ST Jul-Aug 2020

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

July/August 2020 

Vol 20, Issue 4 

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The benefits of Cloud Data Warehousing 

STRATEGY: 

Hardware-defined storage is dead 

RESEARCH: 

Covid-19 increases pressures on I.T. 

TECHNOLOGY: 

What happens when your SSD dies? 

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS

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Vol 20, Issue 4 

CONTENTS 

STOR 

MAGAZINE 


CONTENTS 

STRATEGY: 

 

RESEARCH: 

 

TECHNOLOGY: 

 

 

COMMENT….....................................................................4 

Something for everyone 

06 

HARDWARE-DEFINED STORAGE IS DEAD...............…6 

Enterprises should not be afraid to look past the limitations of block- and file-based 

storage and to the revolutionary potential of modern storage systems, argues Jerome 

M. Wendt of analyst firm DCIG 

CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF READING..................…8 

STRATEGY: CLOUD….....................................................10 

Gareth John of Q Associates examines the issues around migrating systems to the 

cloud, and the growing shift towards a hybrid multi-cloud model 

RESEARCH: STORAGE TRENDS..............................…12 

CASE STUDY: TORIX..................................................…13 

14 

REVIEW: KINGSTON TECHNOLOGY DATA CENTER 

DC1000M.......................................................................14 

MANAGEMENT: DATA PROTECTION.........................16 

Sarah Doherty of iland underlines the threats to organisational data and the need to 

future-proof infrastructure with resilient data protection strategies 

INDUSTRY FOCUS: MEDIA........................................…18 

Nick Pearce-Tomenius of Object Matrix looks at some of the potential compliance issues 

surrounding long term storage of raw footage for TV and media production companies 

16 

BACKUP TO THE FUTURE.........................................…20 

Bill Andrews of ExaGrid examines the journey from simple tape backups to tiered disk 

backups that use adaptive deduplication for fast, reliable and affordable backup and 

restore solutions 

CLOUD: YOUR FLEXIBLE FRIEND.............................…24 

What is a Cloud Data Warehouse and why is it important? Rob Mellor of WhereScape 

shares some insights 

CASE STUDY: CINESITE.............................................…26 

18 

POWER PLAY……........................................................…28 

Rainer Kaese of Toshiba shares some insights from a recent experimental project 

undertaken at the company into the energy consumption of disk drives 

PEOPLE: THE WEAKEST LINK..................................…32 

Florian Malecki of StorageCraft warns that organisations need to beware 'the vulnerability 

from within': human error 

TECHNOLOGY: SSD…….......................................…33 

Recovering data from failed solid-state drives can be more challenging than with hard 

disks, explains Philip Bridge, President of Ontrack 

24 

RESEARCH: STORAGE STRATEGIES......................…34 

Survey uncovers the limitations imposed by traditional IT infrastructures, exacerbated 

by remote working during Covid-19 pandemic 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards July/August 2020 

^ 


MAGAZINE 

03

COMMENT 

EDITOR: David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

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SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE 

BY DAVID TYLER 

EDITOR 

Welcome to the August issue of Storage magazine, where the usual Summer lull 

doesn't seem to have affected our contributors - in fact despite the ongoing 

disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic, we've seen a fairly frantic few weeks 

in terms of people wanting to be included in our pages. And that's good news for 

readers, as it means a broad selection of articles covering topics from right across the 

storage spectrum. 

Toshiba's Rainer Kaese reports on a fascinating exercise in measuring the energy 

usage of hard disks - a key consideration as enterprises and cloud providers alike try to 

manage the rising costs of their data centres. Can you imagine powering a petabyte of 

storage using less power than five old 100W light bulbs? See how it can be done on 

page 28. 

Elsewhere DCIG's Jerome Wendt puts the cat amongst the pigeons with his contention 

that hardware-defined storage is well and truly past its use-by date: "Failing to declare 

the death of hardware-defined storage serves no good purpose. Enterprises need to 

wake up to the plethora of features that modern storage systems deliver that make so 

many of their current tasks obsolete." Wendt argues that in fact most of the tasks that 

take up the working days of storage administrators could and should be being 

managed automatically by more modern storage arrays. 

In a focus on the broadcast media industry we hear from Object Matrix's Nick Pearce- 

Tomenius, who looks at how proper practices and appropriate storage solutions can 

help news and reality TV makers protect the integrity of their productions - and perhaps 

even solve the growing issues of 'Deepfake' videos. He comments: "Good digital 

content governance, a mix of process and technology, can ensure that content is 

protected, instantly accessible and proven to be authentic at any time in the future. It 

can also help organisations to beat Deepfake or disprove manipulated images." 

This issue also includes a couple of complementary bylines around cloud-related 

topics, including a piece on cloud migration - and specifically the shift towards hybrid 

multi-cloud models - from Gareth John of Q Associates. As he says: "Nowadays 

organisations are typically deploying all-flash storage systems in on-prem data centres 

and cold data is not a good fit for this medium. Intelligently archiving cold data to a 

cloud object store can ensure that hot data enjoys the high performance of flash whilst 

exploiting a low-cost scalable cloud tier for inactive data." 

I'm confident that, even more so than usual, this issue really does contain something 

for everyone. 

David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

^ 

04 STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 


@STMagAndAwards 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: HARDWARE-DEFINED STORAGE 

HARDWARE-DEFINED STORAGE IS DEAD 

ENTERPRISES SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID TO LOOK PAST THE LIMITATIONS OF BLOCK- AND FILE-BASED 

STORAGE AND TO THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF MODERN STORAGE SYSTEMS, ARGUES 

JEROME M. WENDT, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF ANALYST FIRM DCIG 

Enterprises, regardless of their size, 

largely agree they want any storage 

solutions they deploy to deliver 

flexibility. They may look for this flexibility in 

multiple ways to include its availability, 

performance, reliability, replication, 

scalability, self-healing or self-tuning 

capabilities, and more. However, as they 

choose storage solutions that deliver the 

flexibility they need and want, another truth 

quickly becomes evident: hardware-defined 

storage is dead. 

A WORKING DEFINITION 

Simply speaking, hardware-defined storage 

arrays present a storage target to a physical 

or virtual machine. All hardware-defined 

storage arrays include some type of 

firmware on them that virtualises its 

underlying HDDs or SDDs. That firmware 

then, in turn, presents this virtualised 

storage as a volume or a folder to one or 

more physical or virtual machines. 

In this respect, most storage arrays fall 

under this working definition of hardwaredefined 

storage. Most storage arrays 

deliver one or both of these storage 

interfaces quite well. Further, almost any 

enterprise that acquires a storage array 

expects it to deliver block-based storage, 

file-based storage, or both. 

Having reached this level of maturity, it is 

time to declare hardware-defined storage 

as dead. Modern storage arrays and 

storage solutions offer so many more 

features. Block- and file-based storage 

should only serve as a starting point, not an 

end game. In only using block and/or file 

storage services on a storage array or 

solution, enterprises do themselves a 

disservice. 

EVIDENCE OF DEATH 

Failing to declare the death of hardwaredefined 

storage serves no good purpose. 

Enterprises need to wake up to the plethora 

of features that modern storage systems 

deliver that make so many of their current 

tasks obsolete. Consider the following 

scenarios and see if you answer "Yes" to any 

of them: 

 

Are you still contacting support for 

break/fix issues? My question to you is, 

"Why has your storage vendor not 

called you to tell you that the hardware 

problem was already diagnosed and 

fixed?" Multiple modern storage systems 

06 STORAGE July/August 2020 


www.storagemagazine.co.uk 

MAGAZINE

ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: HARDWARE-DEFINED STORAGE 

"Block- and file-based storage should only serve as a starting 

point, not an end game. In only using block and/or file 

storage services on a storage array or solution, enterprises 

do themselves a disservice. Failing to declare the death of 

hardware-defined storage serves no good purpose. 

Enterprises need to wake up to the plethora of features 

that modern storage systems deliver that make so 

many of their current tasks obsolete." 

 

 

include features that diagnose the 

underlying issue and may resolve it 

before you even know about it. 

Are you still manually troubleshooting 

performance issues? Again, I ask, 

"Why are you not allowing the storage 

system to help diagnose and resolve 

performance issues?" Granted, you 

can throw more flash storage at the 

problem (and many do.) However, 

flash may only mask underlying issues. 

Using storage arrays that include 

artificial intelligence can equip 

enterprises to directly address the root 

causes behind these performance 

issues. In so doing, they can help 

prevent them from recurring. 

Can your applications communicate 

directly with the storage array and 

request and return storage as needed? 

This feature represents an entirely new 

generation of functionality where 

enterprises may bypass the needs for 

tasks such as LUN masking, zoning, 

and setting security permissions. Where 

is the business value in any of these 

administrative tasks? (Dirty little secret: 

there is little or none!) Look for new 

 

 

storage systems that expose their APIs 

so applications can obtain and rescind 

storage according to their needs. 

Are you still guessing at future capacity 

requirements and tying up capital by 

purchasing that capacity up front? 

Multiple storage vendors now deliver 

their solutions "as a service". The 

vendors offer flexible capacity that ties 

cost to actual usage, and they manage 

the underlying storage array for the 

enterprise. This frees IT staff to manage 

the data rather than the infrastructure. 

Are you creating a new silo of storage 

and storage management headaches 

when migrating workloads to the 

cloud? Look for storage vendors that 

offer their storage solutions as softwaredefined 

offerings in the cloud. This 

extends existing, familiar, data 

management and protection 

capabilities to workloads in the cloud. 

A WAKE-UP CALL 

Do not think for one second that I think 

enterprises will stop using hardwaredefined 

storage or vendors will stop 

shipping it tomorrow. Neither will occur. If 

anything, I expect both block-based and 

file-based storage to outlive and outlast 

me. Hardware-defined storage works and 

many applications and operating systems 

will need it for the foreseeable future. 

That said, declaring the death of 

hardware-defined storage serves as a 

wake-up call to enterprises. DCIG just 

completed and released its 2020-21 

Enterprise All-flash Array Buyer's Guide. In 

evaluating these arrays, DCIG only refers 

to them as "storage arrays" in the very 

broadest sense of the term. 

These arrays do so much more than 

provide block- and/or file-based storage 

targets. Many offer powerful software 

features that revolutionise how enterprises 

allocate and manage storage. 

By putting a stake in the ground and 

declaring hardware-defined storage as 

dead, DCIG is not trying to kill hardwaredefined 

storage. Rather, DCIG desires 

that enterprises take a long, hard look at 

how the modern storage solutions found 

in this Guide can enable them to 

transform their business. 

More info: www.dcig.com 


@STMagAndAwards July/August 2020 


MAGAZINE 

07

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF READING 

THE UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE 

THE UNIVERSITY OF READING HAS BEEN ABLE TO BOOST ITS ACADEMIC RESEARCH CAPABILITIES 

SINCE DEPLOYING A SOFTWARE-DEFINED SCALE-OUT FILE STORAGE SOLUTION 

Founded in the 19th century the 

University of Reading has become one 

of the foremost research-led 

universities in the UK. It has over 50 

research centres, many recognised as 

international centres of excellence, in areas 

including agriculture, biological and 

physical sciences and meteorology. 

