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Join our Webinar to learn how virtualization solves 3 key common challenges faced in multi-site environments:
- Limited IT resources;
- The need for reduced IT complexity; and
- The demand for high availability
“How To Get the Most Out of Your Branch Office Initiatives Virtualization”
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
11:30am EST

Register Now

As part of our discussion, we’ll highlight Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) and give you the tools to:
- Achieve high availability without purchasing a SAN / NAS
- Leverage your VMware vSphere
- Manage your branch offices from a centralized hub

Presented by Steven Santini at StorMagic and Matthew Satongar at D2NA

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The benefits of virtualization are still top of mind for CIOs this year. In fact, InformationWeek.com published an article last month highlighting an IDC recent study that identifies virtualization and server consolidation as the top priority for CIOs in 2012.

So how do you make the most of your investment? Solving the issue of limited IT resources for branch office support is only one of several benefits CIOs find with virtualization. A second important benefit is, of course, the associated cost-savings. But there is even a third and more important issue here that resonates with our clients — achieving high availability.

High availability is a much needed solution in multi-site environments as it protects your virtualized IT environment against hardware and operating system failures. Users can continue accessing business critical applications and information even when one server fails.

Achieving High Availability
The costs of realizing high availability often casts a shadow over the savings generated from virtualization because the storage hardware required to achieve it can be very expensive and complicated, making it understandable why achieving high availability in multiple locations is so easily missed. But with the virtualization of your branch offices, you gain the ability to virtualize your storage. In fact Storage Virtual Appliances (SVAs) enable users to achieve high availability without purchasing a SAN / NAS. Instead, you are able to leverage the internal disks of branch servers to create mirrored datastores which in turn are utilized by your VMware vSphere to enable high availability.

Understanding all that an SVA provides to achieve high availability and make the most of your virtualization initiatives is exactly what we’ll be addressing in our upcoming Webinar at the end of the month. Register now for “How To Get the Most Out of Your Branch Office Virtualization Initiatives” on Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 and join our discussion.

Depending on the severity, a branch can be dead in the water for a few hours or a few days depending on how quickly the systems can be brought back online. Many restaurant operations give out free coffee and food during these periods of down time to keep their customer happy and although this gives many customers a smile it hurts the company pocket.

There are solutions out there that can be implemented to help prevent or reduce the risk of these periods of downtime but are often overlooked as they can prove to cost you more than the expense of un-anticipated downtime.

The Need for Storage

Storage enables you to benefit from VMware features such as High Availability and vMotion, which in a nutshell enable a failover of business critical application/ data from one server to another if either should fail. The benefit of this is that you have continuous uptime. More information on High Availability and vMotion

Traditional Solution

Storage Area Networks (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) are typically used to keep guard and serve up business critical applications and data. This has proven successful in the past but at a very high cost as the storage solutions alone can cost anywhere from $10,000 – $100,000, but the buck does not stop there.

Physical Storage solutions (SAN/NAS) continue to cost you well past their implementation, in fact they will continue to cost you money until they eventually are outdated and are thrown on the scrap heap.

How do they continue to cost me money? Physical storage solutions “reduce” the possibility of down time, they do not prevent it. When the inevitable day come’s, due to the complex nature of a SAN/NAS you would require technically trained staff  to get the hardware back up and running.

It’s clearly not an affordable option to have technically trained staff located at each site lying in wait for the systems to go down. It is equally unaffordable for Centrally Based IT administrators to have to travel long distances to resolve an issue as it would incur travel costs and lengthy down time.

Virtual Solution

Storage Virtual Appliances (SVA) leverage the internal disks of servers to present the unutilized space as shared storage. With 2 or more servers an SVA goes a step further as it mirrors the data between each so that if one server fails the data on the other is identical.

This shared storage and mirroring allows a user to unlock VMware features such as high availability and vMotion. SVA’s are very cost effective solutions and are available for as little as $2,000 but the benefits of an SVA go beyond initial costs.

Benefits of an SVA

Deployment of Multiple Sites

Achieving High Availability with SVA’s is typically a painless process, (that depends on solution provider) an SVA such as StorMagic’s SvSAN for example can be installed on both hosts, create the needed shared storage and enable high availability in less than 1 hour.

