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Storage Guardian Uses Exos to Future-proof Mass Data Solutions
Storage Guardian and Seagate Exos help manage and recover data faster.
Storage Guardian leverages the Seagate® Exos® E 5U84 and Exos X 5U84 RAID arrays to improve customers’ self-service data management and streamline company operations. Their enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery solutions help companies of all sizes future-proof their systems and safeguard critical business data.
Updated storage systems give customers access to enhanced disaster recovery resources and self-management capabilities.
Seagate file and object storage solutions support Storage Guardian’s robust, compact, and low-maintenance data center offering.
Seagate’s Exos X 5U84 and Exos E 5U84 storage systems provide new capabilities for more efficient workflows.
Storage Guardian with Seagate Exos offers enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery that keeps pace with data growth.
Storage Guardian provides enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery solutions to companies of all sizes, helping them future-proof their businesses using solutions that keep pace with exponential data growth. Serving over 7,500 enterprise customers from data centers throughout North America and the UK, Storage Guardian offers solutions that safeguard critical business data in secure off-site locations.
As data sources multiply and customer data-management demands continue to evolve, so do data storage requirements. Storage Guardian focuses its offerings on meeting current customer needs and positioning for future technologies.
Making the right investment choice for a new infrastructure.
Driven by remote work during the pandemic, Storage Guardian’s customers significantly increased the amount of data they back up—growing at nearly 2PB per year. As a result, Storage Guardian was challenged to increase storage capacity to keep up with this growth.
This increased demand coupled with the need to streamline operations compelled Storage Guardian to find a way to consolidate its infrastructure. This not only required a significant investment in new hardware solutions, but it was also critical to choose products that would provide the infrastructure for future technological evolution.
Another challenge was the decreasing price of backup as a service. Historically priced at $30-$50 per TB/month, cloud-based backup providers using object storage now offer the service for as low as $4 per TB/month, requiring Storage Guardian to implement the most cost-effective storage solution possible. They needed a solution that would reduce their storage management workload and operation costs while increasing capacity.
In a competitive data management market, Storage Guardian needed to meet customer needs for performance, capacity, growth, and cost while addressing customer demands for improved data self-management capabilities. Three criteria would define success:
Achieve their target IOPS
Consolidate the data center while improving on the previous architecture
Protect new cloud workloads while offering a competitive cost per terabyte.
They also needed to provide block and file data access and plan for future object storage service.
Storage Guardian has been in business for over two decades. Their leadership team was knowledgeable about the range of providers qualified for this undertaking and recognized that significant investment in up-to-date technology was needed. Therefore, it was critical to partner with a provider that would address current challenges as well as position them to launch future offerings that align with evolving technology.
Having previously used Seagate’s enterprise storage, company leadership understood the high-quality, high-performance capabilities and rich feature set of Seagate’s storage system offerings. After evaluating several alternatives, Storage Guardian implemented two storage solutions that provided block, file, and object storage while meeting their cost and performance goals.
Storage Guardian selected Seagate’s Exos E enterprise storage systems and StorONE’s software-defined storage to replace an expensive legacy NAS solution. StorONE provided a single software solution for file and object storage that can scale to meet growing storage capacity needs using Seagate Exos E disk arrays. The combination of a small number of Seagate Nytro SSDs with Seagate Exos nearline disk storage and StorONE’s advanced predictive auto-tiering provided high IO performance with cost-effective capacity.
The Seagate and StorONE solution solved several challenges for Storage Guardian, providing flexibility of both file and object storage, expansion up to 15PB using a single pair of controllers, and reduced rebuild times to a couple of hours using StorONE’s vRAID. This allowed Storage Guardian to achieve very high IOPS (IO per second) performance—up to 15,000 IOPS at peak without resorting to costly all-flash arrays to meet performance targets. The solution also enabled Storage Guardian to offer NAS and object storage backup targets to customers using Veeam’s Backup and Replication software.
To optimize the cost and performance of block storage for the Veeam backup storage repository, Storage Guardian used a separate solution with Seagate’s Exos X 5U84 high density iSCSI-based SAN arrays. Storage Guardian chose the Exos X 5U84 because of its cost effectiveness, performance, and high storage density. The Veeam validated Exos X system uses Seagate’s latest 6th-generation VelosCT ASIC in its controller to provide twice the read and write performance as the previous generation controller, along with hardware-based erasure coding data protection that decreases drive recovery time from days to hours. The Exos X array also supports Seagate Autonomous Drive Regeneration (ADR) which reduces operator maintenance needs by autonomously repairing drives within the system, recovering up to 95% of the original capacity without replacing the drive.
By implementing Seagate Exos X 5U84 for block storage and Exos E 5U84 with StorONE for file and object storage, Storage Guardian established a robust solution that effectively addresses all three criteria and opens the way for future services that keep pace with technological advancement.
Storage Guardian made the changes needed to future-proof their architecture and exceed customer expectations. Seagate’s Exos X 5U84 and Exos E 5U84 storage systems provided new capabilities that allowed more efficient workflows and a more compact data center. As a result, Storage Guardian customers have enhanced disaster recovery resources and self-management capabilities for data repositories, including:
Boosted customer data self-management
Reduced hardware footprint
Streamlined workloads
Room to plan for future services
“We were able to significantly condense our workloads, maintain stability, improve performance and scalability, and to pass benefits through to our customers. ”
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