RESEARCH WORKLOADS 

While similar in many respects, the IT 

requirements of university research teams 

are often far removed from those of 

commercial workloads. In addition to 

vastly higher compute and storage 

demands, for example, research 

workloads can be a lot harder to predict 

and liable to change significantly at very 

short notice, as Ryan Kennedy, Academic 

Computing Team Manager at the 

University of Reading explains. 

"IT has become a key research tool and 

it's not unusual for academics to request 

access to hundreds of VMs connected to 

terabytes of storage one day, only to dump 

them and start over the next," he said. 

"Delivering that kind of ad-hoc scalability 

using conventional servers and storage 

platforms is both complex and time 

consuming, especially for IT staff employed 

to support the research, not manage the 

infrastructure." 

Against that background Kennedy and his 

team were finding it increasingly difficult to 

deliver the IT resources research users were 

demanding. Moreover, with virtualisation a 

key part of the solution, licensing costs were 

becoming an issue and, while big projects 

could afford to finance new infrastructure, it 

was hard to justify spending to meet the 

needs of those with limited funds. A simpler 

and more agile solution was clearly 

required and one which could be shared 

more equitably and automated to allow for 

greater hands-off management. 

PUBLIC CLOUD OR ON-PREM? 

Among several alternatives investigated the 

public cloud was an obvious candidate but 

not necessarily a good fit as Kennedy 

outlined: "While the public cloud could 

deliver the on-demand agility and selfservice 

management we were after, the 

unpredictable workloads would make it 

more expensive and, potentially, harder 

and more time consuming for us to 

manage. There were also concerns about 

data protection and compliance, especially 

given the sensitive nature of the data 

involved and the need to protect 

intellectual copyright." 

A brief and costly trial using Azure proved 

the validity of these concerns, at which 

point Kennedy persuaded the University to 

instead consolidate its existing infrastructure 

- then spread across multiple sites - into 

one on-premise data centre. Moreover, 

rather than simply upgrading the existing 

infrastructure, the decision was taken to 

switch to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS 

software running on Dell EMC XC series in 

order to deliver the same on-demand and 

self-service benefits as the public cloud, but 

in a more affordable, secure and 

manageable manner. 

The decision was also taken to switch 

virtualisation platform, from VMware to the 

AHV hypervisor included as part of the 

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software stack. A 

bold move with the promise of huge cost 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: UNIVERSITY OF READING 

"As well as lower cost, speed and simplicity were seen as the main plus points of 

Nutanix Files. With our legacy NAS software, for example, new shares had to be set 

up by the support team using specialist interfaces but with Nutanix Files anyone can 

do it and it's easy to automate. It's also a lot quicker with shares available online in 

seconds and none of the performance bottlenecks associated with separate server 

and storage platforms." 

savings, which has also paid off in terms of 

an easy migration and simpler, unified, 

management. "Migrating old VMs to the 

Nutanix hypervisor was trouble free and we 

have yet to find a workload that AHV can't 

handle," commented Kennedy. "The AHV 

hypervisor is also fully integrated and 

managed from the same Prism console as 

the rest of the Enterprise Cloud software 

making it easy to build the self-service 

portal we wanted and allow academics to 

provision their own resources." 

Another key reason for choosing the 

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, the 

integrated Prism Self-Service Portal (SSP) 

can be used by customers to build a 

custom web-based interface that empowers 

users to create and manage both VMs and 

storage directly - much as they would using 

a public cloud platform, but in a strictly 

controlled and supervised manner. To this 

end administrators create projects to which 

they assign compute and storage resources, 

including shared VM templates and 

software images, for end-user consumption. 

Fine-grained access controls can also be 

applied with additional tools to gather 

usage statistics and raise alerts when 

specific thresholds are breached. 

Another important decision was to switch 

from legacy NAS storage to the integrated 

Nutanix Files - a software-defined scale-out 

file storage solution for unstructured data. 

This would enable Reading University to 

configure over a petabyte of usable storage 

using six load-balanced virtual file servers 

all in the same rack and managed from the 

same single pane of management provided 

by Nutanix Prism. "As well as lower cost, 

speed and simplicity were seen as the main 

plus points of Nutanix Files," Kennedy 

explains. "With our legacy NAS software, 

for example, new shares had to be set up 

by the support team using specialist 

interfaces but with Nutanix Files anyone can 

do it and it's easy to automate. It's also a 

lot quicker with shares available online in 

seconds and none of the performance 

bottlenecks associated with separate server 

and storage platforms." 

MIGRATION IN A WEEKEND 

Following an initial proof of concept trial 

using just five nodes, the scalability of the 

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud was immediately 

put to the test when one of the university's 

legacy IT infrastructure suppliers went out of 

business. Faced with having no support for 

key storage appliances an additional 10 

nodes were quickly delivered, enabling 

Kennedy and his team to migrate fully to 

the Nutanix infrastructure over a weekend 

and configure 400TB of storage in just 10 

minutes. 

"It was a real eye-opener," he said. "With 

our legacy storage it would have taken 

weeks to put in new servers and storage but 

once the Nutanix nodes were racked we 

just hit the expand button and, 10 minutes 

later, it was all done. Why couldn't we have 

done it this way before?" 

As well as simpler scalability and 

enhanced storage performance, another 

benefit is much more efficient use of 

available storage with, in the case of 

Reading University, a 16:1 reduction in 

physical storage overheads thanks to builtin 

deduplication, erasure coding and 

compression technologies. 

That doesn't mean that extra nodes 

haven't been needed as according to 

Kennedy uptake of the Reading Research 

Cloud has been 'massive' and is still 

growing. Despite that, there have been no 

availability issues with the Reading team 

opting to take advantage of the inherent 

redundancy of the Nutanix architecture and 

use the integrated Cloud Connect 

capability to take snapshots to Microsoft 

Azure for backup and disaster recovery. 

Ryan Kennedy is hugely appreciative and 

proud of what the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud 

has allowed the University IT team to 

achieve, pointing to not just the scalability 

and ease of use of the platform as key 

enablers but the professionalism and high 

level of support provided by Nutanix and its 

partners: "The Nutanix platform really has 

transformed the way we work," he 

commented. "Most of the time we don't 

even have to touch it - it just runs itself!" 

More info: www.nutanix.com 




MAGAZINE 

09

STRATEGY: CLOUD CLOUD 

THE EVER-CHANGING IT 

LANDSCAPE 

GARETH JOHN, SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT AT Q ASSOCIATES, EXAMINES 

THE ISSUES AROUND MIGRATING SYSTEMS TO THE CLOUD, AND THE 

GROWING SHIFT TOWARDS A HYBRID MULTI-CLOUD MODEL 

The IT landscape is changing. It hasn't 

just evolved from what it was five years 

ago, or even one year ago; it is in a 

state of constant flux, mostly due to the 

cloud aspect of an IT strategy - Cloud 

Strategy - and this can change from month 

to month as organisations adapt to the 

proliferation of new tools and services that 

are on offer. 

There is a definite trend that is seeing 

workloads being moved from the on-prem 

data centre to some sort of cloud, whether 

that be IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS; into a hyperscaler 

or by consuming a service from a 

smaller provider. And there are many good 

reasons for this trend, especially in relation 

to the hyper-scalers: near infinite and instant 

elasticity where you can scale up or scale 

back and only pay for what you use, offloading 

of hardware maintenance, taking 

advantage of cloud-based data analytics, 

utilisation of the substantial and evergrowing 

compendium of services, and 

more. 

Cloud adoption, however, should not be 

hurried. Testament to this are the many 

organisations who had adopted an 

aggressive cloud-first strategy and 

discerned the resultant increasing costs, 

that are now trying to reverse out of the 

public cloud - and incurring yet more 

expense. Just as there are many potential 

benefits of public cloud, there are also 

many valid concerns including 

connectivity, security, data sovereignty, 

lock-in, and of course cost. 

Organisations need to carefully assess 

their existing IT estate to ascertain which 

workloads are appropriate for cloud 

transition. There will almost certainly be 

workloads that are unsuitable for the 

transition and the ones that are 

appropriate will suit different cloud 

models. In this light, most customers that I 

talk to are looking to adopt a hybrid 

multi-cloud model (see diagram). 

The first step is usually to move 

previously on-prem applications to SaaS 

offerings; Microsoft 365 is a prominent 

example of this where people can off-load 

everything (including hardware 

maintenance, O.S. and application 

versioning, resilience and interoperability) 

to a full-stack service that includes the 

application and its data. Note that while 

the data will reside on resilient 

infrastructure, it still needs to be backed 

up to protect against corruption, 

unintended change or deletion. 

RUNNING HOT AND COLD 

Cold data (data that is rarely used) is also 

considered low-hanging fruit for cloud 

utilisation. Nowadays organisations are 

typically deploying all-flash storage 

systems in on-prem data centres and cold 

data is not a good fit for this medium. 

Intelligently archiving cold data to a cloud 

object store can ensure that hot data 

enjoys the high performance of flash 

whilst exploiting a low-cost scalable cloud 

tier for inactive data. This cloud object tier 




MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: STRATEGY: CLOUD 

Connectivity is also an important factor; 

as organisations move workloads off to 

various cloud services, connectivity needs 

to be considered to ensure that bandwidth 

and latency requirements are met once the 

workload has been moved. In this arena 

we're seeing a lot more interest in software 

defined WAN (SD-WAN) initiatives aiming 

to simplify and orchestrate routing over an 

assortment of disparate WAN connections. 

is also a good location to store an off-site 

copy of backup data that can then be 

utilised as part of a cloud-based DR 

strategy. 

The way in which public cloud services 

are consumed is fast becoming the de 

facto standard: users can log on to a 

portal, select the services they require and 

have these services instantiated in 

minutes. This is the reason that 

organisations should consider 

transitioning their on-prem infrastructure 

into a private cloud, so that their 

resources can be consumed in a much 

more cloud-like fashion. 

It's a lot more complicated than this, but 

it will involve deploying a framework that 

provides a service catalogue, automated 

fulfilment, and a billing engine. It will also 

require mapping SLAs to resource pool 

utilisation, organisational changes, and 

procedural standardisation amongst other 

things. 

Whilst public cloud is great for burstable 

workloads (due to the inherent elasticity 

where you only pay for what you use) one 

mistake that we regularly see is the liftand-shift 

of on-prem applications into 

public IaaS offerings. Having all VMs, that 

would normally reside on on-prem 

infrastructure, running in the cloud 24/7 

could see a significant cost increase. 

REARCHITECT FOR SUCCESS 

In order to realise the full value of public 

cloud, applications really need to be 

rearchitected to utilise things like database 

services (rather than running full database 

VMs) and serverless code services (where 

you only pay for the compute time that you 

consume). Automatically turning VMs off 

when they are not being used will also be 

financially advantageous. 

Q Associates has been helping 

customers with all of these schemes for 

some time, but until recently we have had 

to rely on partnerships to ensure that we 

utilise the best specific skills and 

knowledge in any particular area. With the 

recently-announced acquisition of Apex 

Group, we now have premium in-house 

skills in all of these fields and can provide 

our customers with a holistic delivery of 

infrastructure and services, from design 

and implementation through to support 

and management. The acquisition will also 

help us to evolve at speed, with 

widespread internal hybrid multi-cloud 

skills and knowledge, to ensure that we 

stay relevant to our customers in this 

rapidly shifting environment. 

