ST Sep-Oct 2020

STOR 

MAGAZINE 

STORAGE 

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

September/October 2020 

Vol 20, Issue 5 

REDUCING OBJECT STORAGE TCO: 

Reap the benefits and stay within budget 

SMB STRATEGIES: 

Putting data front and centre 

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT: 

Streaming is changing video storage 

SECURITY FOCUS: 

How the right backup can assist against ransomware 

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

The UK’s number one in IT Storage 

September/October 2020 

Vol 20, Issue 5 

REDUCING OBJECT STORAGE TCO: 

Reap the benefits and stay within budget 

SECURITY FOCUS: 

How the right backup can assist against ransomware 

CONTENTS 

STOR 

MAGAZINE 


CONTENTS 

SMB STRATEGIES: 

Putting data front and centre 

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT: 

Streaming is changing video storage 

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

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

Recovery positions 

06 

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT.................................................…6 

COVID-19 is impacting how users consume video streaming services and Cloud DVR - 

which in turn affects the storage strategies of the streaming platforms, argues 

Christophe Vaissade of Western Digital 

CASE STUDY: GENOMICS ENGLAND........................…8 

STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT..............................10 

Getting closer to their data is vital for SMB owners in an increasingly digital economy, 

argues Florian Malecki of StorageCraft 

CASE STUDY: NTT GLOBAL DATA CENTRES EMEA.....12 

08 

EVENT: STORAGE AWARDS 2020..........................…16 

Despite the upheavals caused by COVID-19 we have done our best to make sure that 

this year's Storage Awards will still take place: full details of all the finalists and how to 

vote are here 

CASE STUDY: IRISH PRISON SERVICE....................…21 

INTERVIEW: VIRTUAL EFFECT..................................…22 

Storage magazine caught up with John Greenwood - a past winner of both the 

"Contribution to the Industry" and "Channel Excellence" Storage Awards - about his new 

role at Virtual Effect 

10 

RESEARCH: SMBS.....................................................…24 

The world's SMBs are turning to data as they look to steer a course to COVID recovery, 

according to new Seagate research which spoke to 3,000 small and medium sized 

business decision-makers globally 

MANAGEMENT: CLOUD SECURITY.........................…26 

A spike in cloud cyber-attacks shows that businesses were not adequately prepared for 

the growth in working from home brought about by COVID-19, explains Ryan Trost of 

ThreatQuotient 

21 

SCALE-OUT WITH CONFIDENCE.............................…28 

Frank Lee, Senior Director of Product Planning at Infortrend, describes how the 

company's latest scale-out NAS offerings can help any organisation to grow without 

incurring unnecessary cost 

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: OBJECT STORAGE............…30 

Reaping the benefits of object storage within budget can be made easier via the use of 

tape technologies, argues Matthew Dewey, Technical Director at Quantum 

CASE STUDY: SIDE STREET POST AND VFX.........…32 

26 

STRATEGY: RANSOMWARE.....................................…34 

Bill Andrews, President & CEO of ExaGrid, outlines the steps necessary to ensure that 

organisations can recover from ransomware attacks with minimal impact on the business 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Sept/Oct 2020 

^ 


MAGAZINE 

03

COMMENT 

EDITOR: David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

SUB EDITOR: Mark Lyward 

mark.lyward@btc.co.uk 

REVIEWS: Dave Mitchell 

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lyndsey.camplin@storagemagazine.co.uk 

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stuart.leigh@btc.co.uk 

MANAGING DIRECTOR: John Jageurs 

john.jageurs@btc.co.uk 

DISTRIBUTION/SUBSCRIPTIONS: 

Christina Willis 

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PUBLISHED BY: Barrow & Thompkins 

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Tel: +44 (0)1689 616 000 

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Single copies can be bought for £8.50 

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Published 6 times a year. 

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©Copyright 2020 

Barrow & Thompkins Connexions Ltd 

Articles published reflect the opinions 

of the authors and are not necessarily those 

of the publisher or of BTC employees. While 

every reasonable effort is made to ensure 

that the contents of articles, editorial and 

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can be accepted by the publisher or BTC for 

errors, misrepresentations or any 

resulting effects 

RECOVERY POSITIONS 

BY DAVID TYLER 

EDITOR 

Our September issue includes a full list of all the finalists for this year's Storage 

Awards - an event that, for quite some time, we felt might not happen at all in 

2020. For that reason it feels really good to be able to say that we're nearing 

the finish line, with almost as many nominations as in previous years, and sponsors as 

ready as ever to support the process - for which we are all genuinely grateful. Storage 

magazine is a part of a very small publishing concern, and as such could very easily 

have been one the casualties of the pandemic: it doesn't take many months of hugely 

reduced revenue for a business like ours to feel very precariously placed indeed. 

As we near the end of 2020 - and with no real end in sight to the impacts of the 

global crisis on our business and many others, of course, it is tempting to think that a 

new year will bring positive change. We can't know for sure, of course - but I'm sure we 

are all keeping fingers crossed! In the meantime, check out the full list of possible 

winners on pages 16-20, and make sure you cast your votes! We are still working out 

much of the fine detail of how the awards ceremony itself is going to look, but at the 

end of the day the recognition of winning one of our prizes is every bit as significant as 

it has ever been. 

Elsewhere in this issue the Coronavirus is colouring our editorial contributions as well: 

in a research-based piece from Seagate, it is suggested that recovery for many SMBs 

will be dependent on their ability to manage their data. "Small and medium sized 

businesses are a key growth engine of the global economy, and our research suggests 

that many are realising the potential value that data can deliver for their business as 

they look ahead at the road to recovery," said Seagate's Jeff Fochtman. "As businesses 

of all shapes and sizes become increasingly dependent on technology, realising the 

true value of the data those businesses have stored will become critical to unlocking 

future growth and innovation opportunities." 

We also feature an article arguing that many businesses were not adequately 

prepared for security threats arising from the growth in working from home, as well as 

an article from WD suggesting that the pandemic is impacting on how people use 

streaming services - and therefore changing the storage strategies of streaming services 

themselves. Find out more inside. 

David Tyler 

david.tyler@btc.co.uk 

^ 

04 STORAGE 

MAGAZINE 

Sept/Oct 2020 

@STMagAndAwards 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

INTRODUCING THE LATEST 

POCKET-SIZED 

STORAGE BOOK 

WRITTEN SPECIFICALLY FOR YOU: 

THE CUSTODIANS OF BUSINESS DATA 

Including a glossary of around 200 

industry terms, a focus on the Storage 

investment underbelly and thirty 

lesser known Tech Snippets to drop 

into Server Room conversations... 

Register* for your Free copy by 

emailing: 

storagebook@virtualeffect.co.uk 

* PLease note, to qualify for a Book you must be an end-User 

Data Storage Solutions 

www.virtualeffect.co.uk 

Tel: 03300 431 747 

AN A TO Z OF DATA STORAGE 

EVERYTHING THE INDUSTRY ASSUMES YOU ALREADY KNOW 

BLOCK STORAGE - CLOUD STORAGE - DATA AT REST - DATA PROTECTION - DISASTER RECOVERY 

FILE STORAGE - STORAGE MIGRATION - OBJECT STORAGE - SOFTWARE DEFINED STORAGE

ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: STREAMING SERVICES 

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT 

COVID-19 IS JUST ONE OF THE THINGS IMPACTING ON HOW USERS CONSUME VIDEO 

STREAMING SERVICES AND CLOUD DVR - WHICH IN TURN WILL AFFECT THE STORAGE STRATEGIES 

OF THE STREAMING PLATFORMS THEMSELVES, ARGUES CHRISTOPHE VAISSADE, SALES DIRECTOR 

EMEA AT WESTERN DIGITAL 

The way people consume media has 

overwhelmingly shifted towards Over-thetop 

(OTT). In addition to live TV, the 

number of video streaming platforms has 

grown rapidly. Along with the near unlimited 

choice of content, consumers have come to 

expect a seamless user interface with the ability 

to pause and toggle between shows. 

While the cloud has unlocked powerful 

capabilities for both service providers and 

consumers, a shift to Cloud DVR presents a 

challenge for service providers to deliver an 

ever-growing content library to an increasing 

number of consumers. For example, Cisco's 

Global 2020 IP Traffic Forecast projects that 

global IP traffic will reach 4ZBs in 2022, with 

82% of that being video. By the same year, 

busy hour traffic will grow at a 37% CAGR, up 

to 5 times where it was just in 2018. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated 

this trend, further highlighting the bandwidth 

challenge. But there are solutions to ensure the 

quality of service that consumers demand, 

from the end-point to the edge, to help 

maintain the quality of service that is expected. 

THE BANDWIDTH CHALLENGE 

Consumers watch more video on demand 

(VOD) and recorded shows than ever before. 

Even watching live TV, they often pause and 

make use of a recorded pause-buffer. The 

pandemic exacerbated this need, as millions of 

people were locked down at home. In fact, 

some streaming platforms reduced video 

quality for a month to help reduce the strain on 

broadband providers and in accordance with 

European government officials' requests. 

Many pay-TV providers offer their subscribers 

the ability to pause live TV and record 

programmes as part of a bundled package, 

enabled by a storage element in the Set-Top- 

Boxes (local DVR) or in the cloud (Cloud DVR). 

In the past, users stored content on local DVRs, 

and once a programme was recorded, all the 

actions such as pause, rewind, and fast 

06 STORAGE Sept/Oct 2020 


www.storagemagazine.co.uk 

MAGAZINE

ANALYSIS: 

ANALYSIS: STREAMING SERVICES 

"In the past, users stored content on local DVRs, and 

once a programme was recorded, all the actions such 

as pause, rewind, and fast forward were seamless, with 

minimal bottlenecks. However, as the DVR has 

transitioned to the cloud, and more streaming services 

have come online, the pipe has become more 

constricted putting greater strain on the networks. With 

lots of content now being recorded in the cloud, the 

network becomes a common bottleneck for all." 

forward were seamless, with minimal 

bottlenecks. However, as the DVR has 

transitioned to the cloud, and more streaming 

services have come online, the pipe has 

become more constricted putting greater 

strain on the networks. 

With lots of content now being recorded in 

the cloud, the network becomes a common 

bottleneck for all. The storage must be 

balanced at the edge (in-home network) and 

in the network (through which the content is 

being distributed) to achieve the best user 

experience and TCO, since there are different 

scenarios whereby the network load is 

impacted drastically. 

