have visibility across all storage provides a single pane of glass that allows users to manage all aspects of storage (primary storage, second- ary storage, archive storage), and drastically reduces the amount of time and effort to manage data. Additionally, LJA wanted an automated approach to continuously identify “cold data” and transparently move it by policy without changes to user and application access. Cold data, sometimes referred to as “historically critical data,” is the data that is not actively being accessed. Often, organizations are utilizing data to produce results, do analytics, prove a concept, provide video evidence, etc. As the data grows, the older data becomes cold data and is rarely accessed, said Brian Grainger, Spectra Logic CSO. When organizations move this data off of expensive primary storage to a lower-cost second tier of storage, it reduces the total cost of storage and frees up valuable space on their primary storage system. The cost of cold data is often not only the cost of storing that data on expensive NAS storage, but also the cost of replication, backup, and data protection of that footprint, said Komprise President and COO Krishna Subramanian. Data management is 80 percent of the costs, and when a solution such as Komprise moves data to less expensive storage, it cuts not only the primary storage costs but also the costs of replication and backup. The solution LJAEngineering considered HPE, Tegile, and Equalogic offerings, but ultimately decided on a Spectra Verde NAS Solution in combination with Komprise software (see Figure 1). “We chose Spectra Logic’s Verde NAS solution for its industry reputation, price point, and in- tegration with Komprise, which provided us with the visibility and policy-based automation we need to create an active archive,” said David Kimball, LJA Engineering’s IT manager. Active archive is a concept that has been crafted into a full-scale data management approach and is highlighted by the Active Archive Alli- ance (www.activearchive.com), Grainger said. This concept is based on the idea that users have access to all of their data all the time. This is important, because users are able to move cold (or inactive) data to a lower-cost tier of storage without sacrificing the speed of access that users have with primary storage. There is usually a software layer that acts as the director of data to ensure that when users request data, they are returned the data that they need in the most efficient way. From traditional hierarchical storage management systems, to data- mover software, active archives are designed to give superior access speed at an affordable price. Historically, this has been a difficult storage infrastructure to set up, and that was the reason for the Active Archive Alliance: to reduce the complexity and bring multiple vendors who specialize in this concept together into a single solution. Modern software packages such as Komprise are a perfect example of the soft- ware layer needed to create and manage an active archive solution. Paired with Spectra’s affordable storage solution, this creates a never- before-seen solution that provides affordable, fast, and responsive data storage for any organization, Grainger said.
Figure 1: LJA Engineering uses Spectra Verde network attached storage in combination with Komprise software.
LJAEngineering’s Verde NAS Solution holds 75, 8-TB disk drives and currently stores 250 TB of data. According to Spectra Logic, the Verde NAS Solution is intuitive, easy to use, and offers the lowest cost-per- terabyte on the market — as low as 7.5 cents per gigabyte. Spectra Verde NAS Solution is the optimal disk platform for the storage of mid-tier data, including primary storage offload, data staging, backup, and archiving. Mid-tier data, another term to describe cold data, is the data that has been offloaded from the primary storage and moved to a lower-cost tier of storage. In the past, the storage pyramid had three to four tiers of storage with reduced cost as you went down the storage pyramid, but you also had a slower access time to get to the data, or less features on the secondary storage tier than primary storage, Grainger said. A staging area, or landing zone, is an intermediate storage area used for data processing during the extract, transform, and load (ETL) pro- cess. The data staging area sits between the data source(s) and the data target(s), which are often data warehouses, data marts, or other data repositories. Staging areas can be designed to provide many benefits, but the primary motivations for their use are to increase efficiency of ETL processes, ensure data integrity, and support data quality opera- tions. The functions of the staging area include the following: • consolidation, • alignment,
• minimizing contention, • independent scheduling, • change detection, • cleansing data, • aggregate precalculation, and • data archiving.
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march 2018
csengineermag.com
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