More info: www.qassociates.co.uk 

"Nowadays organisations are typically deploying all-flash 

storage systems in on-prem data centres and cold data is 

not a good fit for this medium. Intelligently archiving cold 

data to a cloud object store can ensure that hot data 

enjoys the high performance of flash whilst exploiting a 

low-cost scalable cloud tier for inactive data. This cloud 

object tier is also a good location to store an off-site 

copy of backup data that can then be utilised as part of 

a cloud-based DR strategy." 




MAGAZINE 

11

RESEARCH: STORAGE TRENDS 

SPECTRA PUBLISHES "DIGITAL DATA 

STORAGE OUTLOOK 2020" 

FIFTH ANNUAL DATA STORAGE REPORT AIDS INDUSTRY IN NAVIGATING THE BUDGETARY AND 

INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGES OF CAPTURING, SHARING AND PRESERVING DATA 

Disk manufacturers are closing in on 

delivery of HAMR and MAMR 

technologies that will allow them to 

initially provide disk drives of 20TB 

while also enabling a technology 

roadmap that could achieve 50TB or 

greater over the next 10 years. 

Spectra Logic has published the fifth 

edition of its "Digital Data Storage 

Outlook" report. The 2020 report 

delves into the management, access, use 

and preservation of the world's everexpanding 

volumes of data, capturing the 

impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on 

trends and technology during this 

unprecedented time in history. The report 

outlines future strategies, technologies, 

applications, use cases and costs for 

more accurate evaluation and planning of 

data management and preservation 

strategies. 

Spectra's Digital Data Storage Outlook 

2020 predicts that, while there could be 

some restrictions in budgets and 

infrastructure, only a small likelihood 

exists for a constrained supply of storage 

to meet the needs of the digital universe 

through 2030. 

Storage device providers will continue to 

innovate with higher speeds and 

capacities to meet increasing growth 

demand, with every data storage 

category, including flash, persistent 

memory, disk, tape and cloud, exhibiting 

technology improvements. This 

momentum will be dependent upon 

projected technology advancements and 

any slowdown in one category, such as 

disk, will provide an opportunity for 

others, such as flash and tape. 

Highlights from the 2020 report include: 

Economic concerns will push 

infrequently accessed data from tier 

one storage, made up of flash, to a 

second tier, made up of spinning disk, 

object storage, cloud and tape. This 

method employs data movers to 

migrate data for ongoing cost savings. 

2020 will see a 10% to 40% price 

increase for flash. After experiencing 

18 months of oversupply of flash in 

the market, resulting in substantial 

price reductions, 2020 will see 

reductions in supply versus demand. 

The third generation of 3D XPoint 

technology will become the latest 

high-performance standard for 

database storage. 

The need for tape in the long-term 

archive market continues to grow. 

Tape will achieve storage capacities of 

100TB or higher on a single cartridge 

in the next decade. 

Cloud providers will consume, in 

terms of both volume and revenue, an 

increasingly larger portion of the 

storage required to support the digital 

universe. 

"The year 2020 is one like no other due 

to Covid-19, which makes accurate 

market forecasting especially challenging 

in these extraordinary times," said Spectra 

Logic CEO Nathan Thompson. "That said, 

as businesses become increasingly datadriven, 

it is even more crucial that IT 

professionals understand the factors 

impacting their organisations, so they can 

anticipate the trends, technologies and 

challenges they will face in order to 

protect their data and derive maximum 

value from it for the long-term." 

The full report can be downloaded from 

https://spectralogic.com/data-storageoutlook-report/ 

More info: www.spectralogic.com 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: TORIX 

MODERN, FLEXIBLE, HIGH-PERFORMING 

NON-PROFIT INTERNET EXCHANGE TORIX LOOKED TO STORMAGIC FOR A HYPERCONVERGED 

SOLUTION THAT WOULD BE EASY FOR ITS I.T. TEAM TO MANAGE 

In 1998, Toronto Internet Exchange 

(TorIX), the first non-profit internet 

exchange in Toronto, was created to 

directly connect the internet traffic of 

Canadian businesses by using local 

network infrastructure. A group of experts 

collaborated to establish TorIX with the 

intention of overcoming the cost and 

latency issues of having Canadian traffic 

flow through the United States. Today, TorIX 

has over 250 organisations connected with 

access to direct routes from many diverse 

peering partners. 

As a non-profit organisation, TorIX focuses 

on investing funds into infrastructure, so 

that its technology can stay up to date to 

remain at the forefront of the Internet 

Exchange Point (IXP) industry. Previously, 

TorIX was using a VMware installation with 

no replication, however it wanted to avoid 

large, hardware-dependent installations 

associated with vSAN and to find a solution 

better fitted for its long-term needs. 

TorIX began the process of evaluating 

market options for an infrastructure solution 

to power its IT operations that was highperforming, 

simple and easy to manage. 

More specifically, TorIX was searching for a 

solution that it could trust with managing 

all of its critical external services for 

customers, including its online portal 

systems, telemetry data, web and mail 

applications. At the top of TorIX’s priority 

list was a hyperconverged solution that was 

easy for its IT team to manage, which is 

why the company turned to SvSAN. 

EASY TO MANAGE & UPGRADE 

To power its non-profit internet exchange, 

TorIX needed a hyperconverged solution 

between its two data centres with high 

performance and availability. After 

evaluating multiple options, TorIX found 

that StorMagic SvSAN best suited its needs 

because it was simple for its IT team to 

manage and easy to upgrade, while still 

remaining cost effective and modern. 

Furthermore, SvSAN's stretch/metro cluster 

capability enabled TorIX to site its two 

SvSAN nodes 3 kilometres apart with no 

impact on performance thanks to SvSAN's 

low bandwidth requirements. 

MAXIMUM UPTIME 

TorIX now has a two-node cluster consisting 

of Cisco servers and VMware vSphere as 

the hypervisor. With SvSAN, TorIX can easily 

manage its IT infrastructure with 100 

percent redundancy and high availability. 

SvSAN powers all of TorIX's critical external 

services for customers, such as web and 

mail applications, online portal systems and 

telemetry data. 

TorIX has reported maximum uptime in 

operations, delivering powerful direct 

internet routes to peering partners without 

interruptions. In addition, throughout the 

pre- and post-implementation process, 

TorIX found StorMagic's world-class, 24/7 

customer support highly responsive and 

helpful with technical expertise. TorIX found 

that SvSAN is reliable and simple to 

manage for its day-to-day operations. High 

data availability is critical to TorIX and their 

loyal customers. 

"TorIX is driven to directly connect 

Canadian business' internet traffic through 

the local network infrastructure, while 

maintaining strong network performance 

and low latency," commented Jon Nistor, 

Board Director, TorIX. "To deliver this to 

customers, we prioritise investing in modern 

technology for our IT infrastructure, so that 

we can remain at the forefront of the 

industry. This is why we selected StorMagic 

SvSAN, so that TorIX can now power 

operations with a modern system that is easy 

to manage, flexible and high-performing. 

"We have been 100% satisfied with 

StorMagic, which we trust to power all of 

our critical external services for our 

customers and have the peace of mind that 

our systems will never fail." 

More info: www.stormagic.com 




MAGAZINE 

13

PRODUCT REVIEW REVIEW 

KINGSTON TECHNOLOGY DATA CENTER DC1000M 

As data centre applications and 

workloads demand ever greater 

storage performance, enterprises are 

finding that NVMe SSDs are the only way 

to go. These high-performance devices are 

perfect for businesses running dataintensive 

workloads and those that need to 

replace legacy SATA or SAS SSD server 

storage and arrays as they deliver very high 

throughputs and low latency in a familiar 

form factor. 

The Data Center DC1000M series of 

NVMe U.2 SSDs from Kingston offer a 

tempting proposition as they deliver a 

finely balanced combination of 

performance and value. Available in a 

choice of four capacities ranging from 

960GB to 7.68TB, we reviewed Kingston's 

1.92TB model which has a very affordable 

sub-£400 price. 

The DC1000M series clearly shows 

Kingston's intentions as it has been moving 

firmly into the data centre storage space 

for some time. Combining these with its 

new DC1000B NVMe boot drive plus the 

DC450R and DC500 series of SATA SSDs 

allows it to offer one of the most 

comprehensive ranges of highperformance 

data centre storage solutions 

on the market. 

The 1.92TB model looks fast on paper 

with Kingston quoting sequential read and 

write speeds of 3,100MB/sec and 

2,600MB/sec. Along with low sub-1ms 

latencies, throughput looks good with it 

claiming rates for random read and write 

operations of 540,000 IOPS and 

205,000 IOPS respectively. 

These numbers make the DC1000M very 

versatile and ideal for mixed-use scenarios 

in the data centre. Typical applications 

Kingston is targeting range from HPC, 

OLTP and virtualisation to cloud services, 

web host caching and HD media capture. 

The DC1000M employs the latest 3D TLC 

(triple level cell) NAND flash technology. 

This is far superior to older 2D NAND as it 

allows the cells to be stacked in layers thus 

enabling much higher storage densities 

with a lower cost per bit and reduced 

power consumption. 

Other key features that will appeal to 

enterprises are hot-plug support and 

SMART monitoring for tracking reliability, 

usage, remaining life, wear levelling and 

operational temperatures. The DC1000M 

also incorporates onboard power loss 

protection (PLP) through capacitors and 

firmware to avoid potential data loss 

caused by power failures. 

For performance testing, we used the 

lab's Dell PowerEdge T640 tower server 

equipped with dual 22-core 2.1GHz Xeon 

Scalable Gold 6152 CPUs plus 384GB of 

DDR4 memory and running Windows 

Server 2019. Our server has an eight-bay 

PCI-e NVMe Gen 3 U.2 cage and we had 

no problems fitting the DC1000M in the 

server's hot-plug carrier where it was 

correctly recognised by the OS as a new 

NVMe bus storage device. 

We used a range of benchmarking apps 

starting with Iometer which reported raw 

sequential read and write rates of 

3,070MB/sec and 2,663MB/sec. The read 

rate is slightly below the claimed speed 

while the write rate is marginally better and 

the CrystalDiskMark app agreed closely 

with these numbers. 

For random read and write rates, Iometer 

returned 2,990MB/sec and 1,600MB/sec. 

Changing Iometer to small 4K block sizes, 

we ran our tests for a number of hours until 

they had achieved a steady state. 

Once throughput had settled, we 

recorded random read and write rates of 

486,900 IOPS and 225,100 IOPS. As with 

our sequential tests, read throughput was 

slightly below the quoted number whereas 

write rates were a little higher. Overall, 

these performance results are great and 

latency is also very low as during our I/O 

throughout tests, both Iometer and the AS 

SSD Benchmark app reported average 

latencies of less than 1ms. 

