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April 2013
EMC Avamar: High Performance Backup and Recovery For a Software-Defined Data Center
Data centers are becoming more difficult to manage and protect as more data and applications are moved into virtual software-defined environments. Adding fuel to the fire, CIOs must now deal with corporate mandates to build an IT infrastructure that scales to unknown demand levels and provides service assurance for fluctuating conditions that cannot be accurately projected. To gain an insight into how EMC Avamar builds high efficiency and high performance into a unified data protection solution for physical and virtual systems, a series of backup and restore tests were run in a VMware® vSphere 5.1 environment. Tests were performed on EMC systems and the Avamar 6.1 results were compared to CommVault Simpana 9, and Symantec NetBackup 7.5.0.4. For CIOs, the data protection equation is rapidly becoming further complicated by a growing trend among corporate departments to store “copy data” as an internal way to deal with their own needs for local data backup, and protection. Propelling the data copy problem is a toxic brew that is one part fear of government regulations and compliance mandates on how companies function and one part distrust of corporate IT to provide fast recovery services that never require the retrieval of tapes from an off-site location. As a result, there is a growing trend within Line of Business (LoB) groups to be over-protective with data by keeping multiple secondary copies.
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February 2013
Paragon StarWind iSCSI SANs Maximize Performance and Functionality for Virtualized Storage Systems
openBench Labs examines the storage virtualization features and performance of the Paragon StarWind iSCSI SAN storage hypervisor software. Using Paragon StarWind iSCSI SAN, IT is free to use a wide array of common server hardware and Windows Server operating systems to implement a highly functional iSCSI SAN infrastructure servicing both physical and virtual systems in a private cloud. Virtual Machines (VMs) in particular have become closely associated with an iSCSI SAN. For IT, the key features of a private cloud based on a Virtual Infrastructure (VI) include the non-disruptive movement of VMs among VI hosts and the rapid cloning of VMs for simplified provisioning, which are dependent on storage sharing on a SAN fabric. More importantly, a VI private cloud is often cited by CIOs as a critical factor in assuaging the downtime fears of corporate executives.
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December 2012
Condusiv’s V-locity 4 Boosts Virtual Machine Performance Over 50% Without Additional Hardware
Condusiv Technologies’ V-Locity 4 optimizes I/O and boosts standard I/O performance metrics from the unique perspective of limiting unnecessary I/O. Not only does this technique afford a VM running V-locity 4 with higher I/O throughput and faster latency by limiting I/O processing on SAN- and NAS-based devices, but V-locity 4 also reduces I/O stress on multiple systems and improves scalability, particularly with respect to VM density and application performance within an enterprise-scale VI. For this white paper, openBench Labs tested the ability of V-locity 4 to optimize all I/O, both reads and writes on a server VM running a Windows-based guest OS. In this assessment, openBench Labs measured the ability of IntelliWrite® technology to prevent unnecessary split I/Os, using its intelligence to create new data files and extend current files as single contiguous collections of logical blocks. In addition, we measured the ability of IntelliMemoryTM technology to offload I/O on reads through dynamic caching, in order to boost throughput and reduce latency.
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August 2012
Unified Virtual Infrastructure Backup
If you’re currently using or considering using either Veeam Backup & Replication or Dell AppAssure software to protect your vSphere or Hyper-V Virtual Infrastructure (VI) environment, you may already be aware that both products were reintroduced in June of 2012 in significantly enhanced forms. openBench Labs is pleased to be the first independent test organization to compare them so you can make an informed purchase decision. We pitted the performance of Veeam Backup & Replication v6.1 software versus AppAssure 5 in a well-appointed VI lab environment. We found that while each offering has focused on ease-of-use through the addition of a new interface and has substantially enhanced its capabilities over its previous version, customers will judge each product primarily by how well each addresses these three time-tested questions: How easy is it to use? How fast can it complete a backup, with all the functionality you need for recovery? What does it take to recover when you need it most? Another important question also needs to be examined, especially in the light of the growing emphasis on private and public cloud computing: How well will the application architecture adapt to future needs?
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August 2012
Unified Backup: Virtual & Physical
If you’re currently using or considering either Symantec Backup Exec or AppAssure software to protect your Windows environment, you may already be aware that both products were reintroduced this year in significantly enhanced forms. openBench Labs is pleased to be the first independent test organization to compare them so you can make an informed purchase decision. We pitted the performance of Symantec Backup Exec 2012 software (introduced in February) versus AppAssure 5 (released in June) in a well-appointed Windows lab environment. We found that while each offering has focused on ease-of-use through the addition of a new interface and has substantially enhanced its capabilities over its previous version, customers will judge these products primarily by how well they answer three time-tested questions: How easy is it to use? How fast can it complete a backup, with all the functionality you need for recovery? What does it take to recover when you need it most? |
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March 2012
Nexsan E-Series Performance & Functionality
Storage for a private cloud has to be exceptionally flexible and performance neutral over a wide range of factors from physical host interconnects to virtual operating environment optimization with multiple hypervisors. To resolve these issues, Nexsan's new E-Series provides a user-defined hierarchy of SATA, SAS and SSD drives, and API integration with Windows, Hyper-V, and VMware, to deliver benchmarked streaming data at 3GB/sec and over 65,000 IOPS. Learn how Nexsan’s E-Series storage platform empowers the virtual enterprise and paves the road to cloud computing.
