be used as a primary interchange technology. Distributing large amounts of data to remote locations is more practical and economic with RDX than many other alternatives.
RDX is a modern technology that is well suited to meet requirements for removable storage. The requirements will persist even though other protection methods are in place. It is another tool in the storage professional’s arsenal to meet requirements for protection and data interchange.
About Evaluator Group
Evaluator Group Inc. is dedicated to helping IT professionals and vendors create and implement strategies that make the most of the value of their storage and digital information. Evaluator Group services deliver in-depth, unbiased analysis on storage architectures, infrastructures and management for IT professionals. Since 1997 Evaluator Group has provided services for thousands of end users and vendor professionals through product and market evaluations, competitive analysis and education. www.evaluatorgroup.com Follow us on Twitter @evaluator_group
SMB Storage Gets Personal
While companies may know the value of their data and the negative impact of data loss on their businesses, many are still not protecting their data adequately. According to Small Business Computing magazine, 40% of SMBs don’t backup their data, and 60% of all data is stored on PC desktops and laptops. Looking at SOHO users, only 73% of those who have a personal backup device backup at least monthly and only 40% back up daily. This failure to protect data adequately can have severe consequences. FEMA even estimates that 40 to 60 percent of SMBs never re-open after a data disaster.
SMB companies are having a growing awareness of the importance of effective backup and archive practices. For example, in litigation discovery a company is responsible for producing the needed information quickly. The inability to easily retrieve data could substantially influence the outcome. The absence of effective backup and archive practices could be devastating. SMBs are also becoming increasingly aware of the need for effective disaster recovery programs so in the event of a natural disaster (fire, water damage, etc.) they can quickly access another copy of their corporate data and be up and running quickly.
The right storage device, such as an RDX Storage device, can help SMBs protect their valuable assets. RDX removable disk storage solutions are suitable for SMB and SOHO data protection, archive, retention, and recovery strategies. RDX removable disk technology supports both fast and drag-and-drop backup and recovery. RDX technology allows you to remove your backup data for archive, and restore your data in seconds — And because RDX removable disk technology can scale to large terabytes of data, you will never run out of storage capacity. SMBs require an easy to use, simple to integrate, fool-proof and cost-effective “all in one” storage solution. The key features that appeal to SMBs in any external storage device are capacity, throughput and portability. RDX Storage technology meets these.
RDX Storage Technology Offers New Flexible Archiving Solution for SMBs & SMEs
Recently a new solution has been introduced to the market for SMBs and SMEs which provides a flexible open platform delivering active data archive management and removable disk offsite disaster protection. The solution combines open platform archive management software with an RDX iSCSI-attached, removable disk library designed to provide a multi-cartridge platform for short-, medium-, or long-term archiving.
The archive management software provides a flexible open interface that helps to make the RDX removable disk library an obvious archive solution for SMBs through SMEs and is particularly well suited for businesses that rely on small IT departments and limited budgets. It can be easily installed on servers using a range of operating systems including Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac. Using the RDX LTO library emulation mode, the open platform archive management software allows multiple RDX cartridges to be seen as a single share (drive letter) or mount point. Using non-proprietary operating system search engines, users can actively search and retrieve archived files. All metadata is retained on a disk cache within the chosen server platform, so even files on an RDX cartridge that have been removed from the RDX removable disk library can be found. Once an offline file is accessed, an email notification is automatically sent to the administrator to request the media be returned to the RDX removable disk library.
RDX SSDs Have Arrived
By Eric Slack, Sr. Analyst, Storage Switzerland
What would you do with a 500GB thumb drive?
I’m not comparing RDX with a thumb drive, although I suspect more than a few users have done so as they drop an RDX cartridge into a bag or backpack. After all, a primary use case for this technology is replacing USB hard drives (and tapes) for getting data offsite. RDX cartridges have historically had spinning hard disk drives (HDD) inside. By using these commercial off the shelf drives RDX can leverage the latest and greatest of what the disk drive industry puts out. This design has allowed RDX capacities to keep increasing, with relatively little engineering work on their part (that’s a good thing).
Now, we’re seeing the wisdom of this design payoff again, with the Solid State Disk (SSD) RDX. They’ve taken a commercially available 2.5” drive form factor SSD and put it into the RDX cartridge. The RDX dock has also been upgraded to USB 3.0, giving this new RDX about twice the performance of its HDD counterpart – up to 180MB/s. The SSD is from Toshiba, an MLC NAND device, currently available in sizes from 64GB to 512GB.