Product: Data Center DC1000M 

Supplier: Kingston Technology 

Web site: www.kingston.com 

Tel: +44 (0) 1932 738888 

Price: 1.92TB - £377 exc VAT 

VERDICT: The DC10000M is clearly capable of handling very demanding enterprise workloads and is more than a match for 

competing NVMe storage products costing substantially more, making it excellent value as well. 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: DATA PROTECTION 

THE 3-2-1 RULE OF DATA PROTECTION 

SARAH DOHERTY, PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER AT ILAND, UNDERLINES THE THREATS TO 

ORGANISATIONAL DATA AND THE NEED TO FUTURE-PROOF INFRASTRUCTURE WITH RESILIENT DATA 

PROTECTION STRATEGIES 

IIn today's world, a 

major challenge for 

organisations is 

protecting their data. 

Whether an 

organisation is in a 

regulated industry 

mandated by law to 

retain x number of years 

of data, or one more 

acutely concerned with 

employees accidentally 

deleting files, the first 

pain point that 

customers usually have 

is focused on data protection. 

There are several reasons for 

companies to resort to backing 

up their data via the cloud. 

Firstly, with ransomware attacks 

more frequent than ever before 

and hardware failure still an 

issue, organisations traditionally 

have local backup as their 

primary means of 

protecting data. 

However, local backup 

is still vulnerable for 

several reasons such as 

SAN failure, double 

disk fault or power 

loss. 

Secondly, backups 

are necessary and 

mandatory, but local 

backups might not 

save organisations in 

certain situations. 

What if the power in 

the building goes out? 

How will they restore their data? If the 

hardware is broken and it takes four 

weeks for the hardware to recover, that 

doesn't help an organisation to get back 

up and running to continue with 'business 

as usual'. 

Thirdly, IT resilience is the ability to 

quickly bring organisations online so they 

can continue to run their business no 

matter what the issue. 

Whatever the situation is, organisations 

need to be able to quickly get IT 

infrastructure back in operation, no matter 

what is going on in their data centre. 

IT resilience and Disaster Recovery as a 

Service (DRaaS) has always been a 

challenge for companies because, in the 

old days, organisations would have to 

have a secondary data site, or use old 

hardware, replicate all data and runbooks 

and plans, and have to test it, etc. It was 

just absurd and only the largest enterprise 

organisations could afford to do it. 

With the cloud's model of 'pay for what 

you use' and 'pay for what you need', 

companies of any size can replicate their 

data, infrastructure and entire application 

stack to the cloud more cost effectively 

than buying additional data centre space 

or running on-premise backup and DR. 

THE 3-2-1 RULE 

The 3-2-1 backup rule is an easy-toremember 

shorthand for a common 

approach to keeping organisations' data 

safe in almost any failure scenario. 

The rule is: keep at least three (3) copies 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: DATA PROTECTION 

"IT resilience and Disaster Recovery as a Service has always been a challenge for 

companies because, in the old days, organisations?would have to have a 

secondary data site, or use old hardware, replicate all data and runbooks and 

plans, and have to test it, etc. It was just absurd and only the largest enterprise 

organisations could afford to do it. With the cloud's model of 'pay for what you use' 

and 'pay for what you need', companies of any size can replicate their data, 

infrastructure and entire application stack to the cloud more cost effectively than 

buying additional data centre space or running on-premise backup and DR." 

of the organisation's data, one being the 

production environment. Then store two 

(2) backup copies, which is usually initial 

backup on different storage media such as 

a tape, snapshot, hard drive etc. Then 

store one (1) of them located offsite. 

There are several reasons why the last 

stage is important. If you think about 

ransomware, nowadays it has the ability to 

find locally attached backups and encrypt 

them. Or organisations could have a 

power failure where, if everything is in the 

same building, they are left with no 

backup at all. 

Historically, a lot of companies would 

resort to trading copies of their tapes, 

putting them on a truck and sending them 

somewhere else. That introduces all sorts 

of challenges with humidity, transportation 

of the tape, where it is being stored, will 

they have the same tape type and will we 

be able to access it in two years? 

Organisations still want to have that airgapped 

copy of their data, but cloud 

introduces a whole new way of 

addressing that as it is easily accessible 

by anyone, anywhere. 

HOW TO FUTUREPROOF 

INFRASTRUCTURE 

Cloud is an elegant solution to address these 

data protection and business continuity 

issues, and one that is within the capabilities 

and budgets of every organisation. By using 

cloud to follow the 3, 2, 1 rule of data 

availability, organisations gain the confidence 

that they can have a failure and still be able 

to recover their data. 

Data centre mobility and cloud enable those 

business-critical workloads to continue no 

matter what the scenario: a new norm, 

global pandemic etc. The cloud allows 

organisations to meet their business needs 

whilst protecting their data. It allows 

organisations to spin up VMs and virtual 

assets, and quickly connect to their 

infrastructure whether on-premises or in 

another cloud. It also lets companies 

continue to work remotely in the middle of a 

pandemic or other physically disruptive crisis, 

such as an extreme weather event, at a lower 

price point. 

RETAINING PROTECTION STANDARDS 

Organisations can migrate their data to the 

cloud for cost and continuity purposes. Once 

data is migrated, it is still critical to focus on 

data protection. The data will be protected 

with the help of the CSP, but they can't stop 

doing backup or IT resilience testing. 

By supplementing the production 

environment with backup and DR in the 

cloud, the organisation can ensure that they 

have those multiple copies, and air-gapped 

back-ups, that can be failed over to almost 

instantaneously should an issue occur with 

the primary infrastructure. 

As an increasing number of organisations 

want to get out of the business of managing 

their data and just focus on delivering 

business value with their IT assets, the cloud is 

providing the answer for both primary and 

backup infrastructure. 

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a good start in 

building any data protection system - a way 

to protect an organisation's data from 

loss/corruption and to control risks in all the 

aforementioned situations. The cloud offers 

incredibly effective and resource-efficient 

ways of achieving this and improving 

business continuity and resilience at a time 

when events are showing us it has never been 

more important. 

More info: www.iland.com 




MAGAZINE 

17

INDUSTRY FOCUS: MEDIA FOCUS: MEDIA 

COULD RUSHES BE KEY TO DISPROVING 

'DEEPFAKE' VIDEO? 

NICK PEARCE-TOMENIUS OF OBJECT MATRIX LOOKS AT SOME OF THE 

POTENTIAL COMPLIANCE ISSUES SURROUNDING LONG TERM 

STORAGE OF RAW FOOTAGE FOR TV AND MEDIA PRODUCTION 

COMPANIES 

Arecent article in the Guardian raised 

the possibility of footage on the Jeremy 

Kyle show having been altered in order 

to tell the story that the producers wanted to 

be told, saying: "The family has concerns that 

the footage is polished and edited, and does 

not represent the totality of the footage that 

would have been recorded on all cameras 

on the day." 

The lack of retention of 'rushes' in a drama is 

unlikely to have a negative impact on society 

in future years but as the Kyle story highlights 

the retention of original footage needs to be 

taken more seriously where factual content is 

being edited or manipulated. 

Another example where studio footage was 

key in a criminal prosecution is the "Who 

Wants To Be A Millionaire" cheating case, as 

Wikipedia recounts: "In court, Ingram claimed 

the videotape of his appearance on 

Millionaire was 'unrepresentative of what I 

heard', and he continues to assert that it was 

'unfairly manipulated'. A video recording, with 

coughing amplified relative to other sounds 

including Ingram's and Tarrant's voices, was 

prepared by Celador's editors for the 

prosecution and 'for the benefit of the jury' 

during the trial." 

Given its nature live action content is difficult 

to manipulate even with the 'broadcast delay" 

but not so if the delay is in the minutes, hours, 

days or months, as is typical for reality based 

programming. This raises three questions for 

those producing factual content and also 

presents a real challenge for those 

organisations in terms of retaining the potential 

hundreds of hours of raw footage that goes 

into producing an hour of finished content: 

1. How are production companies and 

broadcasters protecting rushes or footage 

captured by studio cameras on the day? 

2. Can they prove authenticity of those rushes 

in the years to come? 

3. Is it even possible to retain the original 

footage and find the clips you need when 

required? 

Protecting rushes/dailies is not new in highly 

regulated industries like financial institutions 

that typically are required to adhere to internal 

or external regulations. They typically have to 

implement platforms and processes that ensure 

content security, access control and availability 

of historical data. 

Imagine the scenario where an analyst from a 

global bank gives an interview where the 

advice imparted during broadcast differs from 

the advice given on camera at the time of 

shooting - advice that might bankrupt 

individuals, companies or even countries. This 

manipulation of the message or story can be 

achieved with subtle editing or more recently 

the advances in Deepfake technology. 

A flip side to Deepfake video or manipulation 

in the edit is that people, politicians in 

particular, could use the fact that the 

technology exists to vehemently deny ever 

having said or done something on camera, as 

highlighted in a recent article by Daniel 

Thomas (BBC News): "The first risk is that 

people are already using the fact Deepfakes 

exist to discredit genuine video evidence. Even 

though there's footage of you doing or saying 

something you can say it was a Deepfake and 

it's very hard to prove otherwise." 

It would appear that being able to prove the 

authenticity of raw footage has never been 

more important. 

HOW IS IT DONE TODAY? 

Production companies who own the IP and 

rights for shows like "Jeremy Kyle" and 

"Millionaire" typically rent the studios and pay 

for the services of post-production companies 




MAGAZINE

INDUSTRY FOCUS: INDUSTRY FOCUS: MEDIA 

to get the show made. Those studio and post 

companies will generally be responsible for 

protecting the rushes until the show has aired 

and many will hold on to them for longer 

periods of time until they no longer have the 

physical space or resources to manage them. 

These cases highlight the need to find 

content from a show aired several years 

ago - a task that cannot always be done 

quickly, if at all. The Jeremy Kyle rushes 

were protected by the post-production 

company involved, but that is not always 

the case. Most organisations simply do not 

have the technology platforms nor the 

processes in place. 

One of the main concerns will always be 

"What is the business model?" Keeping 

finished content in an archive requires 

resources and long term investment but there 

is a value in exploiting that content. Doing the 

same for thousands of hours of raw footage 

has a less obvious return on investment. 

The only way companies will feel compelled 

to archive rushes forever is via regulation or 

as an insurance requirement to assist should 

any future litigation occur. If such regulations 

are introduced companies will be expected to 

find and produce evidential content within 

reasonable time frames or get fined. 

DIGITAL CONTENT GOVERNANCE 

CAN HELP 

Good Digital Content Governance, a mix of 

process and technology, can ensure that 

content is protected, instantly accessible and 

proven to be authentic at any time in the 

future. It can also help organisations to beat 

Deepfake or disprove manipulated images. 

Ensuring content is authentic: DCG 

platforms make multiple copies of content 

on ingest using checksums (digital 

fingerprints) to ensure its integrity from day 

one and throughout the lifetime of the 

content. DCG can place retention policies 

on the data such that not even 

administrators can accidentally delete it. 

Protecting data: Digital Preservation 

processes ensure your content is protected 

at ingest and remains protected throughout 

its lifetime. However, this requires regular 

integrity checking which can be a costly 

exercise with legacy technology such as 

LTO. DCG platforms handle all aspects of 

good digital preservation practice, from 

continuous content protection and multiple 

copy protection (on and off-site) to 

business rules support. 