BEWARE THE 'PAUSE-STORM' 

Take a pause-storm (for lack of a better term), 

for example. This happens when a large 

number of viewers switch from watching live 

TV (multicast stream) to viewing time-shifted 

video (unicast stream), such as a major 

sporting event. In a local DVR scenario, this 

would have no impact on the network as the 

time-shifted video plays from the local buffer 

on the hard disk drive (HDD). However, in a 

Cloud DVR scenario, since no local buffer 

exists, a pause-storm will create a large spike 

in network load. 

Looking forward, demand for content 

consumption will only grow with a larger 

library of titles at higher resolutions (4K/8K), 

driving the need for more storage and 

bandwidth. At the same time, users' habits are 

getting more sophisticated which demands a 

seamless interaction with all entertainment 

options. 

Consumers will expect smoother interfaces 

with their TV services going forward. Video 

service providers need to be aware of this 

when deploying their DVR solutions, as low 

latency is crucial to the customer experience. 

When crunching the numbers, many 

operators find that leaving some storage in the 

STB goes a long way in reducing total cost of 

ownership (TCO), while improving user 

experience. Pause-live TV (PLTV) can be 

implemented by buffering the video to flash 

storage attached to the STB. Viewers 

experience no latency, and operators save by 

mitigating the peak demand during increased 

time-shifted viewing (such as during pausestorms). 

FUTURE-PROOFING THE NETWORK 

Even as we talk about ZBs of content (and 

growing) being generated, stored, and moved 

around the cloud, adding just 32GB or 64GB 

of local storage at the STB devices goes a long 

way to ensure the quality of service. The 

enhanced STB will serve as a time-shift buffer 

(TSB) as well as a supplement for Cloud DVR. 

By caching video at the edge, network traffic is 

also significantly reduced. 

To maximise the longevity of the STB, the 

local storage solution needs to be high 

endurance to handle a workload of continuous 

programming and erasing, many times a day, 

over the life of the device, as well as offer 

telecoms operators' remote access so they can 

run network diagnostics and health checks 

periodically. On top of that, AI and ML based 

algorithms can help determine which shows 

will be watched earlier, and automatically prepopulate 

the STB device accordingly. 

So, whether it's a traditional STB or an 

Android-based STB that combines Pay TV 

services with OTT services, local storage is a 

proven solution to 'extend' the network to the 

home and provide a seamless Cloud DVR 

experience. Storage at the edge device is 

important to maintain the revenue stream from 

Pay TV subscribers and a competitive edge 

within the market. 

More info: www.westerndigital.com 





MAGAZINE 

07

CASE STUDY: GENOMICS STUDY: 

ENGLAND 

OBJECT STORAGE PASSES 

THE GENOME TEST 

GENOMICS ENGLAND STORES, PROTECTS, AND PROVIDES ACCESS 

TO HUNDREDS OF PETABYTES OF GENOMIC DATA - SCALING UP 

EVEN MORE THIS YEAR TO PARTICIPATE IN VITAL COVID-19 

RESEARCH - THANKS TO QUANTUM ACTIVESCALE 

Genomics England was established in 

2013 by the UK's Department of 

Health & Social Care to support the 

100,000 Genomes Project - a groundbreaking 

effort to sequence whole genomes 

from a vast number of patients with rare 

diseases and common cancers. In 2018, the 

project was significantly expanded, requiring 

Genomics England to scale its data storage 

infrastructure. Using Quantum ActiveScale 

object storage as part of a single, integrated 

environment enables the organisation to store, 

protect, and provide access to hundreds of 

petabytes of genomic data. 

ACCELERATING THE GENOMICS 

INDUSTRY 

Genomics England has ambitious aims. The 

organisation was created to sequence the 

genomes of an enormous number of people, 

generating new insights that can help improve 

treatments - while also accelerating the 

development of the UK genomics industry. 

Within a few years of its inauguration, the 

organisation proved that it could reach its 

initial goal of sequencing 100,000 genomes, 

and it was rewarded in 2018 with a new goal 

of sequencing up to five million genomes over 

five years. 

Unfortunately, the existing network-attached 

storage (NAS) solution used for storing genomic 

data was not up to the task. The NAS, which 

was storing 21 PB of data, could not be scaled 

further - it had reached its node-scaling limit. 

As the NAS approached capacity, performance 

suffered. Meanwhile, the organisation could not 

ensure resilience for all this genomic 

information. Though data was backed up to 

tape, Genomics England lacked a robust 

disaster recovery strategy that could restore data 

rapidly in the event of a disaster or another 

significant disruption. 

The organisation needed a solution that could 

store and protect fast-growing data volumes. 

"We needed something much more scalable 

than existing NAS solutions-an infrastructure that 

could grow to hundreds of petabytes," says 

David Ardley, head of technical delivery at 

Genomics England. A new solution also had to 

facilitate simple, flexible access to data by more 

than 3,000 researchers around the world. 

Genomics England consulted with Nephos 

Technologies, an independent UK-based data 

services organisation to design and implement a 

new storage solution. Together, teams from 

Nephos and Genomics England reviewed 

current requirements, projected future needs, 

and then designed and implemented a new, 

multi-faceted solution. 

The storage solution incorporates a WekalO 

high-performance file system, Mellanox high- 




MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY: GENOMICS STUDY: 

ENGLAND 

England needs for its critical work. The 

organisation takes advantage of the geodistributed 

capability of ActiveScale. With 

ActiveScale, the organisation distributes 

data across three data centres, for full data 

protection against a major disaster such as 

site loss. 

Data can continue to be accessed for 

reading and writing at the remaining sites 

and withstand additional hardware failures, 

offering 19x9s data durability. In addition, 

the technology helps ensure high data 

integrity by enabling a self-healing process 

through automatic data scrubbing, 

verification, repair, and optimisation. 

speed networking, and Quantum ActiveScale 

object storage. It creates a two-tier architecture 

that combines flash storage plus ActiveScale 

object storage, which serves as a long-term data 

lake repository. The initial deployment included 

1.4 PB of flash and 40 PB of object storage. 

The two storage tiers - each of which can be 

scaled independently - present as a single hybrid 

storage environment. As a result, researchers 

have the flexibility to query data in a highly 

randomised fashion. 

PANDEMIC BRINGS NEW CHALLENGES 

Within a few years of deploying the new storage 

environment, Genomics England needed to 

expand again. The emergence of the COVID- 

19 pandemic in early 2020 presented new, 

urgent challenges for the global medicalscientific 

community, and Genomics England 

was in a prime position to help better 

understand who is susceptible to the virus. The 

organisation committed to sequencing the 

genomes of up to 20,000 intensive care 

patients with COVID-19, plus up to 15,000 

people with the virus who are experiencing only 

mild symptoms. In addition, the organisation 

launched a next-generation genomic research 

platform to enable researchers and drug 

developers to access and use genomic data in 

their COVID-19 work. 

Around the same time that Genomics 

England was ramping up participation in 

COVID-19 research, the ActiveScale solution 

platform was acquired by Quantum from 

Western Digital. A Quantum team helped 

facilitate a smooth transition for Genomics 

England. With full confidence in Quantum and 

the ActiveScale system, Genomics England 

moved forward with expanding its object 

storage environment to accommodate COVID- 

19 work. The organisation scaled to more than 

100 PB of capacity. 

Scaling was seamless with RAID (Redundant 

Array of Independent Disks). "What we love 

about the ActiveScale system is that its inherent 

architecture is underpinned by its RAID 

replacement technology, the intelligent, dynamic 

placement of erasure-coded data," says Ardley. 

"That placement of data eliminates the need for 

system rebalancing, which can compromise 

performance and availability." 

PROTECTING VITAL GENOMIC DATA 

ActiveScale object storage protects data and 

provides the data resiliency that Genomics 

SCALABILITY WHILE CONTROLLING 

COST/COMPLEXITY 

With ActiveScale, Genomics England no 

longer faces the capacity limits of its 

previous NAS solution. The organisation has 

been able to expand its object storage to 

support more genomic analysis and even 

take on additional COVID-19 work without 

a major storage overhaul. In the future, 

Genomics England can easily integrate 

ActiveScale object storage with Amazon S3- 

compliant public cloud environments for 

additional protection and scaling flexibility. 

This scalable storage environment is also 

helping to reduce costs. According to 

Nephos, the Genomics England team 

decreased storage costs by 75 percent per 

genome compared with the previous 

environment. The organisation is expected 

to reduce these costs by 96 percent by 

2023. 

Just as importantly, the Genomics England 

team has been able to experience these 

benefits without adding complexity. "We 

love the simplicity, ease of use, and 

architecture of the ActiveScale systems," 

says Ardley. "These systems are truly 

designed to scale seamlessly to exabytescale 

deployments of on-premises and 

hybrid data storage solutions." 

More info: www.quantum.com 


@STMagAndAwards Sept/Oct 2020 


MAGAZINE 

09

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT 

PUTTING DATA FRONT AND CENTRE 

GETTING CLOSER TO THEIR DATA IS VITAL FOR SMB OWNERS IN AN INCREASINGLY DIGITAL 

ECONOMY, ARGUES FLORIAN MALECKI, INTERNATIONAL PRODUCT MARKETING SENIOR DIRECTOR AT 

STORAGECRAFT 

Many company owners have not 

yet grasped the fact that data is 

now the single most valuable 

asset of their business. What these owners 

don't understand is that, in many ways, 

data is the new currency - and that the 

monetisation of information is potentially 

more valuable than their traditional 

products and services. 

Take, for example, casino operator 

Caesars Entertainment. When the 

company filed for bankruptcy several 

years ago, it was not the physical assets 

Caesars owned that were deemed most 

valuable: it was its data - specifically, its 

customer loyalty programme, which was 

assessed to be worth $1 billion. 

Too often, business owners think of data 

as something inextricable with 

technology. This is a mistake, especially 

in today's world. As organisations 

accumulate increasing amounts of data, 

and as this data becomes increasingly 

valuable, it is the companies that 




MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: 

STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT 

"Unfortunately, many SMBs still rely on the same 

outdated data management technologies they used 

decades ago. This will cripple them as they try to make 

progress in the digital era. What SMBs need is a system 

that will manage data effectively, and quickly recover it 

in case of a system outage. Any responsible business 

leader who is focused on the strategic direction of the 

company must get intimately involved in data recovery." 

appreciate the significance of data and 

manage it effectively that will prosper in 

the years ahead. 

THE VALUE OF DATA AND RECOVERY 

One may think companies would realise 

the urgency of managing and monetising 

the data they collect, but most don't. Over 

69% of all business owners are not 

adequately aware of or appropriately 

concerned about the business impact of 

data growth, according to a study by 

Dimensional Research. 

Data accumulation remains a severe 

issue. A typical business now manages 100 

times more data than it did 20 years ago. 