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March 2012
How Storage Affects Cloud Architecture
Learn how Nexsan accelerates cloud business models to improve IT operating savings by simplifying storage management via tight host API integration.
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January 2012
Comparison of Host-Level vs. VM-Level Backup with AppAssure Smart Agents
What's behind the new "marketecture" debate on VM backup? Can Smart Agents be a benefit when it comes to optimizing Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives (RPO and RTO)? Read the results of openBench Labs tests of AppAssures Smart Agents which dynamically optimize backup and restore operations between backup servers and VM clients.
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December 2011
Cloud–based Workflow Virtualization
The next wave of virtualization projects will shift the focus of IT from opportunistic consolidation projects to the complex application-centric issues of critical business processes. Using CloudShare, IT providers are able to collaborate with customers, partners, and colleagues to provide true hands-on interaction with a dedicated production-class instance of a complete IT environment. CloudShare is able to virtualize an independent copy of an entire workflow—VMs, storage, networking, and preinstalled software—and present it with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop user interface. Virtualized on demand workflows also boost development capabilities by allowing software teams to freeze entire workflows to track subtle integration problems that can degrade a process workflow without actually introducing a traceable error. As a result, any IT provider can now lay a foundation for rock-solid excellence by delivering over the web robust, agent-less solutions for pre-production tasks such as development, testing, QA, staging, and back-end training sessions.
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December 2011
Clustered Storage for High Availability Clouds
Nexsan’s clean implementation of the SCSI-3 standard is critical for successful integration of Nexsan arrays with Veritas Storage Foundation-HA (SF-HA), which provides the software infrastructure for a Veritas Cluster Server (VCS), utilizes the SCSI-3 constructs of registration and reservation as the foundation for high-availability services that protect shared data from being corrupted in a sophisticated SAN environment. Specifically, VCS provides a global locking mechanism to explicitly determine the nodes that remain in a cluster during a membership change and block systems not acknowledged as cluster members from accessing shared storage. In addition, when SAN paths fail, automatic re-routing of I/O requests over alternate paths transparently enhances data and application availability. Learn how Nexsan and Veritas SF-HA establish the foundation of a rock-solid cluster configuration.
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December 2011
Performance Analysis: Optimal Virtual & Physical Backup
AppAssure revolutionizes data protection with its own changed-block tracking technology, for virtual and physical servers. Using this technology, AppAssure creates incremental backup files that only contain changed blocks, which makes an AppAssure incremental backup nearly free of duplicated data. In a head-to-head series of disk-to-disk backup and restore tests with Acronis Backup & Recovery 11, AppAssure created incremental backup files that were 100x smaller in size before data deduplication and put 4x less processing overhead on production clients during backups with deduplication and verification. More importantly, only with AppAssure could we recover all application items, including SQL Server databases and Exchange e-mail messages, from any incremental backup. Read the full openBench Labs review.
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November 2011
Strategic End-to-End SAN Visibility for VMs
For CIOs struggling with the tradeoffs between current legacy network constraints and concerns for a future migration to converged Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), the synergies between Nexsan and QLogic devices provide an immediate means to build a cohesive, flexible infrastructure needed to transition into a fully converged fabric topology. The Nexsan Flexible Storage Platform strategy integrates with QLogic’s Adaptive Convergence strategy, to allow IT administrators to create virtual HBAs with unique identities to manage SAN traffic associated with a VM. Without support for virtual HBAs throughout a SAN fabric, end-to-end SAN management ends at the host server. Learn how Nexsan’s Flexible Storage Platform and QLogic’s Adaptive Convergence Strategies empower the virtual enterprise and pave the road to cloud computing.
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November 2011
Performance Analysis: Unified Virtual & Physical Backup
AppAssure completely revolutionizes data protection by introducing changed-block tracking technology for any system whether virtual or physical. This technology provides backups that are up to 40X faster and 100X smaller than file-based backup technology. More importantly, AppAssure’s very fast backups include deep verification of application recoverability. Learn how to maintain a warm standby VM for any mission-critical server (physical or virtual) distinguished by a five-minute RPO as well as a five-minute RTO for Disaster Recovery.
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