Access: Providing searchable audits of 

every action during the lifetime of the 

media is essential, as it means you can 

track exactly what has happened to that 

content and who has accessed it. DCG 

platforms offer native, searchable audits of 

every action from ingest, moves, deletions, 

attempted deletions and most importantly, 

read. It has to be said that audit is also 

possible with public cloud accounts if the 

user logins are granular to individuals 

performing the actions. 

Search: Find is key. With the increasing 

volume of data in and out of a facility, 

metadata management is as important as 

protecting the content itself. The ability to 

search for content based on up-to-date 

and relevant metadata will unlock the 

value of content for many organisations. 

Loosely coupled metadata and content will 

always make Find an inefficient or 

impossible process. DCG platforms protect 

the metadata along with the essence for 

the lifetime of the content. Using APIs 

enables future proof, integrated and 

automated workflows that ensure content 

can be found even if media asset 

management is not available. DCG 

platforms can also automate the extraction 

and indexing of any embedded metadata 

which can vastly increase search efficiency. 

Business Continuity: Using incumbent 

platforms that rely on legacy archive and 

backup practices does not guarantee 

continuity of business operations. It is a fact 

that loss of data or access to data can lead 

to catastrophic loss of revenue for any 

sized company. DCG platforms provide 

automated and integrated business 

continuity functionality ensuring work can 

continue despite any outages. 

Implementing automated, asynchronous 

replication of metadata, data and user 

access information ensures that everything 

that is needed will be available at the DR 

location. Integration of DCG platforms into 

the end user ecosystem (i.e. they do not 

have to learn new skills) also makes this a 

non-disruptive process. 

As detailed above, implementing a good 

DCG platform that is integrated into media 

workflows will bring value to the organisation 

and ensure content can be found under any 

circumstances. 

In summary there are some technical, 

commercial and cultural issues to address in 

the creative video community if raw footage 

and archive content is to be protected in 

accordance with internal or external 

regulations. One of the biggest challenges will 

be the physical resources needed to archive 

thousands of hours of potentially 4 and 8k 

raw footage. 

One potential option is to create a 

mezzanine or proxy version of those rushes, in 

a certified transformation workflow, that take 

up much less space than the originals but 

retain enough quality for video processing to 

be applied at future dates. Metadata can be 

captured during the ingest and transformation 

process or that metadata can be generated 

later on using AI platforms. 

Keeping those rushes on LTO or SAN/NAS 

platforms will not be sufficient in terms of good 

Digital Content Governance nor the ability to 

efficiently process the files in automated 

workflows. These rushes will need to be kept in 

an object storage or cloud storage platform 

whose automated technologies ensure that 

good DCG is followed and ensures that rushes 

are instantly available and searchable. 

More info: www.object-matrix.com 




MAGAZINE 

19

STRATEGY: BACKUP BACKUP 

BACKUP TO THE FUTURE 

BILL ANDREWS, PRESIDENT & CEO OF EXAGRID, EXAMINES THE JOURNEY FROM SIMPLE TAPE 

BACKUPS TO TIERED DISK BACKUPS THAT USE ADAPTIVE DEDUPLICATION FOR FAST, RELIABLE AND 

AFFORDABLE BACKUP AND RESTORE SOLUTIONS 

An organisation cannot function without 

its data. As a result, data is backed up at 

least five days per week at virtually every 

company around the world. Data backup 

guards against short term operational and 

external events as well as for legal, financial, 

and regulatory business requirements: 

Restore files that were deleted, overwritten 

or from before a corruption event 

Recovery from a primary storage 

ransomware attack 

Keep retention/historical data for legal 

discovery, financial and regulatory audits 

Replicate to a second location to guard 

against disasters at the primary data 

location, such as earthquake, electrical 

power grid failure, fire, flood or extreme 

weather conditions 

Due to all of these requirements, backup 

retention points are kept so that organisations 

have a copy of the data at various points in 

time. Most keep a number of weekly, monthly, 

and yearly backups. As an example, if an 

organisation keeps 12 weekly copies, 24 

monthly copies, and 5 yearly copies - that 

amounts to about 40 copies of the data. This 

means that the backup storage capacity 

required is 40 times the primary storage 

amount. 

Since backup policies require keeping 

retention copies, and the storage needed for 

backup is far greater than the primary storage, 

the industry has evolved over time to reduce 

the amount of storage required in order to 

reduce the cost of backup storage. 

PHASE 1: TAPE 

Backups were sent to tape for about 50 years 

because if organisations were going to keep 

30, 40, 50, 60 copies of the data (retention 

points), then the only cost-effective way to keep 

those copies was to use a media that was very 

inexpensive per gigabyte. Tape solved the cost 

problem as it was inexpensive - but it was also 

unreliable because it was subject to dirt, 

humidity, heat, wear, etc. Tape also required a 

lot of management, including storing tapes in 

cartons and shipping a set of tapes offsite each 

week to another location or a third-party tape 

storage facility. Tape backups were great for 

cost but had many issues. 

PHASE 2: LOW-COST DISK 

Disk solved all the problems of tape, as it was 

reliable, and it was secure since it was in a 

data centre rack behind physical and network 

security. Organisations could encrypt the data 

to replicate to a second data centre (no 

physical media to ship). 

Disk was far too expensive per gigabyte until 

the year 2000 when enterprise-quality SATA 

drives were introduced. This dropped the price 

of backing up to disk dramatically, as SATA was 

reliable enough for backup storage. However, 

even at a lower cost, disk was still too 

expensive when you did the math of keeping 

dozens of copies. 

All of the backup applications added writing 

to volumes or NAS shares to their products so 

that disk could be used. Disk was used as disk 

staging in front of tape, but not tape 

elimination. Backup applications would write 

one or two backups to disk for fast and reliable 

backups and restores but still write to tape for 

longer-term retention due to cost. 

PHASE 3: DATA DEDUPLICATION 

APPLIANCES 

Although SATA disk was lower in price than any 

other enterprise storage media, it was still too 

expensive to keep all the retention on disk. In 

the 2002-2005 time frame a new technology, 

data deduplication, entered the market. Data 

deduplication compared one backup to 

another and only kept the changes from 

backup to backup, which typically is about 2% 

change per week. The backups were no longer 

kept as full backups as only the unique blocks 

were kept, greatly reducing the storage. 

Data deduplication did not have much 

impact if there were only two or three copies 

and in fact, was not much different from just 

compressing the data. However, at 18 copies 




MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: STRATEGY: BACKUP 

"There is no free lunch here and the different storage methods are just 

pushing the problem around. Why is that? Because unless you build a 

solution that includes deduplication and also solves the backup 

performance, restore performance, storage efficiency, and scalability 

issues - then no matter where the deduplication lives, the solution will 

still be broken. The answer is a solution that is architected to 

use disk in the appropriate way for fast backups and 

restores, uses data deduplication for long-term retention 

and scale-out all resources as data grows." 

the amount of disk used was 1/20th that of not 

using data deduplication. You could store 1TB 

in a deduplicated form what it would normally 

take 20TB of disk to store without 

deduplication. The term 20:1 data reduction 

was used (assumed at 18 copies of retention). 

If the retention was longer, the data reduction 

ratio was even greater. 

At this point, organisations could eliminate 

tape as the amount of disk required was greatly 

reduced, bringing the cost of backup storage 

close to that of tape. However, while these 

appliances added data deduplication in order 

to reduce storage they did not factor in the 

trade-off of the compute impact. These 

"deduplication appliances" performed the 

deduplication inline which means between the 

backup application and on the way to the disk. 

Data deduplication compares billions of blocks 

and therefore is extremely compute-intensive. 

This compute-intensive inline deduplication 

process then, actually slows backups down and 

constitutes about one third the performance of 

writing to disk. Since the backups are inline all 

the data is deduplicated on the disk, which 

means each time you restore the data it has to 

be put back together to restore it, which is 

called rehydration. This rehydration process is 

slow and can take up to 20 times longer than 

restoring un-deduplicated data from disk. 

The deduplication appliance used block level 

deduplication which creates a very large hash 

tracking table that needs to be kept in a single 

front-end controller. As a result, as data grows, 

only storage is added to the controller. If the 

data doubles, triples, quadruples, etc. then the 

amount of deduplication that has to occur also 

needs to be increased, but with a front end 

controller the resources (CPU, memory, 

network ports) are fixed, and therefore the 

same resources are used for four times the 

data as were used for one times the data. 

As a result, the backup window grows and 

grows until you are forced to buy a bigger and 

more powerful front-end controller, called a 

forklift upgrade, which adds cost over time. The 

front-end controller approach relies on fixed 

resources and it fails to keep up with data 

growth, so the controllers are continuously 

being obsoleted to add more resources. 

Even though inline scale-up (front-end 

controller with disk shelves) appliances lower 

the amount of storage resulting in lower 

storage costs, they greatly slow down 

backups due to inline deduplication, slow 

down restores due to only keeping 

deduplicated data (rehydration process), and 

don't scale, forcing future forklift upgrades 

and product obsolescence, adding long term 

costs. The net result is that they fix the storage 

cost problem but add to backup and restore 

performance issues and are not architected 

for data growth (scalability). 

PHASE 4: DATA DEDUPLICATION IN 

BACKUP APPLICATIONS 

Customers used and still use data 

deduplication appliances however; the 

backups applications went through a phase 

where they tried to eliminate data 

deduplication appliance by integrating the 

data deduplication process into the backup 

media servers. The idea here was to just buy 

low cost disk and have deduplication as a 

feature in the backup application. This created 

many challenges. 

The first challenge is that data deduplication 

is compute-intensive and the media server 

already has the task of taking all the backups 

and writing them to the media so that all 

compute resources are already being used. By 

adding deduplication to a media server, the 

CPU is crushed, and the backups jobs slow to 

a crawl. To solve this, backup applications 

increase the deduplication block size to do less 

comparison and use less CPU. Instead of using 

block sizes of 8kb they used (for example) 





MAGAZINE 

21

STRATEGY: BACKUP BACKUP 

worlds, both disk without deduplication for fast 

backups and restores, and deduplication to 

lower the overall storage costs. The first tier is 

a disk-cache (Landing Zone) where backups 

are being written to standard disk in their 

native format (no deduplication to slow it 

down). 

128kb. Instead of achieving the 20:1 

deduplication ratio of a deduplication 

appliance, they achieve a rate of about 5:1 or 

6:1. Also, they are slowing down the media 

server and all data is deduplicated on the disk 

so restores are still slow. 

Lastly, the same scaling issues remain. Some 

of the backup application companies 

packaged up the media server with 

deduplication with a server and disk to create a 

turnkey appliance however the challenges still 

exist: slow backups, slow restores, scalability 

issues, and the cost is higher since they use a 

lot more disk than a deduplication appliance 

because they have a lower deduplication ratio 

due to a larger block size. 

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US? 

There is no doubt that disk is the right medium. 

It is reliable and lives in a data centre rack with 

both physical and network security, both onsite 

and offsite. If data is backed up to disk without 

data deduplication the backup and restore 

performance is great, however the cost is high 

due to the sheer amount of disk required. 