Even SMBs have rapidly gone from 

managing gigabytes of data to petabytes, 

which poses challenges around data 

management and organisation. 

Unfortunately, many SMBs still rely on the 

same outdated data management 

technologies they used decades ago. This 

will cripple them as they try to make 

progress in the digital era. What SMBs need 

is a system that will manage data effectively, 

and quickly recover it in case of a system 

outage. Any responsible business leader 

who is focused on the strategic direction of 

the company must get intimately involved in 

data recovery. 

However, according to that same 

Dimensional Research survey, an 

astounding 64% of business leaders are 

either unaware of or uninterested in data 

recovery. In today's world, that's like saying 

you don't know or care how your business 

makes money, as long as the money is 

there when you want it. It's not a successful 

strategy for building a thriving business in 

the digital era. 

TESTING, TESTING 

Business leaders need to know if their 

business can survive a data outage and 

quickly recover. Regular testing of backup 

systems is critical to provide assurance for 

this. Despite its importance, testing is not 

viewed a priority at many businesses. This is 

a mistake. 

A solid backup plan is critical for business 

continuity, and testing is the only way to 

ensure mission critical data is safe. 

Organisations should make a habit of 

periodically testing backup copies to ensure 

data can be reliably restored. 

As the proliferation of data continues, 

business owners need to take more 

responsibility and have a greater 

awareness of the volume, composition, 

and business value of their data. After all, 

awareness is the first step in using data to 

their advantage, while also keeping it safe 

and secure. 

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE 

Modern storage technology can give 

business owners the ability to understand 

and access their data easily and quickly 

recover it in the event of a system outage. 

What's more, these new storage 

management solutions are cost-effective 

and can be implemented and run by nontechnical 

employees. 

Exploding data volumes, limited storage 

capacity, and the escalating cost of 

downtime are among the most pressing 

challenges faced by SMBs today. Businesses 

can rise to these challenges by getting 

closer to their data and more involved in 

solutions for its management and recovery. 

This will enable them to maximise the value 

of their data and ultimately flourish in the 

digital economy. 

More info: www.storagecraft.com 




MAGAZINE 

11

CASE STUDY: 

CASE STUDY: NTT GLOBAL DATA CENTRES EMEA 

A TESTING GROUND FOR DATA CENTRES 

RAINER W. KAESE OF TOSHIBA ELECTRONICS EUROPE GMBH SHARES THE STORY OF NTT'S 

GROUND-BREAKING TECHNOLOGY EXPERIENCE LABS, WHERE DATA CENTRE MANAGERS AND 

SERVICE PROVIDERS CAN ASSESS AND QUANTIFY REAL-LIFE SOLUTIONS TO DAILY CHALLENGES 

UNDER NON-SYSTEM-CRITICAL CONDITIONS 

As the IT responsible manager of an 

enterprise or service provider, if you 

were to need to support 100 new hires 

per year for the next 5 years, how much more 

capacity and performance would you plan 

for? How would you implement it from the 

starting point of your existing infrastructure? 

It's not a simple and clear calculation, and it 

will certainly need tuning over the period of its 

implementation, but a few numbers and a 

calculator are all that is needed to develop 

some rough low-end and high-end costs. And 

you probably have a broad idea of the 

suppliers you will turn to in order to 

implement it. 

However, what if you were being asked to 

develop the storage concept for an 

automotive supplier's new service? They are 

planning on rolling out a cloud-connected 

autonomous driving solution. They have 

rough estimates for the number of cars per 

year, and the amount of data, but the 

difference between best- and worst-case 

demand would require one of several 

different data centre approaches if the 

whole thing is to be financially viable and 

not over provisioned. 

Now, what happens when you need to test 

your back-of-an-envelope approach? Do you 

have a spare rack, servers, hard drives and 

network capacity to firm up your numbers? 

Probably not. 

While cloud storage solutions seem to be 

popping up everywhere, it is not the solution 

for everyone's challenge and, at large scales, 

is not cheap either. For more sensitive data 

or implementation approaches, it makes 

sense to keep that data somewhere 

physically secure, but this requires space, 

connectivity, and plenty of hardware, so is 

not cheap either. 

Thanks to Global Data Centres EMEA, a 

division of NTT Ltd., testing ideas and 

implementing innovative services are easier 

than ever before. Their Technology Experience 

Labs provide not only space, power and 

protection, but also the freedom to innovate 

with cloud and storage technology together 

with the support of a vibrant community. This 

allows data centre managers and service 

providers to innovate quickly at low cost to 

trial private or hybrid clouds or review 

distributed architectures and measure their 

impact on IT service delivery. All this backed 

up by a community linked by webinars, boot 

camps, meetups and hackathons. 

The main site is based in Frankfurt (Frankfurt 

1) where 65,000 sqm of space is available 

for servers with the building designed 

specifically to be operated as a data centre. 

Fed by two separate substations from two 

separate feeds and protected by two separate 

uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) and 

diesel generator redundant power systems, 

the energy supply is secured. Physical security 

and access control ensure that systems are 

protected from a wide range of potential 

attack approaches, backed-up by 24/7 

monitoring and systems redundancy. 

Connectivity of up to 10 Gbit/s can be 

provided from a carrier-mix of over 350 

suppliers, ranging from local to tier 1. This 

particular campus is also linked by fiber optic 

connection to NTT's data centre in 

Rüsselsheim (Frankfurt 3), enabling multi-site 

implementations. 

To date, a wide range of use cases have 

been trialled ranging from hybrid cloud, 




MAGAZINE



"Determining the optimal approach for a data centre is 

challenging, especially with demands on performance 

and capacity growing continuously but not necessarily 

by known and plannable amounts. Environments such 

as that provided by NTT with its professional physical 

space and community of support, allow room for 

experimentation using systems of significance. In turn, 

real-life solutions to daily challenges can not only be 

assessed but quantified as well under non-system-critical 

conditions." 

storage and big data, through DevOps and 

App Management, to High Performance and 

Cognitive Computing. Even studies into 

hardware approaches, such as the testing of 

water-cooling with waste heat recovery, have 

been undertaken. 

Coming back to the examples highlighted 

earlier, many IT- and data centre managers 

and service providers will be looking to 

continue upscaling, or vertical scaling, their 

existing systems, adding more hardware and 

drives to boost performance and capacity. If 

this seems like the correct solution to the 

challenges faced, then NTT provides an 

environment in which such approaches can 

be evaluated. 

This was demonstrated with a highperformance 

data storage server targeting 

high reliability and performance needs that 

could be used for various iSCSI targets with 

sizes ranging from 10 TB to 40 TB. The 

system, installed in 2017, utilised Supermicro 

X10 Series servers in 2U format, featuring two 

Intel Xeon CPUs and 128 GB RAM. This was 

coupled with a Microsemi ASR8885 

controller, 10 Gbit/s NICs, and a 60-bay dual 

expander toploader JBOD from Celestica. 

The storage was implemented using Toshiba's 

MG04SCA40EA 4 TB enterprise-class HDDs 

with 12 Gbit/s SAS interface, 7,200 rpm 

performance in a 3.5-inch form factor. 

The system was built upon the Open-E 

JovianDSS, a Linux-based data storage 

software using the ZFS file system that can be 

used to architect storage on iSCSI, Fiber 

Channel (FC), NFS, and SMB (CIFS) 

protocols. Thanks to its Linux basis it has a 

high level of hardware compatibility and is 

well suited to virtualised storage environments. 

While providing high data integrity and 

protection using data and metadata checksumming 

and self-healing to detect and 

correct errors, it can also be configured as 

part of an active-active dual-controller cluster. 

The final solution delivered 108 TB of user 

storage with a Zpool capacity efficiency of 

50% using a two-way mirror storage 

redundancy type. The Zpool was laid out in 

30 groups of data/parity disk pairs, providing 

240 TB of gross unformatted capacity, and 

120 TB net. The final usable storage of 108 

TB provided a Zpool read performance rating 

of 12.9x single disk, with Zpool write 

performance attaining 8.5x single disk. Save 

for a single planned shutdown for a software 

update, the system has been operational 

without downtime or disk failure since August 

2017. 

As well as mirror groups, dual and triple 

parity groups are also supported. The triple 

parity approach is recommended with high 

capacity disks of 10 TB or larger. At this 

parity level the malfunction of three disks per 

data group can be tolerated. Additionally, 

the Open-E JovianDSS supports a storage 

self-backup approach with versioning 

possible up to every minute. The backup 

feature creates rotational auto-snapshots of 

a volume according to user-defined 

retention-interval plans, asynchronously 

replicating snapshot deltas to local (on-site) 

or remote (off-site) storage. 

The backup application is very light, which 

explains why it can run 24/7 without any 

significant influence on production. It can be 

used for regular backup/restore purposes or 

for instant disaster recovery. 

Beyond being a scale-up storage proof-ofconcept 

activity, this cluster also serves as the 

virtual storage infrastructure of the Technology 





MAGAZINE 

13



mapped to all physical disks in the system. This 

means that in, for example, a clustered 

hypervisor environment, the concurrent 

transactions of multiple virtual machines (VM) 

can be supported without any noticeable 

performance impact. 

Experience Lab for all other innovators. This 

makes it an excellent platform to prove its 

functional and performance advantages daily 

under realistic operating conditions. 

By adding more HDDs in JBOD enclosures, 

this cluster has the potential to scale-up further 

as storage needs increase. The upper limit of 

this scaling is determined by the available rack 

space, reach via SAS cabling, the number of 

SAS ports on the controller(s) and the compute 

power of the controlling server. Scaling up this 

particular JovianDSS cluster in the Technology 

Experience Lab would probably be possible 

up to the low, single-digit petabyte range but, 

due to the mentioned limitations, not beyond 

this capacity. 

Of course, if your future growth and user base 

is unknown, as in the automotive example 

given, a different approach is required that 

scales as needed and has no real upper limit 

on capacity. This requires horizontal scalability, 

also known as scale-out storage. 

Scale-out storage uses a network-connectivitybased 

approach that allows new nodes to be 

added, almost without limit, to the existing 

clusters as need dictates. Each cluster consists 

of a number of servers, drives and networking, 

with the cluster nodes linked together by highspeed 

networking or backplane. Thanks to this 

approach, there is no need for overprovisioning 

as capacity and performance can 

be added as required. The entire storage 

solution appears to users as a single entity and 

can be administered via a single interface, even 

when parts of the hardware implementation are 

located in other cities or on other continents. 

To ensure that this collection of hardware both 

operates as a single storage entity, and 

provides provision for expansion, failover, and 

robustness, suitable software will also need to 

be selected. NTT's approach is again ideal for 

testing combinations of hardware and software 

to learn how they interact. This could be to 

determine what works best for individual needs, 

such as performing a partial or full system 

recovery after ransomware attack in a realistic 

operational environment. 