If a branch is already set-up with 2 servers this can be done from a central office, the only downside of this is that it may take some time to transfer the necessary SVA installation files but this is dependent on the bandwidth available to you. (But still better traveling)

The benefit of this is that business operations are not disturbed, IT Administrators are not required to visit the site (Again depends if servers are already in place) and no outsourced personal / additional training required.

Management of Multiple Sites

One of the biggest challenges IT administrators face in larger multi-site environments is management, how do you manage multiple sites effectively, especially when one server or SVA goes down.

Some SVA’s are integrated into VMware’s vCenter and enables the end-user to manage the SVA’s and the servers at any location from a single familiar interface.

Down time Resolution / Prevention

Every business is effected by down time at one point or another and in multi-site environments can cause some major headaches.

Physical SAN solutions essentially are a single point of failure, regardless of having high availability. A physical solution is holding all the data and business critical applications which is being served up to the server/s, if one server fails everything can failover to the other as the data is still available.

But what if that SAN fails? This would cause some very large headaches for your IT department, because it is very unlikely for you to have training storage professionals at each site it would require you to either hire someone or for you IT administrator to travel to the site to resolve the issue. This can lead to costly expenses and unnecessary Down-Time, both options are expensive and lengthy.

An SVA on the other hand resolves the single point of failure issue because an SVA mirrors data to both (or More) servers meaning that each server holds identical information so if one fails the other can rely on its own internal copies.

With an SVA integrated into vCenter,if a server or the SVA fails getting either back online can be done without any staff leaving the office. In a scenario where physical hardware needs replacing or maintenance then physical presence of IT staff would be required regardless of physical/virtual.

Connectivity to multiple sites is a major factor affecting the efficiency of central management, a very slow connection or no connection at all would prevent you from deploying and managing sites from a central office however an SVA would still be able to provide you the redundancy you need to keep business critical applications available until a failed server or SVA if repaired/resolved.

Cost

As mentioned before, SVA’s are very affordable and are available from around $2,000, the savings are very apparent when compared to physical solutions which can range from $10,000 – $100,000.

The financial benefits of an SVA go beyond the initial purchase and continue to save you money on:

- Support: SVA’s are considerably cheaper than physical solutions as are the annual support costs

- Maintenance / Upgrades: SVA’s are a software solution and do not require expensive maintenance costs. Supported customers are able to keep their SVA’s up to date with simple software upgrades which are included in the support agreement.

- Staffing and Training: SVA’s are typically easy to use and do not require any additional training or specially trained staff. Central management reduces the need for trained IT staff locally, IT travel or outsource It professionals.

- Depreciation of Hardware: Technology is a rapidly improving sector with hardware depreciating at a fast rate as technology improves. SVA’s are not affected by this as this as supported customer can keep with the time with simple software updates.

- Electricity: No additional hardware means no additional electricity

- Down Time Resolution: Prevention and fast resolution times ensure more business uptime.

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Up-Coming Webinar: Achieve Stress-free Branch-office System

Date/Time: January 31 2011 / 11:00 am EST

Learn More

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
11:00 am EST
Register Now

The Advantages of Centralized Management
Regardless of your industry, organizations with multiple branch offices have one thing in common — an increasing dependency for on-line applications and computers to serve your customers and constituents.  Centralized management is the key to consistency, efficiency and affordability.

Network and application administrators who are responsible for keeping applications and servers online and up to date with the latest software releases are under pressure and they have limited budgets and staff. How do you address all these challenges? You focus on centralized management.

In This Webinar, You Will:

• Learn how to implement an affordable, high-availability branch office solution;
• Understand how the right solution reduces the demands on application and network administrators;
• Discover how to enable corporate IT to maintain control and manage branch offices from a single, centralized management hub.

Who Should Attend:
This educational webinar is aimed at both IT professionals and business decision makers  whose organizations have tens, hundreds, or thousands of locations.

Access Your Complimentary White Paper:
As a thank you for registering for our webinar, we are pleased to share our informative white paper, “Unlocking VMWare with a Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA).”

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
11:00 am EST
Register Now

Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world, in this world staff can be lazy, customers can be cheap and systems can go down. You can hire better staff and over time you may even have a great team, you could get more customers in your branches with effective advertising, but what about your systems? That’s a little more challenging.

Retail operations rely on their Point of Sale (POS) and computer systems to do business, as business critical applications if they fail your branch/s could be non-productive for hours and often days. Traditionally this can be avoided by implementing Physical SAN / NAS storage hardware at each branch to hold the business critical information so that if a server fails the data is still accessible through another.