Using an inline deduplication appliance, you 

can reduce the high cost of storage due to the 

20:1 deduplication ratio. However, all of these 

appliances are slow for backups due to inline 

deduplication processing, slow for restores due 

to only keeping deduplicated data that needs 

to be rehydrated with each request, and they 

don't scale as data grows which grows the 

backup window over time and forces costly 

forklift upgrade and product obsolescence. 

If deduplication is used in a backup 

application the performance is even slower 

than a deduplication appliance as the CPU is 

being shared between the deduplication 

process and media server functionality. The 

backups applications can improve this with 

incremental backups only but there are other 

trade-offs. In addition, far more disk is required 

as the deduplication ratio is more in the range 

of 5:1 to 10:1 rather than 20:1. 

There is no free lunch here and the different 

storage methods are just pushing the problem 

around. Why is that? Because unless you build 

a solution that includes deduplication and also 

solves the backup performance, restore 

performance, storage efficiency, and scalability 

issues - then no matter where the deduplication 

lives, the solution will still be broken. The 

answer is a solution that is architected to use 

disk in the appropriate way for fast backups 

and restores, uses data deduplication for longterm 

retention and scale-out all resources as 

data grows. 

PHASE 5: THE FUTURE - TIERED BACKUP 


Tiered backup storage offers the best of both 

This allows for fast backups and fast restores 

as there is no deduplication process in 

between the backup and the disk, and the 

most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated 

format. As the backups are 

being written to disk, in parallel with backups 

coming in, the data is deduplicated into a 

second tier for longer-term retention storage. 

This is called Adaptive Deduplication (it is not 

inline, and it is not post process). The system is 

comprised of individual appliances that each 

have CPU, memory, networking, and storage, 

and as data grows all resources are added 

which keeps the backup window fixed in 

length as data grows and eliminates both 

forklift upgrades and product obsolescence. 

The net is: 

Backups are as fast as writing to disk 

as there is no deduplication process in 

the way 

Restores are fast as there is no data 

rehydration process, because the most 

recent backups are in a nondeduplicated 

form 

Cost is low upfront because all long-term 

retention data is deduplicated in the longterm 

repository tier 

Backup window stays fixed in length as 

data grows as the architecture is scaleout, 

adding all resources and not just disk 

as data grows 

Long-term costs are low as the scale-out 

architectural approach eliminates forklift 

upgrades and product obsolescence 

In summary then, backup storage has taken 

a long journey and has arrived with tiered 

backup storage that provides fast and reliable 

backups and restores, with a low cost up front 

and over time. 

More info: www.exagrid.com 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: 

TECHNOLOGY: CLOUD DATA WAREHOUSING 

CLOUD: YOUR FLEXIBLE FRIEND 

WHAT IS A CLOUD DATA WAREHOUSE AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? ROB MELLOR, VP AND GM EMEA, 

WHERESCAPE, SHARES SOME INSIGHTS 

We are seeing business 

expectations for on-demand data 

explode, with many data 

warehousing teams beginning to transition 

their data warehousing efforts to the 

cloud. With the need to efficiently pull 

together data from a wide range of everevolving 

data sources and present it in a 

consumable way to a broadening 

audience of decision makers, cloud data 

warehousing is proving invaluable. 

In this article, we are going to cover the 

basics and explore cloud data 

warehousing; how the cloud data 

warehouse compares to the traditional 

data warehouse, and the benefits of a 

cross-cloud solution. 

WHAT IS A CLOUD DATA 

WAREHOUSE? 

A cloud data warehouse is a database 

service hosted online by a public cloud 

company. It has the functionality of an onpremises 

database but is managed by a 

third party, can be accessed remotely and 

its memory and compute power can be 

shrunk or grown instantly. 

TRADITIONAL VS. CLOUD 

A traditional data warehouse is an 

architecture for organising, storing and 

accessing ordered data, hosted in a data 

centre on premises owned by the 

organisation whose data is stored within it. 

It is of a finite size and power and is 

owned by that organisation. 

A cloud data warehouse is a flexible 

volume of storage and compute power, 

which is part of a much bigger public 

cloud data centre and is accessed and 

managed online. Storage and compute 

power is merely rented. Its physical 

location is largely irrelevant apart from for 

countries and/or industries whose 

regulations dictate their data must be 

stored in the same country. 

BENEFITS OF THE CLOUD 

APPROACH 

The benefits of a Cloud Data Warehouse 

can be summarised in five main points: 

1. Access 

Rather than having only physical access to 

databases in data centres, cloud data 

warehouses can be accessed remotely 

from anywhere. As well as being 

convenient for staff who live near the data 

centre, who can now troubleshoot from 

home or anywhere out of hours if needed, 

this access means companies can hire staff 

based anywhere, which opens up talent 

pools that were previously unavailable. 

Cloud data warehousing is self-service 

and so its provision does not depend on 

the availability of specialist staff. 

2. Cost 

Data centres are expensive to buy and 

maintain. Property to store them in needs 

to be properly cooled, insured and 

expertly staffed, and the databases 

themselves come at a huge cost. Cloud 

data warehousing allows the same service 

to be enjoyed, but you only pay for the 

computing and storage power you need, 

when you need it. Now with elastic cloud 

services such as Snowflake, compute and 

storage can be bought separately, in 

different amounts. You really only have to 

pay for what you are using, and you can 

instantly close or downsize capabilities you 

do not need. 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: 

TECHNOLOGY: CLOUD DATA WAREHOUSING 

"Hosting data in a Cloud data warehouse means you 

can switch providers if and when it suits changes in 

business strategy. Staying database-agnostic means you 

have the agility to upsize, downsize or switch completely. 

Metadata-driven automation software allows you to lift 

and shift entire data infrastructures on and off of a 

Cloud data warehouse if desired, and allows different 

teams within the same company to work with the 

database and hybrid cloud structure that best suits 

their needs." 

3. Performance 

Cloud service providers compete to offer 

use of the most performant hardware for a 

fraction of the cost that would be incurred 

to reproduce such power on-premises. 

Upgrades are performed automatically, so 

you always have the latest capabilities and 

do not experience downtime in upgrading 

to the latest 'version'. Some on premises 

databases offer faster performance, but not 

at the cost and availability of the 

'Infrastructure-as-a-service' that Cloud 

providers offer. 

4. Scalability 

Opening a Cloud data warehouse is as 

simple as opening an account with a 

provider such as Microsoft Azure, AWS 

Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake. 

The account can be grown, shrunk, or even 

closed instantly. Users are aware of the 

costs involved before they change the 

amount of compute or storage they rent. 

This scalability has led to the coining of the 

phrase 'Elastic Cloud'. 

5. Agility 

Hosting data in a Cloud data warehouse 

means you can switch providers if and when 

it suits changes in business strategy. Staying 

database-agnostic means you have the 

agility to upsize, downsize or switch 

completely. Metadata-driven automation 

software allows you to lift and shift entire 

data infrastructures on and off of a Cloud 

data warehouse if desired, and allows 

different teams within the same company to 

work with the database and hybrid cloud 

structure that best suits their needs. 

CHOOSING A SOLUTION 

A cost analysis is vital in estimating how 

much money a Cloud Data Warehouse 

might save a business. Different Cloud 

providers have different pricing structures 

that need bearing in mind. More 

established providers such as Amazon and 

Microsoft rent nodes and clusters, so your 

company uses a defined section of the 

server. This makes pricing predictable and 

constant, but sometimes maintenance to 

your particular node is needed. 

Snowflake and Google offer a 'serverless' 

system, which means the cluster locations 

and numbers are not defined and so are 

irrelevant. Instead the customer is charged 

for the exact amount of compute or 

processing power it consumes. However, in 

bigger companies it is often difficult to 

predict the amount of users and size of a 

process before it occurs. It is possible for 

queries to be much bigger than was 

assumed and so cost much more than was 

expected. 

Each cloud provider has its own suite of 

supporting tools for functions such as data 

management, visualisation and predictive 

analytics, so these needs should be factored 

in when deciding on which provider to use. 

Using cloud-based data warehouse 

platforms, you can gather even more data 

from a multitude of data sources and 

instantly and elastically scale to support 

virtually unlimited users and workloads. 

With the ability to manage the influx of big 

data, using automation to aid in providing 

return on investment, businesses will be 

able to manage the influx of big data, 

automate manual processes and maximise 

the return on cloud. 

More info: www.wherescape.com 




MAGAZINE 

25

CASE STUDY: CINESITE STUDY: CINESITE 

RENDERING ASSISTANCE 

DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT STUDIO CINESITE IS ABLE TO BRING MOTION PICTURES TO AUDIENCES FASTER 

WITH CLOUD RENDERING 

FRUSTRATIONS DRIVE NEW 

THINKING 

During the recent production of a fulllength 

animated feature film, Cinesite ran 

into technology issues with the existing 

cluster it had recently purchased. That 

vendor's system was causing network 

slowdowns for unknown reasons - for up to 

minutes at a time. 

Cinesite is a leading digital 

entertainment studio with credits on 

animated feature films such as The 

Addams Family, Extinct and Riverdance 

and VFX projects such as Avengers: 

Endgame, Rocketman, The Witcher, and 

the James Bond franchise. The company 

employs nearly 1,000 digital artists and 

staff, who work from offices across 

London, Montreal, Berlin, Munich, and 

Vancouver. 

Cinesite's award-winning visual effects 

and animation teams help bring 

filmmakers' visions to life. To support 

complex and demanding workflows for 

visual effects, and conceiving and 

realising CG-animated films, Qumulo 

and AWS enabled Cinesite to leverage 

high-performance storage at scale, 

helping Cinesite achieve more than the 

studio ever thought possible, including 

developing scalable 16K video workflows 

for future applications. 

Cinesite's existing infrastructure included 

a newly-installed but older generation 

storage technology from another provider 

that supported approximately 500 render 

nodes in the Montreal data centre, and a 

workflow that leveraged AWS for 

occasional overflow rendering. 

Eventually, the slow-downs became full 

interruptions - freezing the productivity of 

465 artists for as long as an hour. The 

system freezes could happen at any time, 

and that put production schedules at risk. 

JUMPING INTO ACTION 

Frustrated with that vendor's system and its 

inability to solve the problem, Cinesite 

approached Qumulo for ideas. Qumulo 

quickly deployed hardware nodes onsite, 

and was able to get Cinesite back up and 

running in short order. 

After the immediate need was solved, 

Qumulo engineers worked with the Cinesite 

team to diagnose other issues they were 

facing with their legacy systems to fully 

restore network speed. In fact, on one 

occasion, the Cinesite technical team was 

working on a solution well into the early 

morning - and reached out to Qumulo's 

customer success team at that unusual 

hour. Within sixty minutes, the Qumulo 

team responded with suggestions for 

configuration changes that would further 

increase network performance. Cinesite 

implemented those suggestions, got the 

performance it needed, and "from that day 

forward, we haven't looked back," said 

Graham Peddie, Chief Operating Officer, 

Cinesite Montreal. 

PLANNED TO EXPAND 

Cinesite knows first-hand the challenges of 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: CINESITE 

resource planning. "We can't plan for the 

peaks, so we plan for an average," said 

Peddie. That is the way planning had 

worked in the past. It was clear Cinesite 

would need a modern, cloud- native 

solution to move to a competitive scale. 