Again, thanks to the RDX design, an SSD from any manufacturer could be used, keeping costs down and suppliers available. The Engineering folks at Tandberg told me it took longer to get brochures written than to do the actual engineering work required to release the SSD RDX product. Back to the thumb drive discussion; seriously, there’s really very little this product or any enterprise grade SSD has in common with a thumb drive.
Flash as a storage device
First of all, flash as a storage device needs a little help when it’s put into environments where users really expect to get all their data back. Unlike magnetic media, flash must be erased in full block segments, you can’t simply overwrite existing data a byte at a time. Also, the NAND flash substrate can only sustain a finite number of erasures and overwrites (called Program/Erase or P/E cycles). This means the flash controller has a few things it must do in the background in order to provide the reliability and longevity that enterprise users expect from their storage devices.
Garbage collection
When data’s written to the flash device, after all the cells have been filled the first time, the controller must go through and consolidate data to free up enough space to hold one or more complete blocks, depending on the size of the write. This includes “garbage collection” or the process of clearing out data that’s already been deleted. The controller must also spread data writes out onto as many cells as possible, called “wear leveling”, to make sure the individual NAND flash memory cells are accumulating an equal number of P/E cycles.
The thumb drive you picked up at the last trade show has a controller inside that may do some of these things – or not. Until they’re actually filled up for the first time, users will never know, which is fine since they’re not designed for any substantial long term use. But real SSDs that are used in real enterprise applications, like the RDX are different. They do all of those things (and more) to maintain reliability and consistent performance throughout their useful life – which is comparable with spinning disk drives.
OK, so let’s rephrase the original question and ask: “What could you do with a portable 500GB enterprise class solid state drive in an industry standard RDX cartridge?” According to Tandberg there are several areas that are using this technology.
Video cameras are now all digital, we’re talking about the movie and TV industry,. They store video ‘footage’ on memory sticks that go into the camera but need to transfer these videos back to the editing and production facility as quickly as possible. USB drives and disk-based RDX have been the technology of choice but SSD offers them some benefits. It’s about twice as fast in the transfer process and it’s more rugged than spinning magnetic disk media.
Scientific instrumentation generates a lot of data, with new higher resolution sensors and the increasing use of graphics for analysis. The oil and gas industry is a big user of portable digital media to collect well head data, seismic data, geologic data, etc. This often involves physically driving around to remote sites and changing out disk media. Again, RDX has found a home in this environment. It’s more ruggedized than traditional portable disk drives and more reliable than tape. Solid state storage is even more appealing here since it has no moving parts and can better withstand the bumps, drops and dirt associated with this environment.
The military is also interested in an RDX cartridge with an SSD inside. The “digital battlefield” is a term the DoD coined to describe their focus on imagery and seeing (literally) everything that’s happening, in real time. This means sophisticated systems, lots of sensors and tons of data. A lot of this data is transferred over a ‘boot net’ (the military version of sneaker net), and RDX has found a home here as well. With SSDs, they now have a faster, more rugged and potentially more reliable medium to capture this digital battlefield data and get it to the people who need it.
Mainstream RDX Moves Upstream
By Marije Gould, Tandberg Data
Until recently RDX technology has been focused on the SMB market. Once proven as effective in managing SMB data for backup, protection, restore and archive, RDX storage product companies are now introducing products suitable for the SME market. What do these look like? There are now multi-cartridge platforms that can be configured in multiple modes. For example, RDX-based appliances can look like a tape library or autoloader, virtual RDX drives, stand-alone tape drives, generic disk drives, or a combination of tape and disk. RDX multi-cartridge platforms provide the flexibility for an SME data center to provide removable data protection for any or many systems on the same network.
These RDX multi-cartridge platforms are also compatible with popular backup applications to quickly and easily integrate automated removable disk into existing protection plans and ISCSI connectivity provides for easy integration into existing Ethernet infrastructure.
The growth of RDX technology has been phenomenal in the SMB market and as this important technology enters the SME market we are finding the same reception.
USB 3.0 RDX Dock and Family of RDX SSD Cartridges Deliver New Performance Capabilities!
By Marije Gould, Tandberg Data – USB 3.0 RDX Docks Coupled with RDX SSD Cartridges – USB 3.0 RDX docks, introduced in May, offer higher performance and are fully backward compatible with all RDX cartridges maintaining full interchangeability of all RDX docks and cartridges. The new RDX USB 3.0 docks achieve speeds up to eight times than that of the USB 2.0 and SATA versions when combined with new RDX Solid-State Disk (SSD) cartridges. In addition, the RDX USB 3.0 docks have been optimized for power efficiency, making the device more environmentally friendly.