One such system utilises PetaSAN, a scaleout 

storage area network (SAN) solution built 

on Ceph. Ceph is a leading open source 

storage platform that aims to offer object-, 

block- and file-level storage using a distributed 

computing cluster. Additionally, it offers 

scalable storage capacity and it replicates the 

data, making it fault-tolerant and both selfhealing 

and self-managing. One of the 

challenges is that it requires a Linux 

administrator to setup and maintain, an issue 

that the open source PetaSAN project aims to 

solve. This wraps the power and complexity of 

Ceph in a 'single pane-of-glass' management 

interface while simultaneously providing access 

to the powerful Linux command line when 

needed. The goal is to provide highly available 

clustered iSCSI disks, with each iSCSI disk 

The platform was built using hardware from 

Starline Computer GmbH, consisting of Areca 

RAID cards in pass-thru mode coupled with 

Cavium's remote direct memory access (RDMA) 

10Gbe Ethernet adapters. The PetaSAN 

implementation provides 220 TB of highly 

available clustered iSCSI disks thanks to 

Toshiba's high-capacity 10 TB enterprise hard 

drives. The resulting multi-path disks could be 

identified by virtual IP addresses and offered 

fast I/O with link redundancy. 

Additionally, this system provides the virtual 

storage resources for the Technology 

Experience Labs, especially for proof-ofconcept 

activities where its scale-out features 

are required. 

Of course, the final intent may not be to 

operate and maintain the hardware for a 

storage solution, or the implementation may 

need to make use of a mix of own hardware 

and cloud resources. For such situations, the 

use of Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) 

may be an option to consider. Thanks to the 

work of Starline, this test platform integrates 

an S3 gateway via the command line that 

should acquire GUI configuration support in 

the future. 

Determining the optimal approach for a 

data centre is challenging, especially with 

demands on performance and capacity 

growing continuously but not necessarily by 

known and plannable amounts. Environments 

such as that provided by NTT with its 

professional physical space and community of 

support, allow room for experimentation using 

systems of significance. In turn, real-life 

solutions to daily challenges can not only be 

assessed but quantified as well under nonsystem-critical 

conditions. 

More info: www.toshiba-storage.com 




MAGAZINE

SPECIALIST STORAGE RESELLER OF THE YEAR 

2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 

Specialist Storage Reseller of the Year - Epaton 

One to Watch - Epaton 

Contribution to the Storage Industry - Phil Dick 

Channel Excellence Award - Jonathan Lassman 

Virtual Event of the Year - SecureCon 

VOTE NOW 

GET IN TOUCH FOR YOUR FREE CONSULTATION 

Specialists in Next Generation storage, backup, HCI and hybrid cloud, 

we help to manage and secure our customers critical information 

whilst saving them millions of pounds every year! 

We can do the same for you and help you 

DO MORE, FOR LESS. BETTER. 

sales@epaton.co.uk | 03333 111 001 

Your data, our business 

epaton.co.uk

EVENT: E STORAGE A WARDSTORAGE 2020 

AWARDS 

THE SHOW MUST GO ON - ONE WAY OR ANOTHER! 

DESPITE THE UPHEAVALS CAUSED BY COVID-19 WE HAVE DONE OUR BEST TO MAKE SURE THAT THIS 

YEAR'S STORAGE AWARDS WILL STILL TAKE PLACE: FULL DETAILS OF ALL THE FINALISTS AND HOW TO 

VOTE ARE ON THE FOLLOWING PAGES 

We want to thank you, our readers 

across the industry and around the 

world, for bearing with us during 

these uncertain times. Unfortunately 

COVID-19 has decided our fate and, sadly, 

we will not be able to hold a full awards 

ceremony this year as we would have liked - 

and the party will have to wait until we are 

in safer times. This won't, however, prevent 

us recognising the fantastic industry that we 

work in; we will just have to do it a little 

differently. Behind the scenes, we are 

working on the exact format for the 'event' 

and we hope to be able to announce more 

details very soon. 

cast your votes and make your voice heard. 

 

We are still offering a selection of 

This year's winners will now be announced 

on Thursday 26th November 2020, stay 

tuned for the links and announcements on 

the Storage Awards website (see below) and 

social media. The full list of finalists is now 

available, and you can see on the following 

pages - correct at time of publication - who 

has made it through to the public voting 

stage of the process - so now is the time to 

marketing opportunities for our virtual 

awards ceremony as below, to be sold on a 

first come first served basis. 

 

SPONSORSHIP PACKAGES 

Headline Sponsor marketing package - 

£4000 (normally £6000) - includes: 

Company branding as a headline 

 

sponsor on the Storage Awards website 

up until our next awards 

Company branding on all VT screenings 

for the virtual winner's announcements 

1 x full page advertisement in Storage 

Magazine 

1 x eBlast 

6-month web banner on the Storage 

Magazine website 

Exclusive voting link for sponsors who are 

finalists 

Category Sponsor marketing package - 

£2450 (normally £3950) - includes: 

Company branding as category sponsor 

on the Storage Awards website up until 

our next awards 

Company branding on the VT screen of 

your chosen sponsored category 

¼ page advertisement in the 

November/December issue of Storage 

Magazine 

1 x eBlast 

6-month web banner on the Storage 

Magazine website 

Exclusive voting link for sponsors who are 

finalists 

Don't forget, voting is open right now, so 

head to the website below to let us know who 

you feel should be this year's winners! 

www.storage-awards.com 




MAGAZINE

EVENT: STORAGE E VENT: AWARDS 

STORAGE A 2020 

STORAGE AWARDS 2020 FINALISTS 

STORAGE INNOVATION OF THE YEAR 

Altaro 

Endpoint Backup for MSP 

Arcserve 

9000 Appliance Series 

Datadobi 

DobiMigrate 

DataCore 

vFilO 

Data Dynamics 

StorageX 

Dell EMC 

Powerstore 

HPE 

Primera 

Insurgo Media 

Investigo 

Nexsan Unity 3300 

Pure Storage 

FlashArray//X 

Quest 

QoreStor 

Spectra Logic 

StorCycle 

StorageCraft 

Onexafe Solo 

StorPool 

Storpool SDS 

Unitrends 

Recovery Series Appliance 

Western Digital 

Ultrastar 18/20TB HDDS 

ONE TO WATCH - COMPANY 

Boston 

CDS 

Cloudian 

Epaton 

Excelero 

Igneous 

Infortrend 

Insurgo 

Kasten 

Komprise 

Lacie Storage 

MinIO 

Nebulon 

NGS 

Ortial Technologies 

Portworx 

Preservica 

Quest 

Scale Computing 

Scality 

SoftIron 

Spinnakar 

Titan Data Solutions 

Ultra Support 

Unitrends 

Vast Data 

WekaIO 

VIRTUAL EVENT OF THE YEAR 

DataCore 

On Demand 

Epaton/NGS 

Exertis Enterprise 

Infortrend/CMS/Toshiba 

Komprise 

Rubrik 

Q Associates/Rubrik 

Quantum/Veeam 

Veeam 

SecureCon 

Stay home, stay connected 

Better Together 

TechKrunch 

Virtual Camp Rubrik 

Don't backup go forward 

Virtual IQ 

VeeamON Virtual 

STORAGE MARKETING TEAM OF THE YEAR 

Accelstor 

Arcserve 

Boston 

CMS Distribution 

DataCore 

Exertis Hammer 

Infortrend 

Insurgo Services 

Lacie Storage 

Origin Storage 

Ortial Technologies 

Park Place Technologies 


Seagate 

StorageCraft 

Zerto 

CONTRIBUTION TO THE STORAGE INDUSTRY 

Altaro 

Colin Wright 

Arcserve 

Mick Bradley 

Barracuda 

Chris Ross 

Barracuda 

Phil Maynard 

CDS 

Ian Burton 

Cloudian 

Neil Stobart 

Commvault 

Nigel Tozer 

Curvature 

Christo Conidaris 

Ethos Technology 

Adam Worthington 

Epaton 

Phil Dick 

ExaGrid 

Graham Woods 

Exertis Enterprise 

Simon Regan 

HPE 

Angus Reid 

Huawei Enterprise 

Michael Rae 

Nexstor 

Rob Townsend 

Spectra Logic 

Craig Bungay 

Titan Data Solutions Ben Jackson 

CHANNEL EXCELLENCE AWARD 

Arcserve 

Richard Massey 

Arrow ECS 

Billy Bond 




MAGAZINE 

17

EVENT: E STORAGE A WARDSTORAGE 2019 

AWARDS 

Cohesity Martin Gibbons 

Commvault Bobby Dhaliwal 

Datacore John Lucey 

Epaton 

Jonathan Lassman 

Exertis Enterprise Jonnie Ray 

HPE 

Marcus Thompson 

Quantum Richard Martin 

Seagate David Thompson 

Spinnakar Gerard Brophy 

Titan Data Solutions David Treadwell 

Unitrends Paul Hollow 

RANSOMWARE PROTECTION 

COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Acronis 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Commvault 

Dell EMC 

Nexsan - a StorCentric Company 

Overland Tandberg 

Quantum 

Rubrik 

StorageCraft 

Unitrends 

Veeam 

Veritas 

Zerto 

SMB DATA PROTECTION COMPANY OF 

THE YEAR 

Acronis 

Archiware 

Asigra 

Bacula 

Barracuda 

Carbonite 

Datto 

Macrium Software 

Nakivo 

Novastor 

Retrospect - A StorCentric Company 

StorageCraft 

Vembu 

ENTERPRISE DATA PROTECTION 


Actifio 

Arcserve 

Atempo 

Barracuda 

Catalogic 

Cobalt Iron 

Commvault 

DataCore 

Datrium 

Quest 

Rubrik 

Unitrends 

Veeam 

Veritas 


Zerto 

ENTERPRISE BACKUP HARDWARE 


Arcserve 

Cohesity 

Dell Technologies 

Exagrid 

HPE 

Infortrend 

Lacie 

Qualstar 

Quantum 

Rubrik 

StorageCraft 

Synology 

Unitrends 

STORAGE INNOVATORS OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Boston 

Cirrus Data 

Cloudian 

DataCore 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

IBM 

Igneous 

Komprise 

MayaData 

Nebulon 

Pure Storage 

Seagate 

SoftIron 

Spectra Logic 

StorMagic 

Vast Data 

Veeam 

WekaIO 


DATA MANAGEMENT VENDOR OF THE 

YEAR 

IBM 

Igneous 

Komprise 

Leonovus 

NetApp 


Solarwinds 

StorCycle from Spectra Logic 

Veeam 

Virtana 

Virtual Instruments 

OBJECT STORAGE VENDOR OF THE 

YEAR 

Caringo 

Cloudian 

HPE 

IBM 

MayaData 

NetApp 

Nexenta 

Object Matrix 

OpenIO 

Quantum 

Scality 

SoftIron 

Spectra Logic 

StorageCraft 

HYPER-CONVERGENCE VENDOR OF 

THE YEAR 

Boston 

Commvault 

dataON 

DataCore 

ExaGrid 

Fujitsu 

HPE 

IBM 

NetApp 

Nutanix 

Pivot 3 


SoftIron 

StarWind 





MAGAZINE

EVENT: STORAGE E VENT: AWARDS 

STORAGE A 2019 

HYBRID STORAGE VENDOR OF THE 

YEAR 

Boston 

Dell EMC 

Fujitsu 

HPE 

Hitachi Vantara 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Infortrend 

Nexsan- a StorCentric Company 

Netapp 

Qsan 

Quantum 

Seagate 

SoftIron 


"AS A SERVICE" PLATFORM OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve Cloud 

