IT
Powerful Storage Solutions for IT Specific Enviornments
Proven in the world's largest enterprise computing and backup environments, Promise offers the ultimate in performance, flexibility and reliability. Whether your needs involve virtualization, business continuity or data protection, Promise has a solution to fit your unique needs.
Data means everything
Data is the lifeblood of businesses and storage solutions are deployed to ensure valuable data is safe and always available. Selecting proven solutions is crucial to ensuring your data is safe. However, many storage solutions today are overly complicated and cause massive headaches for the IT department. This is especially true for SMB IT which requires solutions that are easy to administer and maintain.
IT departments are often faced with limited staff (and budget), even though their businesses are creating an increasing amount of data, which needs to be rapidly available. Many businesses are turning to virtualization to help their data center become more efficient, because the current "one app/one server" model leads to physical server sprawl, underutilized servers and increased costs.
Virtualization is a growing trend
Cloud computing infrastructure requires flexibility and storage management efficiency. Virtualization enables dynamic storage allocations so that physical layers of storage can be utilized most effectively.You can enable the full benefits of server virtualization and boost performance and versatility with Promise storage. Migrate physical servers to virtual machines to lower monthly power and cooling costs and reduce the overall footprint of the entire data center as fewer servers, less networking gear and a smaller number of racks are required. Plus, the lower number of servers reduces maintenance costs and effort.
Solutions
VAAI support
vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) is an API framework from VMware that enables certain storage tasks, such as thin provisioning, to be offloaded from the VMware server virtualization hardware to the storage array. For a storage administrator to take advantage of VAAI, the manufacturer of the storage system must support VAAI.
Vess R2000 and VTrak x30 storage solutions support VMWare VAAI which reduces resource overhead on VMWare vSphere ESXi hosts, significantly improving performance for storage-intensive operations such as storage cloning, zeroing, and more.
Certified excellence
Promise storage systems are certified with a range of solutions, including VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and DataCore SANsymphony-V. As virtual machines continue to increase with more virtualized deployments, performance optimized where critical, complimented with simpler and cost effective 10GbE iSCSI infrastructures will accelerate meeting the bandwidth and storage requirements for the cloud and datacenter.Business continuity
Downtime can have serious results which can devastate your business. Businesses also must find ways to increase the ability of a system to recover quickly from various kinds of failures and service interruptions. High-availability storage with a redundant design is a crucial piece to the puzzle.
Over time, drives and other components, such as power supplies, fail. It's vital that the system stays online when replacing these components instead of having to take the system offline. Furthermore, when businesses need to update firmware and software or perform regular maintenance tasks like nightly backups, the systems may be taken offline. It's important to deploy solutions that reduce the impact this has on your business.
Redundant component design
The VTrak x30 Series and Vess R2000 Series are high-availability dual controller storage solutions - if one controller fails the other will failover and still maintain the same level of data service to the host. Plus, Vess and VTrak feature a redundant power supply design that helps reduce system downtime.Hot-swappable modular design
Vess and VTrak are modular RAID storage subsystems with hot-swappable components, including drive bays and power supplies. If one component fails, you can easily swap the part without shutting down the system so data service continues with no interruption.Non-disruptive firmware updates
Unlike conventional software firmware updates requiring system shutdown to perform the task, PerfectFlash, available in Vess and VTrak storage solutions, enables a non-disruptive software or firmware update process for computer storage devices that greatly eliminates downtime while doing system software updates.PerfectRebuild and PerfectPath
Promise storage solutions include a unique technology called PerfectRebuild that significantly cuts the time needed to rebuild a RAID array. This frees up CPU resources more quickly for host I/O and other mission critical tasks and reduces the risk of system downtime. Plus, Promise solutions include PerfectPath which provides multiple paths between the host and subsystem, so that if one path fails, the other paths will take up the workload and keep your data available to the host.Data protection isn't a luxury. It's a necessity.
Drives fail. That's a fact of life in the high-end storage world. And it's why RAID storage is so important. During the rebuild process of a failed drive, the likelihood of a second drive having an error or failing increases exponentially with both the size of the hard drives and the total capacity of the logical drive. The longer the rebuild takes the higher the risk to your data. In RAID 5, if you lose a second hard drive while the first one is still rebuilding, you lose 100% of your data.
RAID storage arrays used in performance-critical applications are typically configured to operate in write-back cache mode. Data written to a write-back cache is vulnerable until it is written to disk. Normally, a BBU will save the data in the cache for 72 hours in case of a power outage. But what if more than 72 hours are needed to restore power to the system?
Preparing for disasters
When designing a disaster recovery plan in a business, it's important to take the following points in to consideration:- What is the monetary impact to the business in case of a disaster?
- How soon can the business be back in production?
- At what point in time can I recover to?
- How much communication bandwidth can I afford?
- What disaster recovery solution is viable based on my distance requirements?