With the visual effects (VFX) and feature 

animation division pipelines at full capacity, 

and no easy way to burst to the cloud at the 

scale Cinesite needed for the extraordinary 

render and storage requirements, the studio 

again turned to Qumulo for a way out. 

To achieve the scale Cinesite was after, 

moving the workload to AWS US East 

(Virginia) region from the smaller region 

they had been using was required. With the 

existing solution, this would have been no 

easy feat. With Qumulo, it was seamless. 

"The only way we could expand to the new 

zone was by implementing Qumulo cloud 

storage," said Peddie. "This approach 

allowed us to spin up the machines and 

store data for offsite rendering on AWS US 

East (Virginia). Without Qumulo, we 

wouldn't have been able to do this or meet 

our deadlines." 

Qumulo's hybrid file software runs the 

same enterprise file system in the cloud as 

on-prem, and data can be natively and 

seamlessly replicated between instances or 

across regions. Bursting to 20, 200, or 

even 2,000 high-quality render nodes on 

AWS with Qumulo to keep pace with all 

that power is no problem. Instances can be 

spun up in minutes, and torn down just as 

quickly. 

Spencer Kuziw, Lead Systems 

Administrator, Cinesite Montreal, explained: 

"Qumulo is a huge benefit to us. We can 

spin up as many high quality render nodes 

as we need, in as many regions as we 

need, without impacting our local storage. 

And the Qumulo hybrid cloud software can 

handle whatever we throw at it. It is an 

essential part of our cloud deployment 

strategy." 

QUMULO GETS IT 

Customer support is another crucial benefit. 

Cinesite's media and entertainment clients 

operate within pressure-packed deadlines, 

and the studio has to be highly proactive to 

meet their needs. "Qumulo is different," 

Peddie said. "When it comes to our 

workflows and deadlines, Qumulo gets it. 

They know that we're under pressure. They 

know that solutions can't take weeks and 

months. We need issues solved quickly. So, 

for me, Qumulo's responsive and proactive 

customer support was an important benefit 

and set the company apart from all the 

other vendors we've seen." 

FINGER ON THE PULSE 

Analytics and real-time visibility are also 

crucial to Cinesite. Qumulo's real-time 

analytics tools enabled the studio to identify 

and fix pipeline inefficiencies. During a 

recent migration, real-time activity and 

usage analytics made it immediately clear 

that a script was making multiple copies of 

a directory, eating up space. 

Qumulo analytics show activity in realtime, 

including by directory growth, most 

active network IPs, most active file paths, 

and so on, making it simple to pinpoint a 

problem and quickly clean it up. Typically 

on other systems, common issues like that 

go unnoticed and storage capacity simply 

fills up, leaving admins with the task of 

running reports, waiting days for them to 

complete, then conducting forensics. 

EYES ON THE FUTURE 

Cinesite continues to consider additional 

cloud options to take advantage of the 

latest media and entertainment 

technologies. The team is exploring new 

and exciting projects like 16K-plus file sizes 

and unique applications outside of cinema. 

Peddie said, "We could never have tackled 

these technological and creative challenges 

without a cloud solution. Qumulo has 

enabled us to boost Cinesite's competitive 

position within the industry." 

More info: www.qumulo.com 

"Qumulo is a huge 

benefit to us. We can 

spin up as many high 

quality render nodes as 

we need, in as many 

regions as we need, 

without impacting our 

local storage. And the 

Qumulo hybrid cloud 

software can handle 

whatever we throw at it. It 

is an essential part of our 

cloud deployment 

strategy." 




MAGAZINE 

27

TECHNOLOGY: 

TECHNOLOGY: ENERGY CONSUMPTION 

POWER PLAY 

RAINER KAESE, SENIOR MANAGER, STORAGE PRODUCTS DIVISION, TOSHIBA ELECTRONICS 

EUROPE, SHARES SOME INSIGHTS FROM A RECENT EXPERIMENTAL PROJECT UNDERTAKEN AT THE 

COMPANY INTO THE ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF DISK DRIVES 

Energy efficiency initiatives have 

driven down energy consumption 

significantly over the past decades. 

Today's homes probably consume as 

much energy for lighting as that required 

for two or three old 100 W light bulbs. 

But who would have thought that, using 

the latest generation of hard disk drives, 

a petabyte of storage requiring less 

energy than five of those old light bulbs 

could be achieved? 

With the demand for always-on, online 

storage capacity for databases seemingly 

showing no signs of abating, it is vital to 

develop storage systems that can keep up 

with this growing flood of data while 

simultaneously fulfilling certain criteria. 

Cost per capacity ($/TB) is usually the 

most important of these, due to the 

immense quantities of data involved. 

However, energy consumption is another 

aspect to consider as this impacts the 

long-term operational costs. This energy 

should also be consumed efficiently, 

thereby reducing the need for cooling 

that also incurs costs. 

Physical dimensions of the end solution 

also need to be considered. Increasing 

the number of disks requires a housing 

with increased volume. Ideally, the server 

housing should easily be accommodated 

by a standard 19" rack system, fitting into 

existing infrastructure of 1000 mm long 

racks. Performance is obviously another 

factor but, if the key goals are high 

capacity at low power consumption, it is 

possible to tolerate toward lower IOPS or 

throughput figures. 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: 


In an investigation undertaken by the 

research team at Toshiba Electronics 

Europe GmbH, a project was undertaken 

to see if it was possible to build 1 PB of 

data storage into a system consuming less 

than 500 W of power. 

CHOICE OF STORAGE 

The requirement for mass capacity is 

achieved most cost-effectively with the use 

of HDDs, the top capacity models of 

which have similar $/TB ratios for 12 TB, 

14 TB and 16 TB models. However, in 

order to ensure that the final system 

would fit into a standard 19" rack, it 

clearly made sense to select the largest 

16 TB capacity drives to keep the physical 

volume required to an absolute minimum. 

This choice also aligns well with the 

power consumption goal, since the power 

dissipation per unit capacity has 

successively dropped with the introduction 

of new HDD models (see Table 1). 

This is due not only to the new 

technology implemented, but also thanks 

the move to helium-filled drives (see 

Figure 1). 

The 16 TB models of Toshiba's MG08 

series are available with both SAS and 

SATA interfaces. The SAS interface 

provides two 12 GB/s channels that are 

ideally suited to systems where high 

availability and throughput are a priority. 

However, there is a power consumption 

cost associated with this choice since SAS 

drives consume around one to two watts 

more than their SATA counterparts. Since 

the goal was to reduce power 

consumption, the SATA interface model 

MG08ACA16TE was the chosen 

candidate for this project. 

The individual specifications for this 

particular drive, in terms of power 

dissipation, are shown in Table 2. 

SELECTING AN ENCLOSURE 

With the storage defined, the next step 

was to select a suitable enclosure. Toploader 

models are convenient and 

available as a JBOD in four unit high 19" 

rack format. A 60-bay model from AIC, 

the AIC-J4060-02, was selected for this 

project. The single expander version was 

chosen, saving on cost and power 

dissipation, matching with the 

specification of the one-channel SATA 

interface. Once filled with 16 TB HDDs, 

the solution has a gross storage of 960 

TB, almost one petabyte. The JBOD is 

then connected to the host bus adapter 

(HBA) or RAID controller of the server via 

one mini SAS-HD cable. 

With a length of just 810 mm, this JBOD 

fits into any existing rack. 

BASELINE TESTING 

An initial power consumption 

measurement was made without the 

HDDs via the 220 V inputs to the twin 

redundant power supply. With no HDDs 

inserted, but both the JBOD and SAS link 

up, an initial measurement of 80 W was 

made. The next step was to measure 

power consumption with a single drive 

under different workload conditions. 

Write workloads were chosen that 

simulated archiving, video recording and 

backup using 64 kB sequential blocks. 

Using the same block size, sequential 

reads were also undertaken, equivalent to 

a backup recovery and media streaming 

workload. To provide a further data point, 

4 kB random read/writes were also 

performed, corresponding to the agile 

"hot-data" workload of databases. 

Obviously, these do not fully correlate 

with the typical workload for this type of 

system but allowed the collection of 

reference data for comparison purposes. 

In addition to these borderline cases a 

test with an approximate real workload 

was carried out. A mix of different block 

sizes was read and written randomly (4kB: 

20%, 64kB: 50%, 256kB: 20%, 2MB: 

10%). In order to achieve the maximum 

possible performance, all synthetic loads 

were executed with a queue depth (QD) 

of 16. In addition to these tests, a 

standard copy process was started on a 

logical drive under Windows and the 

power dissipation measured. 

The results for the individual drive use 

case consistently shows a lower power 

consumption than that given in the data 

sheet for the selected drive (see Table 3). 

Another point to note is that, in 

opposition to the data sheet, sequential 

loads result in higher power consumption 

than random access loads. This can be 

traced back to the power needs of the 

JBOD, since the SAS expanders require 

more power at high bandwidths in 

sequential operation. 





MAGAZINE 

29

TECHNOLOGY: 


TESTING VARIOUS 

CONFIGURATIONS 

With all the slots of the JBOD filled, the 

maximum power consumption when the 

system was idling lay at a respectable 

420 W. This is slightly higher than 

expected (80 W + 60 x 4 W = 320 W) 

and can be traced back to the fact that 

the controller occasionally addresses the 

HDDs even in idle mode. On the other 

hand, the peak start-up power measured 

lay at just 720 W, significantly lower than 

the sum of the JBOD plus the spin-up 

data sheet values for the HDDs (80 W + 

60 x 16.85 W = ~1100 W). This can be 

traced back to the staggered approach to 

spin-up the system employs, applying 

power to the HDDs one after the other. 

The system was re-tested using the 

same workloads used for single drive 

operation. The highest power 

consumption of 500 W measured 

occurred during sequential reads of 64kB 

blocks, while the lowest of 445 W was for 

both sequential 64 kB and random 4 kB 

writes (see Figure 2). 

Two further configurations were also 

investigated. The first combined the 60 

disks into a local RAID10 with 5 subarrays 

to create 480 TB net storage. This 

was then formatted as two 240 TB logical 

drives under Windows Server 2016. 

Here, sequential accesses required less 

power, while random accesses essentially 

matched that measured in JBOD mode. 

Implementing a software-defined, 

zettabyte file system (ZFS) using 

JovianDSS from Open-E also resulted in 

improvements in power consumption for 

read tests, but slightly higher 

measurements when writing. In this 

configuration two 800 GB enterprise 

SSDs were also added as a read cache 

and a write log buffer, with the resulting 

240 TB logical drives made available 

over iSCSI. 

CONCLUSIONS 

Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH 

estimates the total capacity of enterprise 

capacity (Nearline) HDDs shipped in 

2019 at around 500 exabytes (500,000 

petabytes). If all these HDDs were 

operated as 16TB models in 60-bay 

JBODs, this would result in a continuous 

power consumption of 225MW 

(equivalent to an average coal-fired 

power plant). However, since the majority 

of HDDs delivered in 2019 had even 

lower capacities, it can be assumed that 

the power consumption was even higher 

and it is clear that there is significant 

room for improvement to reduce the 

industry's W/TB power consumption 

figures. 