New RDX SSD Cartridges – A new line of RDX cartridges have been introduced that are based on SSD technology for demanding environments which require super fast, extremely durable and portable storage. Performance improves by up to eight times when used with USB 3.0 docks.
The new RDX SSD cartridges provide blazing fast transfer rates of up to 180MB/s when used with the RDX USB 3.0 docks. These cartridges are designed for mission-critical, data-intensive applications and work-flow applications such as medical, military, video editing and surveillance. The new RDX SSD cartridge capacities include 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. Standard RDX media is available in capacities ranging from 160GB to 1TB, with an ever-increasing capacity roadmap that tracks with the 2.5-inch mobile hard disk drive industry.
RDX technology provides a safe, rugged and portable storage choice for SMBs and SMEs. Designed to store, back up and archive data from servers and workstations, RDX removable disk technology offers users higher capacity, faster speed and lower cost than low-end tape products. Its fast transfer rate of up to 180MB/second allows users to back up their entire server onto a single cartridge, quickly and safely.
RDX Media Costs Continue to Drop as Volumes Increase
By Tandberg Data — RDX has become widely accepted in the marketplace and demand is growing world-wide. The average cost of RDX media continues to be driven down as capacity shipments continue to grow exponentially. More than 256 Petabytes of RDX capacity have been shipped since its introduction in 2006 with 37.5 Petabytes shipped in Q2 2011 alone. Leading the growth has been a shift is to higher capacity cartridges, notably the 1 TB cartridges.
The average cost per GB in the market has gone down from approximately $2.50 per GB in 2006 to below $0.50 per GB in 2011. The 1TB cartridge is even better positioned at around $0.30 per GB. This is a huge benefit to RDX customers, particularly since users can scale up in capacity and still use any RDX drive.
RDX has earned a standing in the data protection market. RDX technology offers the best that tape and disk have to offer, and it has been rapidly adopted by SMBs, mid-sized enterprises, and by systems integrators during server builds.
The New Arguments for Using Removable Disk in Lieu of Tape for SME Archiving Requirements
By Jerome M. Wendt on September 1, 2011 9:30 AM
Continuing (dare I say exploding?) data growth in small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) is forcing these size organizations to confront an issue that was primarily confined to larger organizations: data archiving. Chief among these issues, the question as to what media to store archival data on is one that needs to be answered. While many may assume that tape is best positioned to assume this role, there is a growing body of evidence that disk may be the most appropriate media for SMEs to use when archiving their data.
Every size organization is grappling with growing data stores and SMEs are certainly not exempt from that. As this occurs, they are finding that while they need more storage capacity for their primary data, they may need far greater amounts of storage capacity to store and retain their archival copies of data.
Historically, this role of storing archive data has fallen to tape because of certain properties that it possesses. But what SMEs may fail to realize is that removable disk media now possesses many of the same properties as tape. As such, it may now actually be a better choice than tape for storing archival data.
Consider the reasons that are typically cited for using tape and how removable disk now matches up.
Removable disk also provides at least one feature that tape does not offer: forward and backward compatibility. An issue that SMEs encounter when using tape is that when new, larger capacity tape cartridges are released, to take advantage of them they first have to upgrade their tape drive(s). However, upgrading their tape drive negates their ability to use their older tape cartridges since tape drives can only write to the current and the prior generation of tape cartridges.
Removable disk has no such limitations. It can read and write to any prior or future generation of disk drive since it offers a standard interface. This makes it more practical and even easier to manage than tape, especially when it comes to more quickly accessing, searching and retrieving archival data.
E-discovery and search are two other arguments for using disk instead of tape. Should an SME be subject to an e-discovery, their archived data will likely need to be accessed, indexed and searched, which will then lead to the retrieval of individual email messages or files. Since these are typically stored throughout the archival data store and not in just one location, this calls for random access to the data which plays to disk’s strengths, not tape.
These arguments for removable disk have now become so strong that tape’s last and best argument for use is its longevity as it is rated to last up to 30 years. But even in this respect SMEs need to ask the question, “What archival data do I need to retain for 30 years?”
Most regulations to which SMEs are subject only require that they keep data for three to seven years. In this regards, removable disks now have 5 year warranties so they are usable for at least that period of time and the data on them is in all likelihood good for a couple of years after that. Further, because removable disk is forward and backward compatible, it is a relatively simple task to copy data from an older disk to a newer one if a longer retention period is required.
So a better question for SMEs to ask is, “What is the best way to implement removable disk in my environment so I can best take advantage of the benefits that it has to offer?” In this respect, SMEs should look to solutions such as what Revinetix offers as it combines the best of what both fixed and removable disk solutions have to offer.