However this method is often over-looked in retail environments as the solution can be very expensive to implement, maintain and requires technically trained staff to manage, although there is now an alternative.

Storage virtual appliances (SVA) leverage the internal disk drives of your ESX/i servers to create a virtual SAN. An SVA mirrors the data between servers to ensure both (or more) contain identical information, this mirroring ensures that if one server fails business critical information/applications (such as POS, Reports, Email, etc) will always be available with tools such as VMware High Availability.

One of the biggest benefits of an SVA is that it does not require technically trained staff locally and if the solution has a fault or a server fails, information and applications will still be available while the fault is resolved and managed from the central office. A physical solution such as a SAN is responsible for all the information and business critical applications, so if it goes down so does the branch. This often requires an IT administrator to visit the branch or an outsourced storage specialist which can lead to unnecessary down time and heavy costs.

By implementing a Storage virtual Appliance into your Branches, you are securing those branches against future down time and ensuring that business critical applications can continue uninterrupted

DOWNLOAD: The Affordable Multi-Site Management Kit

Storage Virtual Appliance’s (SVA) are a very cost effective solution not only from a point of sale aspect but also on daily operations. It’s easy to see where an SVA saves you money on initial purchase, especially when compared to a physical SAN / NAS, but an SVA continues to be cost effect beyond this.

An SVA does not depreciate in value like physical hardware and is not prone to expensive routine maintenance and upgrades commonly seen in physical storage solutions, supported SVA customers can simply keep with the times with a few clicks of the mouse

SVA’s are available from as little as $2,000 for High availability licensed for 2 servers making achieving high availability even more achievable for SMB’s and multi-site environments

Additional Protection

A physical SAN or NAS is essentially a single point of failure, if it fails your data is unavailable until it is brought back online, which depending on the technically trained staff available may take hours and often in Multi-Site retail environments, days!

As an SVA is mirroring data over 2+ servers any of the SVA’s or servers can fail without the business losing access to the critical data. An SVA such as SvSAN can be managed centrally within vCenter, enabling IT administrators to get any downed server/SVA back online quickly.

Leverage the benefits of High Availability, vMotion, and DRS

Shared storage unlocks the real benefits of VMware that are required to achieve true business continuity. Features such as High Availability, vMotion and DRS ensure that your business critical information is always available and that you get the most out of your environments.

Scale performance and capacity as needs grow

SVA’s leverage existing server capacity and resources for mirroring and can be extended to include additional servers as you require. To get more out of your SVA simply update some of the server hardware, add more disc’s, replace servers etc

Share datastores across clustered ESXi servers

Datastores can be made readily available to any servers in the cluster making data even more readily available to users.

Doesn’t require specialized training

SVA’s are simple and do not require any specialist training or staff meaning that existing staff would be able to get to grips with the technology quickly and easily.

As a result Remote Office/Branch office environments and SMB’s no longer need additional Technical IT staff locally.

Learn More about StorMagic and the Storage Virtual Appliance SvSAN

Central Management enables IT administrators to resolve issues from a central location without having to leave the comfort of their desk (To be fair they could do with a little sunshine). So central management means no more IT staff at local sites and no more IT travel expenses, Right??

Well, central management means you can manage the site centrally (Duh!) but without high availability at each site you’re in the same situation, as if the server goes down……you guessed it, pack your bags.

Traditionally to achieve high availability you would implement a physical SAN or a NAS into a 2-3 server infrastructure, that’s great if you have $40,000 spare to spend on each site (And that’s just for the SAN), not exactly an affordable solution. However even if it was affordable, essentially a physical SAN / NAS is a single point of failure, this means that if/when it fails, the benefits of central management are redundant as it would require an IT person on site to resolve the issue.

A Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA) enables the benefits of shared storage (HA, vMotion & DRS) without the associated cost and single point of failure. An SVA mirrors data across multiple servers and presents that mirrored data as the shared datastore required to enable VMware features such as HA etc. Because an SVA is a software based solution if anything did go “wrong” it can be managed centrally and as it mirrors the data across multiple servers you can be confident that any server can fail without business operations coming to a halt.

We wish you all the best for the new year and may it bring great sucess and joy to you all

From all of us

StorMagic