Asigra 

Barracuda 

Clumio 

Cobalt Iron 

Docker 

Druva 

Egnyte 

Infrascale 

NexProtect from Nexstor 

Nexstor 

StorageCraft 

Unitrends 

Zadara 

FLASH/SSD STORAGE VENDOR OF THE 

YEAR 

Accelstor 

Boston 

Dell EMC 

DDN 

Hitachi Vantara 

HPE 

Huawei 

IBM 

Infortrend 

NetApp 

Nimbus Data 

Ortial 

Pavilion Data Systems 

Pure Storage 

QSAN 

SoftIron 

Toshiba 

Vast Data 

Vexata - a StorCentric Company 

Violin Systems 

WekaIO 


CLOUD ENABLER OF THE YEAR 

AWS 

Aparavi 

Barracuda 

Clumio 

Cloudian 

Druva 

Hycu 

IBM 

Infortrend 

Kasten 

MinIO 

Panzura 

Quest 

Qumulo 

Reduxio 

Rubrik 

StorMagic 

Veeam 

Veritas 

SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE 

VENDOR OF THE YEAR 

Cloudian 

DataCore 

Datera 

Falconstor 

HPE 

IBM 

MayaData 

Nasuni 

Open-e 

OSNexus 

RAIDIX 

StarWind 

StoneFly 

StorMagic 

StorONE 

StorPool 

Syneto 

Veeam 

Veritas 

STORAGE PERFORMANCE 

OPTIMISATION COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Agile Storage 

Apeiron 

ATTO 

Bridgeworks 

Broadcom 

Data Dynamics 

Excelero 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

Huawei 

IBM 

InfiniteIO 

Intel 

Marvell 

Memblaze 

Nebulon 

Pure Storage 

Quantum 

Quest 

Silk 

Spectra Logic 

Stellus Technologies 


CAPACITY STORAGE VENDOR OF THE 

YEAR 

Boston 

FujiFilm 

HPE 

Huawei 

IBM 

Infortrend 

Lenovo 

NEC 

Nexsan - A StorCentric Company 

Overland Tandberg 

Qnap 

Qsan 

Sans Digital 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

StorageCraft 

Synology 

Toshiba 


CHANNEL PARTNER PROGRAM OF THE 

YEAR 

Arcserve Accelerate 

www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Sept/Oct 2020 


MAGAZINE 

19

EVENT: E STORAGE A WARDSTORAGE 2019 

AWARDS 

Barracuda 

Commvault 

IBM 

NetApp 

Nutanix 

Pure Storage 

Quantum 

Rubrik 

Seagate 

SpectraLogic 

StorMagic 

Veeam 

Channel Pro 

Partner Advantage 

Partner World 

Partner Connect 

Partner Network 

P3 Partner Program 

Alliance 

Velocity 

Insider 

Edge 

Channel Program 

ProPartner 

THIRD PARTY MAINTENANCE COMPANY 

OF THE YEAR 

Blue Chip 

CCE 

CDS 

Curvature 

Daisy Group 

ICC 


Procurri 

Q Associates 

StorTrec 

Ultra Support 

SECURITY STORAGE RESELLER OF THE 

YEAR 

Altinet 

Dacoll 

Data Systems 

NGS 

Esteem 

Logicalis 

MTI 

Qual 

SPECIALIST STORAGE RESELLER OF THE 

YEAR 

Cognitive 

Cristie Data 

Epaton 

MTI 

NAS 

Nexstor 

Proact 

Q Associates 

Qual 

Vesper Technologies 

Virtual Effect 

VSPL (Vector & Scalar Products Ltd) 

CORPORATE STORAGE RESELLER OF 

THE YEAR 

Capita 

CDW 

Computacenter 

Insight 

MTI 

Proact 

Q Associates 

SCC 

Softcat 

Trustco 

STORAGE DISTRIBUTOR OF THE YEAR 

Arrow ECS 

Cloud Distribution 

CMS Distribution 

Ethos Technology 

Exertis Enterprise (formerly Hammer) 

Global Distribution 

Origin Storage 

Spinnakar 

Tech Data 

Titan Data Solutions 

Westcoast 

CLOUD PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

Altaro 

VM Backup Cloud 

Management Console 

Barracuda Networks Barracuda Backup 

Cloudian Hyperstore 

Datastax DSE 

IBM 

Cloud Backup 

Infortrend EonStor GS Gen2 

SUSE Enterprise Storage 5.5 

Veritas 

CloudPoint 

VMWare vCloud Suite 

WekaIO WekaFS 

STORAGE PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve UDP 

Barracuda Networks Barracuda Backup 

Cloudian HyperStore 

DataCore SANSymphony-V 

ExaGrid 

EX Series 

HPE StoreOnce 5500 

Huawei 

Infortrend 

Lacie Storage 

Pure Storage 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

WekaIO 


OceanStor Dorado V6 

EonStor CS 

Thunderbolt Series 

FlashBlade 

EXOS X 5U84 

ArticBlue 

WekaFS 

20TB Ultrastar HDD 

CLOUD COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Actifio 

AWS 

Caringo 

Cloudian 

Egnyte 

IBM 

NetApp 

Panzura 

Oracle 

Qumulo 

Rubrik 

Scality 

Veeam 

Veritas 

Zadara 

STORAGE COMPANY OF THE YEAR 

Arcserve 

Barracuda 

Cloudian 

DataCore 

DDN 

Dell Technologies 

ExaGrid 

HPE 

IBM 

Infinidat 

Infortrend 

Komprise 

NetApp 

Pure Storage 

Seagate 

Spectra Logic 

Veeam 





MAGAZINE


CASE STUDY: IRISH PRISON SERVICE 

SAFE AND SOUND 

PAUL SPECIALE, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER AT SCALITY, 

EXPLAINS HOW THE IRISH PRISON SERVICE IS LOCKING 

DOWN PRISON SAFETY WITH 5,000 CAMERAS AND MULTI 

PETABYTES OF STORAGE 

Prison video surveillance cameras are 

essential for keeping an eye on the 

watched and the watchers. However, 

capturing, storing and retrieving that 

video camera data is much more 

complicated than training a lens on a few 

dark corners. 

What does such a solution look like? 

The Irish Prison Service (IPS) recently 

upgraded its video surveillance system in 

12 countrywide prison facilities to 5,000 

cameras continuously recording the 

movement and actions of everyone on the 

inside. And for compliance with privacy 

laws, that footage has to stick around at 

least four years and a day - that's two 

blue moons or a leap year cycle - or until 

any incidents are resolved. 

"Video data has a huge impact on the 

safety and security of our staff and 

prisoners. People's lives are at stake in 

extreme cases," says George Jackson, the 

recently retired head of information and 

communication technology at IPS. 

"Therefore, it's hugely important that there 

are safeguards around how the data is 

stored and secured." 

In spite of historically low incarceration 

rates, close to countries like Norway and 

Sweden, the upgrade from the 2008 

surveillance setup comes as the IPS 

population grew about 10 percent over 

the previous year. 

The old system wasn't able to ensure data 

security. It lacked the visibility and a 

technical process for securely and 

systematically deleting video and, as a 

result, footage on the traditional storage 

array had never been deleted. Storage 

capacity was also running short. 

Additionally, IPS had recently upgraded 

surveillance infrastructure with new highdefinition 

cameras, generating larger video 

files and even higher storage demands. 

Enter data storage from HPE, Scality and 

CTERA. In this joint solution, HPE provides 

local storage using CTERA running on 

HPE servers to capture video 24/7 at 

each prison facility. Long-term offsite 

storage relies on HPE systems and Scality 

RING to securely retain video of incidents. 

HPE servers at each facility provide five 

terabytes of local storage to handle all the 

video captured locally. 

Two Scality RING storage clouds provide 

300 terabytes of usable, secure storage 

that scales to multiple petabytes if 

needed. RING also automates replication 

between the two environments, protecting 

the data by having a complete copy of 

the archive always available in the event 

of a disaster. 

Scality software provides intelligent data 

management throughout the lifecycle of 

the stored video, including secure and 

automated deletion. Moreover, to be 

certain the deletion process is carried out 

with full transparency, a series of email 

alerts will advise relevant parties in 

advance of deletion, beginning at the 

three-year mark and progressing with 

more frequent notices up to the day 

before scheduled deletion. 

"Prisons can be difficult environments, so 

any technology we use must work," says 

Jackson. "If there is an incident, it's highly 

important that the solution works and is 

reliable. We trust the Scality and HPE 

solution to safeguard this critical video 

storage data." 

More info: www.scality.com 




MAGAZINE 

21

INTERVIEW: VIRTUAL EFFECT 

BROUGHT TO BOOK 

STORAGE MAGAZINE EDITOR DAVID TYLER CAUGHT UP RECENTLY 

WITH JOHN GREENWOOD - A PAST WINNER OF BOTH THE 

"CONTRIBUTION TO THE INDUSTRY" AND "CHANNEL EXCELLENCE" 

STORAGE AWARDS - ABOUT HIS NEW ROLE AT VIRTUAL EFFECT, 

LOCKDOWN AND HIS NEW POCKET-SIZED BOOK "AN A TO Z OF 

DATA STORAGE" 

David Tyler: Let's start with some 

background on Virtual Effect, and 

how you came to be there. 