Revinetix offers fixed disk for daily backups and short term archival requirements (~1 – 12 months in duration, depending on amount of data and business requirements.) However, it also supports the use of removable disk technology so SMEs can keep archival data in a near line or offline state to meet their internal or external retention requirements.
What makes the union of Revinetix and removable disk based technology particularly appealing is two-fold.
First, should an SME have to quickly respond to an e-discovery request, they can optionally attach removable disks to another Revinetix system. This frees the primary system to do the daily backups, backups and ongoing archival of data while enabling them to dedicate a second system to do data retrievals or e-discovery searches.
Second, disaster recoveries get a lot easier and more predictable as well. Using removable disk means SMEs always have the right generation of technology at both the production and DR site so they can be confident they can recover. Further, removable disk opens up the possibility that SMEs can recover the application directly from it which may eliminate the need to have a separate storage solution at the DR site. SMEs could never do that with tape.
Tape is still a logical and cost-effective medium to archiving but its use cases are increasingly reserved for large enterprises. What SMEs will likely find is that new removable disk technology gives them all of the benefits that they associate with tape while preserving the benefits that disk affords. By using solutions such as what Revinetix offers, they can fold both fixed and removable disk technology into their environment and seamlessly manage them both.
About DCIG: DCIG analyzes software, hardware and services of companies within the data storage and data protection industries. DCIG’s goal is to provide an informed, inside look at the latest advances and developments for products and services in these markets in the form of blog entries, case studies and executive and full-length white papers. Visit DCIG at www.dcig.com
RDX Provides Assurance (As Opposed to Good Luck!) When Disaster Strikes
By Jim Nash, DCIG Business Analyst.
I was driving to Omaha from my home in Minnesota in early August to have our annual company meeting. As I was getting ready, I received a text from my company President asking me what route I intended to take to get there. Normally I would make my way southwest across Minnesota to South Dakota, and into Iowa where I would then take I-29 South right into the Omaha area. “Good luck with that” he responded and reminded me that large portions of I-29 were underwater.
While I have a boat that I used for fishing I did not expect to bring it with me in anticipation of using it as a means of conveyance for this trip. So instead I drove south to Des Moines and then west to Omaha, which added a lot of time to the trip but at least I was dry and arrived safely.
I can’t honestly remember a summer that was so pre-occupied with flood threats, flood damage, and an overwhelming sense of disorder. My thoughts went out to the farmers, and businesses that were impacted by this flood, as they have lost a tremendous of revenue and opportunity.
But as I thought about it more, I was struck with the question of data protection and what were the businesses in the flood plain doing to insure that their data was protected and portable for the potential news of a broken levy along the Missouri River.
Data is the lifeblood of so many companies yet it is also an oft forgotten item in a disaster recovery plan for SMB’s of smaller size. Many do not have the budget or appetite for cloud storage and, in these parts of the county, may not be able to locate a provider that offers sufficient internet bandwidth for cloud access. Further, they do not always understand something that they cannot physically touch. That is the beauty of an RDX solution.
With an RDX solution many in the Missouri river area or indeed any flood plain can still backup and archive vital corporate data, inventory information, customer records, video, etc. But they can keep the portability and a high level of assurance that they have access to their data.
With RDX farmers, small businesses, and single site businesses in the path of the flood can back up to the RDX cartridge in an RDX docking station, eject the RDX cartridge and high tail it out of town in a matter of minutes with all of the data they need intact and ready to recover. Further, depending on how you back your data up, you can potentially even run your application directly from the RDX media without needing to restore it.
This portability affords a CIO, CEO, business owner or even a family farmer the certainty of data protection at an achievable cost with the flexibility to set it up wherever they have retreated as they wait for the flood waters subside.
I think that it would be an interesting and probably sad mathematical exercise to calculate the financial repercussions of data loss due to this one flood event in the Upper Midwest alone. Millions of dollars of property were certainly lost, but what is the cost of lost data? I would suggest that it is comparable in cost to real property and is sadly not an insurable item that one can receive payment on from their insurance company.
Natural disasters are certainly newsworthy on many levels, but resultant data loss need not be for the SMB that can avoid data loss by not thinking ahead. Using an RDX solution can, and will allow you to have a safe, ruggedized, portable data back-up solution when unexpected events like this occur.
About DCIG: DCIG analyzes software, hardware and services of companies within the data storage and data protection industries. DCIG’s goal is to provide an informed, inside look at the latest advances and developments for products and services in these markets in the form of blog entries, case studies and executive and full-length white papers. Visit DCIG at www.dcig.com