The investigations and testing 

undertaken by Toshiba show that, thanks 

to the power efficiency of the latest 

generation of high-capacity, helium-filled 

disks, petabyte storage that typically 

demands less then 500 W of power is 

indeed achievable. This is a significant 

milestone for data centres working to 

grow capacity while keeping both capital 

expenditure and operating costs down. 

Additionally, this can be achieved in a 

range of configurations, from pure 

JBOD, through RAID, to softwaredefined, 

and in a standard dimension 19" 

rack format with a commonly available 

enclosure. 

More info: www.toshiba-storage.com 




MAGAZINE

OPINION: 

OPINION: DATA PROTECTION 

PEOPLE: THE WEAKEST LINK 

FLORIAN MALECKI OF STORAGECRAFT WARNS THAT 

ORGANISATIONS NEED TO BEWARE 'THE VULNERABILITY FROM 

WITHIN': HUMAN ERROR 

While cyber threats continue to be a 

massive drain on business 

productivity, there is another, less 

obvious vulnerability: unintentional employee 

error. Indeed, a majority of businesses say 

that simple human error is their leading cause 

of data loss, according to a survey from 

StorageCraft. 

Among survey respondents, 61% reported 

that their company had suffered a data loss 

over the last two years. More striking is that 

67% said human error - everyday mistakes 

made by employees - was the primary reason 

for data loss and system outages. Human 

error, for example, weak passwords and "dirty" 

work environments, can be the pathway to 

security hacks and have potential to wreak 

havoc far greater than that of a third party with 

malicious intent. 

It can be as simple as an employee 

misplacing a spreadsheet or spilling coffee on 

their laptop. It could be someone who 

accidentally deletes a critical file or an entire 

database of critical information. Then there are 

the real-life oddities such as dropping a laptop! 

These seemingly small incidents can add up 

and potentially cripple a business. 

A few years ago, software company Gliffy 

experienced a nightmare scenario when one 

of its employees pressed the wrong key and 

deleted the company's entire production 

database. The same thing happened to 

GitLab a few years back, resulting in a major 

service outage. 

Perhaps the most famous data-deletion story 

involved Pixar during the production of Toy 

Story 2. One of the movie's animators 

accidentally entered a delete command, 

resulting in a cascade of errors that erased 

90% of the production files. To make matters 

worse, the data-backup system failed to work 

properly due to inadequate disk space. For a 

brief moment, there were fears that the entire 

production would have to be scrapped. It was 

only a Herculean effort by the technical crew 

that saved the film. 

The data-loss problem could become even 

more prevalent in the current and post-COVID 

world, as millions of people work remotely. 

Moving employees, their computers, and data 

from a secure office environment to a lesssecure 

home environment presents a range of 

unintentional data-loss risks. 

The reality is that employees will continue to 

make mistakes, they're only human, after all. 

Here are three ways that organisations can 

protect themselves against catastrophic data 

loss caused by human error: 

Promote good data backup habits. With so 

many employees working remotely, it's 

harder for organisations to manage 

backups and store data on the corporate 

network. Encourage employees to be 

responsible and back up their data 

regularly. If they store data on a local flash 

drive inserted into their laptop, they should 

back it up to the cloud or another hard 

drive. If employees store their data primarily 

in the cloud, they should be sure to have 

another copy offline. 

Encourage stringent cyber hygiene. All 

employees, especially those working 

remotely, need to be reminded to update 

the software on their devices and enable all 

available security features, such as firewalls 

and anti-malware. Failing to install updated 

software and security patches is a wellknown 

employee misstep that creates gaps 

for malware and ransomware to seize on. 

Limit the number of files employees can 

access. Employees should only be able to 

access data and folders based on the 

principle of 'least privilege'. This gives 

employees enough access to perform their 

required jobs but prevents them from 

accidentally deleting or corrupting files they 

shouldn't have had access to in the first 

place, meaning the risk caused by human 

error is significantly reduced. 

A business' weakest link may well be the 

'danger within', albeit unintentional. With the 

right strategies and processes in place, 

businesses can limit data loss when employees 

inevitably make mistakes. 

More info: www.storagecraft.com 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: TECHNOLOGY: SSD 

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR 

SSD DIES? 

RECOVERING DATA FROM FAILED SOLID-STATE DRIVES CAN BE MORE 

CHALLENGING THAN WITH HARD DISKS, EXPLAINS PHILIP BRIDGE, 

PRESIDENT OF ONTRACK 

There is no doubt that the use of solidstate 

drives (SSDs) has gathered pace. 

The main benefit is that they are much 

faster than a legacy HDD. This is because a 

standard HDD consists of many moving 

parts, as typified by the telltale 'whirring' 

sound we have all become accustomed to. 

When data needs to be accessed, the 

read/write head needs to move to the 

correct position. SSDs, by contrast, don't 

have any moving parts. This speed of 

operation makes them perfect for 

environments where real-time access and 

transfer of data is a necessity. 

One of the main downsides of SSDs 

though is that they have a limited life span. 

Whilst HDDs can - in theory - last forever, an 

SSD has a built-in 'time of death' that you 

can't ignore. This is because data can only 

be written on the storage cells a finite 

number of times. After that, the cells 'forget' 

new data. Because of this - and to prevent 

certain cells from getting used all the time 

while others aren't - manufacturers use wearlevelling 

algorithms to distribute data evenly 

over all cells by the controller. 

When it comes to estimating this time of 

death, manufacturers use something called 

terabytes written (TBW). The TBW figure can 

rather accurately tell you how much data 

can be written in total on all cells inside the 

storage chips. A typical TBW figure for a 

250 GB SSD lies between 60 and 150 

terabytes written. To put this in perspective, 

to get over a TBW of 70, a user would have 

to write 190 GB daily over one year (in 

other words, to fill two-thirds of the SSD with 

new data every day). While in a consumer 

environment, this is highly unlikely, in a 21stcentury 

business, it is highly plausible. 

One of the most popular SSDs - the 

Samsung SSD 850 PRO SATA - is stated to 

be "built to handle 150 terabytes written 

(TBW), which equates to a 40 GB daily 

read/write workload over a ten-year period." 

Samsung promises that the product is 

"withstanding up to 600 terabytes written 

(TBW)." If we consider a normal office user 

to write somewhere between 10 and 35 GB 

a day, even if one raises this amount up to 

40 GB, it means that they could write for 

more than five years until they reach the 70 

TBW limit. 

These rates have been verified by Google 

and the University of Toronto who - after 

testing SSDs over a multi-year period - put 

the age limit as somewhere between five and 

ten years depending on usage; around the 

same time as the average washing machine. 

WORST CASE SCENARIO 

So, what do you do if the worst happens and 

your SSD does indeed stop working? It is no 

exaggeration to say that in this era where 

data is king, not having access to that data 

could prove to be catastrophic. To mitigate 

the impact, it is best to contact a 

professional data recovery service provider 

where possible. 

When it comes to a physical fault, it is not 

possible for a user to recover or rescue their 

data themselves, however well-intentioned 

they may be. In fact, any attempt to recover 

data could make matters worse and lead to 

permanent data loss. 

Even though the average SSD lifespan is 

longer than users may expect, using SSDs 

can still pose a serious threat, as recovering 

data from failed SSDs is distinctly 

challenging. Sometimes the only solution is 

to find an identical functioning controller 

chip and swap it in to gain access - which is 

easier said than done. 

More info: www.ontrack.com/uk 




MAGAZINE 

33

RESEARCH: 

RESEARCH: STORAGE STRATEGIES 

PANDEMIC INCREASES PRESSURES ON I.T. 

SURVEY UNCOVERS THE LIMITATIONS IMPOSED BY TRADITIONAL I.T. INFRASTRUCTURES, EXACERBATED 

BY REMOTE WORKING DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC 

Nebulon has released the results of an 

independent survey completed by IT 

decision makers at 500 companies in 

the IT, financial services, manufacturing, retail, 

distribution and transport industries across the 

UK, US, Germany and France. Conducted in 

June of this year, the survey exposes the biggest 

challenges enterprises face in transforming 

their on-premises application storage 

environments, which have only been 

exacerbated during this Covid-19 era. While IT 

organisations cite multiple restrictions, the 

survey reveals limited infrastructure automation 

and high CAPEX as the most significant 

challenges for those deploying enterprise 

storage array technology, forcing them to reexamine 

IT spending and operations even 

more so than usual amidst the pandemic. 

While increasing automation and reducing 

costs may seem like mainstream initiatives for 

any large organisation, the pandemic and 

resulting workforce restrictions mandate 

significant progress in days or weeks, versus 

months or quarters. The results of the survey 

further reinforce this as respondents also 

highlighted their on-premises application 

storage environments are difficult to maintain, 

and reveal that they lacked the in-house 

expertise necessary to manage them. Even 

more disconcerting, respondents indicate that 

their traditional external storage arrays are not 

suited to handle new workloads, including 

containers and NoSQL databases. This is 

unsurprising as modern workloads have been 

architected for local versus shared storage 

resources. 

British IT decision makers specifically ranked 

"expensive" highest, with 57% making this one 

of their top three challenges, followed by "time 

consuming to maintain" (50%) and "difficult to 

automate at scale" (49%). Respondents from 

smaller organisations (1,000-2,999 

employees) were more likely to mark "lack of inhouse 

expertise" highly compared to larger 

organisations (3,000+employees) (59% 

compared to 31%) while these larger 

companies were more likely to consider cost a 

top challenge (61% compared to 35%). 

"The impact of the pandemic is forcing 

CIOs worldwide to reconsider their 

operations," said Siamak Nazari, Co-Founder 

and CEO of Nebulon, Inc. "Reducing costs 

through server-based storage alternatives 

without the restrictions of hyperconverged 

infrastructure, and reducing operating cost 

pressure through cloud-based management 

of the application storage infrastructure are 

crucial initiatives for IT organisations looking 

to survive this new normal." 

For companies with a growing class of 

mission-critical data that cannot or should not 

move to the public cloud, Cloud-Defined 

Storage is an alternative to expensive storage 

arrays, offering enterprises a cloud-managed, 

server-based approach for mission-critical 

storage. By combining a cloud-based control 

plane, called Nebulon ON, with server-based 

storage that is powered by the Nebulon 

Services Processing Unit (SPU), Nebulon 

enables organisations to reduce cost for 

enterprise storage by up to half without 

compromising on enterprise data services. 

This is made possible by Nebulon's unique 

architecture that makes use of commodity SSDs 

in industry standard servers, Ethernet in favour 

of Fibre Channel, and by eliminating 

operational complexities by moving 

management to Nebulon ON with an as-aservice 

model. With the architectural and 

operational simplicity of Cloud-Defined 

Storage, application owners gain a self-service 

infrastructure provisioning that is unmatched 

with existing on-premises storage solutions. 

"IT organisations have been seeking a costeffective 

alternative to external storage arrays 

for years," said Nazari. "With our Cloud- 

Defined Storage offering, they have the 

opportunity to reduce costs while also 

deploying a self-service solution for 

application owners that also reduces the 

operational burden." 

More info: www.nebulon.com 




MAGAZINE

ST Jul-Aug 2020

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