John Greenwood: The opportunity arose to 

join a dynamic and agile business - Virtual 

Effect are growing their UK customer base 

and have a specific focus on storage. As 

Chief Strategy Officer I have the ability to 

identify and recruit emerging and disruptive 

vendors that replicate the ambition of the 

company. Coupled with some of the more 

established and proven names, our 

portfolio provides a blend of storage 

startups and more mature players. It is an 

exciting role and, with the many contacts 

and relationships that I have been lucky 

enough to develop during my time in the 

storage industry, provides the perfect 

platform to build upon. 

DT: Has the outbreak of a global 

pandemic affected the company's plans? 

JG: You could say that Virtual Effect were 

somewhat ahead of the game as the 

company has a "Work from Home" culture 

at its core. Subsequently the team already 

had the infrastructure and systems in place, 

along with a cultural discipline, that 

allowed things to be "business as usual" 

when lockdown came. We have seen the 

role of many of our customers change, with 

their focus moving to service and 

application delivery and support. Our 

supply chain has also, thankfully, been 

largely unaffected. Personally, I think we 

are a fairly resilient, flexible and adaptable 

industry and this scenario has been 

testimony to that. 

DT: And how have you made good use of 

your time during lockdown? 

JG: In some ways I feel a little accountable 

for lockdown - when asked if I would be 

putting together a Storage Guide, having 

previously written fifteen of them, I quipped 

"Not unless someone is prepared to shut 

me away, undisturbed, in a room for 10 

weeks". Subsequently, when lockdown 

came, I really didn't have any excuse and 

the writing of Virtual Effect's "An A to Z of 

Data Storage" commenced. 

Working in the industry helps enormously 

of course, as we have constant access to 

information and visibility of what is coming. 

The challenge with this book is that the 

storage landscape is such a fast-moving 

one and nothing stands still. The secret is 

to try not to get too far into specifics, the 

book is supposed to be a high-level guide 

to the industry rather than to provide 

definitive specifications. 

DT: Tell us more about it - and of course 

how Storage magazine readers can get 

hold of a copy. 

JG: Perhaps most importantly I should 

stress that the book is only available as a 

printed book. A recent study showed that 

readers of printed books absorb and 

remember more than readers of e-books, 

which (at this point in time) is why we have 

chosen to adopt this approach. The book 

has been written for end-users, specifically 

(as I term them) 'the Custodians of Data'. 

Within the 100 pages are over 140 

storage vendors, a goat and a reference to 

the eighties band behind the hit 

'Sometimes' - so it's not all serious techie 

stuff. I have tried to put an occasional 

smile onto the face of the reader. To get a 

copy, send an email to 

storagebook@virtualeffect.co.uk and this 

will trigger a reply that will ask you for a 

little more information. Upon receipt of 

that, we will then send you (on the basis 

you are an end-user) a copy of the book 

for free. 

More info: www.virtualeffect.co.uk 




MAGAZINE

Security Storage Reseller of the Year - NGS 

One to Watch - NGS 

Virtual Event of the Year - SecureCon 

VOTE NOW 

Are you Cyber Essentials Certified? 

Whether you need to get started on your journey to simple, effective 

cyber defense, re-certify or take it to the next level, NGS can help. 

Visit ngsuk.com/cyberessentials to find out more. 

DO MORE, FOR LESS. BETTER 

ngsuk.com

RESEARCH: SMBS SMBS 

SMBS TURN TO DATA TO ASSIST WITH 

POST-COVID PLANS 

THE WORLD'S SMBS ARE TURNING TO DATA AS THEY LOOK TO STEER A COURSE TO COVID RECOVERY, 

ACCORDING TO NEW SEAGATE RESEARCH WHICH SPOKE TO 3,000 SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZED BUSINESS 

DECISION-MAKERS GLOBALLY 

Seagate Technology has shared the 

results of a global survey of 3,000 small 

and medium sized business (SMB) 

decision-makers. The survey reveals that 

despite economic headwinds, existing SMB IT 

infrastructure for many SMBs has shown 

resilience, and a majority of SMBs believe 

business data will play an important role in 

their long-term recovery plans. 

The research was commissioned by Seagate 

and carried out by FleishmanHillard's TRUE 

Global Intelligence and online market 

research firm Dynata. Results are based on 

an 11-question online survey fielded among 

3,000 small business decision makers across 

six countries (UK, USA, Germany, China, 

South Korea, Taiwan), fielded between 21 

May and 4 June 2020. Respondents included 

decision makers from small and medium 

sized businesses (2-249 employees) across a 

range of industries, and survey questions 

covered topics including current data storage 

systems, impacts of COVID-19 and home 

working, and perceived value of different 

business data types. 

EXISTING IT INFRASTRUCTURE 

SHOWS RESILIENCE 

Despite the rapid and unexpected shift to 

remote working during the COVID-19 

pandemic, existing SMB IT infrastructure 

proved resilient, according to the Seagate 

research. More than half (54%) of SMB 

decision-makers reported no difficulty in 

accessing files or company data remotely, 

and 61% reported similar productivity levels 

to when their employees are in the office. 

Almost half (45%) of SMB decision-makers 

reported their company's existing data 

infrastructure was more resilient than 

expected during the pandemic. All SMBs 

included in the study have fewer than 250 

employees (see above), and the majority 

have fewer than 50. 

During a time of acute crisis for many SMBs, 

many are taking the importance of robust IT 

infrastructure more seriously in their long-term 

planning. 50% of decision-makers surveyed 

said that they planned to invest in data 

backup and recovery services in the future, 

while 51% said that data technology could 

play a role in long-term business growth. 

DATA-DRIVEN COVID-19 

RECOVERY STRATEGIES 

As SMBs look to the future, decision-makers 

are developing their recovery strategy. With 

36% of SMB decision makers expecting their 

staff to work from home more often after 

COVID-19, increased appreciation of how 

data can help businesses recover and thrive 

will be essential. 

Nearly two thirds (65%) of SMB decisionmakers 

say that their post-COVID-19 

recovery strategy is being informed by the 

data they have stored about their business. 




MAGAZINE

RESEARCH: RESEARCH: SMBS 

"Small and medium sized businesses are a key growth engine of the global 

economy, and our research suggests that many are realising the potential value 

that data can deliver for their business as they look ahead at the road to recovery. 

As businesses of all shapes and sizes become increasingly dependent on 

technology, realising the true value of the data those businesses have stored will 

become critical to unlocking future growth and innovation opportunities." 

The pandemic has sparked a reassessment 

of the value of business data among SMB 

decision-makers: more than half (55%) say 

they recognise the value of their business 

data more than before the pandemic. 

There is a wide variety of business data 

available to SMBs, and decision-makers 

regard some of that data as much more 

important to their business' recovery 

strategy. Globally, SMB decision-makers 

ranked data around customer acquisition 

(59%) and customer retention (57%) as the 

most valuable data to their business, with 

employee productivity metrics coming in 

third place (52%). 

UK POORLY PREPARED FOR 

LONG TERM? 

According to the research, UK SMBs were 

better prepared than the global average for 

the rapid shift to remote working during the 

onset of COVID-19, however they are less 

prepared for long-term recovery. 

Only 17% of UK SMB decision-makers 

reported their business had no 

centralised data storage systems in 

place, lower than the global average 

(21%), and perhaps as a result fewer 

UK SMB decision-makers reported their 

staff having difficulties in accessing files 

remotely (38% vs. 46% global average). 

37% of UK SMB decision-makers say 

their team has been less productive 

while working from home. This is in line 

with the global average of 39%. 

Chinese SMBs' productivity suffered 

more during COVID-19, with 50% 

reporting lowered productivity, while 

German SMBs were less impacted, with 

only 22% reporting lowered 

productivity. 

UK SMB decision-makers are the most 

likely among all countries surveyed to 

anticipate long-term remote working 

(42% expect their employees to work 

from home more often in future than 

they did pre-COVID-19, vs. 36% 

global average). However, despite this 

anticipation of long-term change, only 

53% of UK SMB decision-makers 

reported using data to help inform 

their business recovery strategy, lower 

than the global average of 65% and 

China (83%). 

"Small and medium sized businesses are a 

key growth engine of the global economy, 

and our research suggests that many are 

realising the potential value that data can 

deliver for their business as they look ahead 

at the road to recovery," said Jeff 

Fochtman, senior vice president of 

marketing and business at Seagate 

Technology. "As businesses of all shapes 

and sizes become increasingly dependent 

on technology, realising the true value of 

the data those businesses have stored will 

become critical to unlocking future growth 

and innovation opportunities." 

More info: www.seagate.com 




MAGAZINE 

25

MANAGEMENT: CLOUD SECURITY 

HOW SECURE IS YOUR CLOUD-BASED DATA? 

A SPIKE IN CLOUD CYBER-ATTACKS SHOWS THAT BUSINESSES WERE NOT ADEQUATELY PREPARED FOR THE 

GROWTH IN WORKING FROM HOME BROUGHT ABOUT BY COVID-19, EXPLAINS RYAN TROST, CTO AND 

CO-FOUNDER OF THREATQUOTIENT 

in the Verizon's 2020 Data Breach 

Investigation Report, shows that businesses 

did not implement best-practice cybersecurity 

measures before we all set up our 

home offices and started working 

completely from home. 

As more and more remote employees 

place vital data into the cloud, this creates 

more entry points that are vulnerable and 

open for cyber attackers to exploit. Recent 

research from Palo Alto Networks found 

over 1,700 malicious coronavirus-themed 

domains are created every day. Despite a 

minority residing in public clouds, they are 

more likely to be missed by less-complex 

firewalls. Between the anonymity that 

cloud technology provides cyber-criminals, 

and how easy it is for cloud administrators 

to misconfigure cloud settings; it is no 

surprise adversaries seek it out. 

Businesses continue to place more 

and more data in the cloud, from 

personal details to intellectual 

property. The growing adoption of cloudbased 

solutions by businesses, whether 

for greater agility, data analytics or to 

support employees in accessing the data, 

for example when they were remotely or 

from home, also increases the risk of 

cloud attacks. 

In December, I released a series of 

predictions for 2020, one being the 

likelihood of a significant rise in cloud 

attacks in 2020. Little did we know back 

then that the outbreak of COVID-19 

would occur, creating the perfect storm for 

cyber-attackers to take advantage of an 

incredibly disruptive period, with 

businesses being forced to adopt solutions 

at a rapid pace, potentially skipping usual 

protocols, and likely employee use of 

'shadow IT' solutions. 

The spike in cloud cyber-attacks this year, 

with the term "cloud" appearing 29 times 

One of the greatest threats to cloud 

providers is nation-state actors. When they 

discover a particular enclave where 

confidential data is hosted, such as an 

enterprises' intellectual property, they could 

use a zero-day attack to escape 

containment and deploy a persistent threat 

to continue their lateral movements 

throughout the cloud provider. Or perhaps 

more simply, a determined engineer of 

your organisation could dump sensitive 

data into an external drive - either way, 

there are too many variables and 

unknowns for security engineers to 

respond to effectively and expediently. 

