Challenges:
- Server Reached End of Life
- Needed a Backup Target Storage
- Required Enhanced Data Protection Features
Solution:
- StoneFly Dual Node Shared Nothing Clustered NAS Appliance
Results:
- Highly Redundant Clustered Storage Appliances
- Fault Tolerance
- Featuristic Storage Infrastructure
Organization
A financial services company that has been providing auditing, accounting, book keeping and other finance related consultancy services to its customers.
Industry
Financial Services
Challenges
As a financial consultant privy to the sensitive financial records of its clients, the company was frustrated with the outdated data protection and data optimization features its legacy storage system provided. In addition to the appliance nearing its end of life warranty date, the consultancy’s storage system did not provide enough data security to adequately protect its client’s financial data.
The client was interested in an on-premise solution that could be deployed as a secure backup target storage with control and minimal risk of data breach and other forms of data loss. “We deal with highly sensitive and confidential data of our clients. In order to assure data protection, we needed a solution that would allow us to store it on-premise.” said Jones, the data storage administrator.
Solution
To meet the customer’s data protection and on premise backup needs StoneFly’s technical support team was able to devise an ideal solution by introducing StoneFly’s NAS storage as an on-premise backup target storage. They crafted a solution using StoneFly’s Dual Node Shared Nothing hardware architecture as it leverages appliance clustering and mirroring/synchronous replication to make the system highly redundant and fault-tolerant. In an event of a disaster, data remains accessible and operations continue without disruption while the failed system is recovered.
As shown in the diagram below, the solution has two identical appliances that are clustered together and hence share nothing between them. Put simply, one is the mirror of the other making the configuration highly redundant and fail safe.
24-bay 12Gb SAS 4U Rackmount (3.5″)
A 24-bay 4U Rackmount NAS appliance was suggested to the firm which made the backup target storage. The StoneFly team further future proofed the appliance by offering up to Petabytes of storage with expansion units that offer click-of-a-button deployment and require no forklift upgrade.
Results
StoneFly’s Dual Shared Nothing NAS Appliance assisted the financial consultancy in achieving greater data protection and more efficient data storage due to the added data optimization services.
Highly Redundant Clustered NAS Appliance
StoneFly provided the client two identical NAS appliances, clustered together to achieve high levels of redundancy and fault tolerance. Therefore, in the event that one appliance failed, the other appliance would be able to carry on business as usual while the failed appliance recovered. This met the firm’s data redundancy requirements and assured them full business continuity in the event of a disaster. Due to the fault tolerant nature of the system, the client was able to access their financial data 24/7.
Advanced Data Protection Features
In addition to the security provided by the highly redundant Dual Node Shared Nothing architecture, the client appreciated the advanced data protection features included with their appliances such as immutable delta based snapshots and WORM technology.
Immutable Delta Based Snapshots
The financial consultancy’s data was given an extra layer of protection through StoneFly’s advanced delta based snapshot technology, which takes a snapshot of systems when a change occurs. This ensures that the system state is always retrievable and data is never lost even if a failure, malicious attack or any other incident occurs. This is in addition to the full, incremental or differential backup images created by the Backup Management Engine. Users can easily restore files that have been accidentally deleted, incorrectly modified, corrupted or infected by ransomware/malware. Moreover, these snapshots are immutable and read only which make it impossible for the snapshot to be edited or changed by anyone, once it is taken.
WORM Technology (Write Once Read Many)
StoneFly enabled the client to provision policy-based immutable WORM storage repositories for its NAS workloads. WORM stands for “Write Once Read Many” and these volumes cannot be edited or changed once used, until user policy allows it to be changed. This powerful data protection feature enables customers to add an extra layer of protection to their data security procedure.
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