If your business is considering moving its 

data into the cloud, it isn't a decision that 

should be made too quickly. Due diligence 

must be performed by IT professionals, 

CIOs and CISOs of enterprises and 




MAGAZINE

MANAGEMENT: CLOUD SECURITY 

"Before you make a decision, evaluate all the risks 

associated with handing over your data to a third 

party for hosting. Do they have the required security 

protocols? Are they willing to answer questions about 

their security practices? If the provider has been 

breached previously, this could be a red flag, but 

don't be quick to discredit them. Look into how they 

responded to the breach, not only internally but how 

they supported their customers." 

governments, and even general cloud 

users before selecting a cloud provider. 

RISK EVALUATION 

Placing your data into the hands of a 

cloud provider means you trust that 

vendor with your business' data and 

reputation. Before you make a decision, 

evaluate all the risks associated with 

handing over your data to a third party for 

hosting. Do they have the required security 

protocols? Are they willing to answer 

questions about their security practices? If 

the provider has been breached 

previously, this could be a red flag, but 

don't be quick to discredit them. Look into 

how they responded to the breach, not 

only internally but how they supported 

their customers. 

PREPAREDNESS 

Find out about the cloud provider's stacks, 

specifically if they can service your needs 

and what level of control and visibility you 

may retain. Does the cloud provider 

maintain all hosting responsibilities or is it 

a joint effort? Is their technology 

immediately updated or does it 'slow roll' 

updates in order to let the community find 

unintended vulnerabilities? Does the 

provider perform annual due diligence 

checks to ensure their existing technology 

stack has not become stale with lagging 

technology? 

The biggest players in the cloud space 

like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have 

the best security teams and tools 

available, but this doesn't mean your 

organisation doesn't still play a major role 

in the security of your data. Learn about 

the provider's shared responsibility model 

to understand what responsibilities are 

shared between vendors and users to 

avoid basic security malpractices that can 

leave your business exposed. 

GOVERNANCE POLICIES 

It is important to be aware of the 

governance protocols or policies the cloud 

provider has put in place. Look for 

vendors that are transparent about their 

data centre locations, especially if you 

have specific data requirements and 

regulatory obligations. Your data will be 

subject to the subsequent laws of the 

location it is stored in. That being said, the 

host provider must also be knowledgeable 

about other governing regulations 

especially as it pertains to your data. 

For example, if you have data that must 

conform to GDPR policies but the data 

centre is located across the globe, the 

cloud provider must be able to abide by 

GDPR laws. Review the provisions in the 

company's Service Level Agreement (SLA) 

that addresses the protocols for handling 

potential data losses, compensation, or 

data migration. 

DATA MIGRATION & EDUCATION 

Migrating data is a slow process that 

requires time and bandwidth, affecting 

your business' ability to operate at its 

optimal level. Find out how long this 

process will take to minimise downtime 

and reduce this time by only migrating 

data sources that are required. 

Invest time and money to get employees 

up to speed on how to transition to the 

new cloud environment. This will not only 

ensure they are clear on security protocols 

but it can minimise the chance of breaches 

as a result of human error. According to 

the Office of the Australian Information 

Commissioner, almost a third (32%) of 

breaches between July and December 

2019 were a result of human error. 

More info: www.threatq.com 




MAGAZINE 

27

TECHNOLOGY: SCALE-OUT NAS 

SCALE-OUT WITH CONFIDENCE 

FRANK LEE, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT PLANNING AT INFORTREND, DESCRIBES HOW THE 

COMPANY'S LATEST SCALE-OUT NAS OFFERINGS CAN HELP ANY ORGANISATION TO GROW WITHOUT 

INCURRING UNNECESSARY COST 

Data growth never stops. It impacts 

all companies around the world 

and shapes new requirements for 

business operation. IDC forecasts that 'the 

Global Datasphere' will grow from around 

50 Zettabytes in 2020 to 175 Zettabytes 

by 2025. To deal with such tremendous 

quantities of data, enterprises will need to 

modernise their IT infrastructure to a 

future-proof, scalable and cost-effective 

solution. 

INTRODUCING EONSTOR CS 

Infortrend thoroughly researched the 

global data growth trends before entering 

the scale-out NAS market. What we found 

was that, compared to structured data, 

unstructured data has the highest growth 

rate imposing unbearable management 

burdens on legacy IT. Customers' 

feedback also revealed challenges of 

ever-increasing unstructured data volumes 

and issues with storage silos 

management. Our EonStor CS scale-out 

NAS (CS) has been designed to address 

these issues with its scalable capacity and 

linear-increasing performance. CS can 

keep up as the business grows, making it 

the optimal data storage and 

management solution. 

WHERE DOES IT SIT? 

EonStor CS is suitable for a wide range of 

data-intensive industries, such as Media 

and Entertainment (M&E), High- 

Performance Computing (HPC), general IT, 

Surveillance, and Backup/Recovery. It is 

ideally positioned to meet projects across 

key health care and public sector settings 

and we continue our drive with key public 

sector procurement groups. 

For M&E and HPC latency-sensitive 

applications, CS 3000/4000 with 

scalability through a scale-out expansion 

offers an easy way of managing growing 

assets while reducing performance 

bottlenecks. Post-production studios with 

more than 10 workstations and growing 

business can use CS as a shared media 

storage to get the highest and the most 

stable performance for their NLE workflow 

performed on 4K/8K ultra high-resolution 

videos via Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci 

Resolve, or Apple Final Cut Pro. 

As for HPC and real-time data analysis, 

CS delivers maximum system efficiency with 

hybrid HDD/SSD cluster configuration for 

flexible data allocation in high-capacity and 

high-performance pools. 

Enterprises can deploy CS' 2000 model as 

an archiving solution for large-scale 

surveillance projects with 1000+ 3MPresolution 

IP-cameras and requirement of at 

least 90 days video retention period. To get 

the complete surveillance solution, CS can be 

integrated with major VMS providers, such as 

Milestone, Genetic, and Digifort. For general 

IT, CS can serve as a centralised storage for 

backup of employee's personal work files and 

office file sharing. As a Veeam Ready 

Repository, CS can be as well deployed in IT 

environments applying virtualisation 

technologies. 

WHY CHOOSE EONSTOR CS? 

A huge advantage of EonStor CS is that it 

offers both high performance and capacity by 

supporting online scale-out and scale-up 

expansion: overall, CS systems can be 

expanded to increase up to more than 

100GBps cluster performance and 100PB 

capacity. For mission-critical applications, CS 

can individually scale performance and/or 

capacity without requiring service downtime. 

Another important benefit is lowered 

management overhead. By unifying multiple 

nodes to form a single namespace system, 

users can access the system via standard 

protocol. With symmetric file system 

architecture, where all nodes understand the 

disk structures, there is no need for standalone 

metadata servers or client-side 

software, and this effectively reduces data 

management hassles and costs. 

Infortrend cares about data protection so 

that users can rest assured their data is safely 

stored/operated and applications have no 

single point of failure. To simultaneously 

satisfy the demands of system growth for 

various applications and provide data 




MAGAZINE

TECHNOLOGY: SCALE-OUT NAS 

remain unused. To avoid this, EonStor CS 

scale-out NAS integrates DNS Load 

Balancing which automatically and evenly 

distributes the workload across all storage 

nodes in the cluster. It greatly maximises 

access performance and system analysis 

capabilities for applications where access for 

multi-client traffic is provided, like media 

streaming services or multi-tenant HPC 

infrastructures. 

integrity, CS supports three kinds of cluster 

scale-out policies: traditional scale-out 

policies, erasure code and replica, plus 

Infortrend's exclusive distributed mode. 

By configuring distributed mode, users can 

optimise capacity utilisation and increase 

performance, thus, lowering overall system 

TCO. Thanks to supporting single and dual 

node clusters, system deployment can be 

started with only one or two nodes and then 

subsequently expanded with new nodes as 

storage capacity and performance demands 

grow. In distributed mode, a file is evenly 

distributed in each node, and only one copy 

of it is written to storage. Unlike erasure code, 

distributed mode does not require data parity 

calculation and unlike replica mode, it does 

not create duplicated copies of data. This 

allows ultra-high 90% capacity utilisation and 

increased performance - by up to 50% 

compared to other modes. 

If a node failure is detected, CS initiates selfhealing 

features to automatically rebuild node 

data and prevent data corruption. To prevent 

performance degradation or data loss when 

multiple disks fail on different nodes, EonStor 

CS has a unique system architecture with an 

embedded layer of Infortrend RAID protection 

on each node. Unlike traditional scale-out 

NAS, where the damaged data must be 

reconstructed by calculating corrupted parts 

from other nodes through the network, data 

recovery in EonStor CS architecture does not 

occupy the network bandwidth as it occurs 

inside the node via RAID mechanism, so it is 

faster and system performance is not affected. 

ALL DATA IS NOT EQUAL 

Not all enterprise data is equally important 

and frequently accessed; sometimes storage 

optimisation is vital to provide faster services 

for time-sensitive applications and archiving 

processed or outdated data. CS supports 

automatic storage tiering between All-Flash 

and HDD node for allocating data to the 

appropriate tiers based on file access 

frequency or file status. Less-used data can be 

stored in high capacity all-HDD pools, with 

hot data in high performance SSD pools. In 

this way, users can meet the requirements of 

shorter response time and massive capacity 

with optimised costs. The all-flash CS 

supports up to 3,400/2,000 MB/s 

Read/Write speed per single node and 

40Gb/s RDMA node-to-node connection to 

provide lightning-speed access to missioncritical 

workloads of such applications as 

HPC and M&E. 

CS can be scaled-out by demand to up to 

144 nodes. When more than one storage is 

deployed, a common problem is uneven 

distribution of client traffic causing bottlenecks 

and overworking of some nodes, while others 

To accommodate any network environment, 

CS supports various I/O card combinations of 

such network interfaces as 10GbE, 25GbE, 

40GbE. And finally, the cluster can be easily 

set up by a non-IT expert in just 30 minutes 

with the intuitive cluster deployment wizard. 

GROW BUT SAVE COSTS 

Compared to other vendors' solutions CS is 

more cost-effective, so for financially savvy 

enterprises, Infortrend will often be the first 

choice as a scale-out NAS solution provider. 

The unique feature of CS system is that it can 

start from one deployed node (all data will 

still be protected by Infortrend RAID) and it 

can be, on demand, scaled out to 144 

nodes. Also, unlike many competitors, 

Infortrend offers open-drive policy and 

perpetual licensing for system management 

and data services. 

WHAT'S THE FUTURE FOR CS? 

We have defined the future trajectory of CS 

scale-out NAS both from hardware and 

software perspectives. Speaking about the 

hardware platform, CS will support the 

popular NVMe interface specification for SSD 

model, 100GbE network, and Intel's nextgeneration 

platform. On the software side, 

we are actively working on features such as 

auto-tiering and dedupe to improve overall 

TCO, HDFS support for data analytics, and 

cloud integration for public data backup. 

For more information around the CS, 

please contact sales.eu@infortrend.com or 

visit the website below. 

More info: 

www.infortrend.com/uk/products/cs 




MAGAZINE 

29

TECHNOLOGY FOCUS: OBJECT STORAGE FOCUS: 

REDUCING THE TCO OF OBJECT STORAGE 

REAPING THE BENEFITS OF OBJECT STORAGE WITHIN BUDGET CAN BE MADE EASIER VIA THE USE OF 

TAPE TECHNOLOGIES, ARGUES MATTHEW DEWEY, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR AT QUANTUM 

associated expenses of owning a piece of 

equipment like the costs of acquisition, 

maintenance, power, cooling, and the 

enclosing building and the land it sits on. The 

majority of today's object stores are hard diskbased, 

which provides good performance and 

reliability, but the cost of power and physical 

footprint is significant. To lower TCO, object 

stores are incorporating tape. Yes, tape lives! 

From genetic data to high-resolution 

video, unstructured data is breaking 

traditional storage architectures from the 

inside out. One of the most promising storage 

options for organisations producing large 

volumes of unstructured data is object storage. 

Object stores have long found a home in the 

cloud and inside data centres, becoming longterm 

repositories for high-value data - and for 

good reason. But with demand for storage 

capacity growing exponentially, how can 

organisations reap the benefits of object stores 

without costs spiralling out of control? 

DATA RETENTION & PROTECTION 

ARE KEY 

Object stores abstract away the location of an 

object, which enables higher levels of 

redundancy. This protects against device (e.g. 

hard disk) failure but also against failures of 

entire nodes or even entire data centres. 

Abstracting away object location also enables 

object stores to scale to sizes and topologies 

difficult to achieve with file systems. The user of 

an object store may be unaware of where 

exactly their data is physically stored. What 

looks like a single object store may be 

distributed across locations in multiple cities to 

achieve greater reliability against natural 

disasters. This level of durability could 

tremendously increase the capacity 

requirements of the underlying hardware, but 

with smart erasure coding algorithms, it can be 

achieved using less capacity than by mirroring 

the data. 

A key issue when deploying object storage is 

data retention. The retention period for many 

kinds of data is specified by legal and other 

compliance constraints. One might expect 

that data not subject to compliance 

requirements is likely to be deleted sooner, but 

some data has value indefinitely. For example, 

geological and genetic data doesn't have an 

expiration date. These kinds of data sets can 

represent a tremendous investment and the 

data never expires. 

THE COST CONUNDRUM 

Demand for storage capacity is growing at a 

compound annual growth rate of more than 

20 percent. Long-term repositories must 

become cheaper and deeper without losing 

durability. That means object stores must lower 

the overall total cost of ownership of storage. 

This includes not just the cost of the media, but 

Tape has lower media costs and, unlike disks, 

requires minimal power and cooling when not 

being accessed. Tape tiers are ideal for large 

amounts of data stored for long periods of 

time. And for sequential IO, tape actually 

outperforms disk for both reading and writing. 

But tape works (and fails) differently from disks. 

The latencies to access data on tape can't be 

ignored. Best practice implementations will 

present tape as a separate tier to allow 

applications to help manage data access. 

Exploiting the full advantages of tape in an 

object store also requires a deep 

understanding of how to properly manage and 

treat it. The object store must account for and 

survive failure modes that are unique to tape. It 

must also manage access patterns to reduce 

tape latencies and wear. And all of the 

required complexity must be implemented 

below the object interface, saving the user 

from experiencing it. 

Because tape excels at sequential access, 

large individual objects will perform best. 

However, a well-implemented object store will 

group small objects into larger sequential 

streams to and from tape. With the right 

expertise, organisations can implement a 

tape-based object store for long-term data 

retention while keeping storage costs firmly 

under control. 

More info: www.quantum.com 




MAGAZINE

INTERVIEW: 

INTERVIEW: TITAN DATA SOLUTIONS 

A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO 

DATA STORAGE AND DATA 

MANAGEMENT 

STORAGE MAGAZINE SPOKE TO DAVID TREADWELL, SOLUTIONS 

DIRECTOR AT TITAN DATA SOLUTIONS ABOUT HOW RECOGNITION IN 

THIS YEAR'S STORAGE AWARDS HAS BEEN JUST ONE OF A NUMBER OF 

HIGHLIGHTS IN AN IMPRESSIVE YEAR FOR THE COMPANY 

Storage magazine: Titan is a finalist in 

the One to Watch category at this 

year's Storage Awards, and you 

personally are on the shortlist for the 

Channel Excellence award, both of which 

are a great reflection of how you're seen 

as a business within the industry. How 

important is that kind of recognition for 

Titan as the company continues to grow? 

David Treadwell: Recognition comes in 

many different guises but being recognised 

by the industry and the people who work 

in it, is perhaps the most rewarding. We're 

looking forward to this year's Storage 

Awards, albeit a virtual event rather than 

the traditional great evening out. With 

nominations for both the company and 

people who work in it, it is very pleasing to 

see that our different approach is being 

recognised. 

Recognition has also come from the 

vendor community. Since the beginning of 

this year we have signed eight new 

Distribution agreements with specialist 

data storage vendors. All these vendors 

bring something different to the market - 

an alternative to some of the more 

recognised industry names. 

And the net result is that we are able to 

offer resellers and MSPs a genuine 

alternative when they're looking for 

solutions to tackle some of the pressing 

data storage and data management 

challenges being faced by their customers. 

Storage magazine: Titan is working with 

some very big names across the sector, as 

well as a number of perhaps lesser-known 

but highly innovative partners - tell us a bit 

more about what you're bringing to market 

in 2020 and beyond. 

David Treadwell: Our vendor map 

provides a comprehensive overview of the 

names now featured in our product 

portfolio - and there are some notable 

highlights. 2020 has seen us confirmed 

as Quantum's largest distributor in EMEA. 

In addition, we were Nexsan's first 

appointed Distributor in EMEA and Scale 

Computing adds hyperconverged solutions 

to our portfolio. 

We have also strengthened our 

proposition in the Rich Media sector with 

partnerships now in place with Promise 

and Facilis. We continue to drive ATTO 

solution sales with their Intelligent Bridges 

and we have just brought to market a very 

exciting new software vendor which will 

completely safeguard Veeam backups 

from Ransomware. 

Storage magazine: It sounds as though 

everything is working out according to 

plan for Titan at the moment - has the 

pandemic's impact been more or less 

balanced out now as your clients find new 

ways to work? 

David Treadwell: Ultimately of course, it is 

our customers who decide whether we're 

heading in the right direction, and the 

evidence suggests that we are doing 

something right. Like everyone else, April 

and May business was impacted by Covid- 

19. However, July saw a record month as 

we helped support businesses with 

products and solutions to manage a 

remote workforce. 

We have some exciting plans for the 

coming months with new vendors and new 

services, and if your readers want to find 

out more about us, I'd recommend they 

visit our website. 

More info: www.titandatasolutions.com 




MAGAZINE 

31


CASE STUDY: SIDE STREET POST AND VFX 

"ASTONISHING" SPEED - AND 

MINIMAL DISRUPTION 

POST-PRODUCTION SPECIALIST SIDE STREET POST IS DEPLOYING A GB LABS NAS SOLUTION TO 

RESOLVE LATENCY ISSUES WITH ULTRA-HIGH DEFINITION VIDEO FOOTAGE 

Side Street Post and VFX is an 

independent post-production and VFX 

company based in Vancouver, Canada. 

The company is a leading provider of postfinishing 

and VFX services on a broad range 

of content including television, feature films, 

documentaries and commercials. Side Street 

recently selected GB Labs' SPACE SSD NAS 

shared storage system to drive its DaVinci 

Resolve Studio systems. 

More than 300TB of GB Labs SPACE SSD 

shared storage solution, with its massive disc 

performance of 12GB/s now enables all of 

Side Street's DaVinci Resolve Studio 

workstations to simultaneously playback 4K 

DPX streams at full resolution, with no 

network slow-down or dropped frames. 

Side Street Post and VFX's President, Gary 

Shaw, said, "Our legacy SAN storage system 

was no longer meeting our needs, and 

limited our ability to fully utilise Resolve in 

higher resolutions. We needed a solution 

that would enable all our colour correction 

suites to operate simultaneously at 4K 

resolution or higher and more efficiently." 

Gary's view, shared by many, was that the 

current fibre channel storage systems could 

not affordably achieve the concurrent speeds 

needed, and the technical development of 

such systems is generally thought as having 

been eclipsed by ethernet solutions. For Side 

Street, NAS was the way to go. 

Gary said, "Vancouver is a major market 

for episodic television and feature film 

production, a lot of it captured with high-end 

cameras that shoot at 4K, 6K or 8K, so a lot 

of raw camera footage arrives which in the 

grading process requires a very high data 

rate. Both technically and ethically, we don't 

really want to downscale and work in HD. 

We want our clients to experience the true 

image quality especially on Dolby Vision 

projects. To deal with such high data rates 

and file sizes, you need a system that can 

handle them, and SPACE SSD from GB Labs 

provided both the bandwidth and file 

management capability that fits our needs." 

GB Labs describe SPACE SSD as 'the 

world's fastest and most scalable NAS 

platform', with performance up to 18GB/s 

and capacity up to 10PB. The Side Street 

system transfers data at 12GB/s and is 

linked to a 100GbE switch. 

According to GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic 

Harland, "Side Street Post is very forwardthinking 

and knew that a fibre channel 

system could not achieve what it needed. 

Speed was of the essence and they needed 

all colour workstations running at full 

capacity, simultaneously, in 4K, 6K, 8K and, 

eventually, beyond. SPACE SSD NAS copes 

with that easily, with plenty of headroom." 

A major differentiator with all GB Labs 

storage systems is that they do not require 

the user to replace or dispose of their 

existing storage. Like many other GB Labs 

users, Side Street was able to make use of its 

existing SAN by incorporating GB Labs 

ECHO Bridge as a way of accessing SAN 

data, or moving files to it for near-line 

storage. 

"It's a case of using the old storage for 

secondary purposes, essentially cold storage, 

and empowering SPACE SSD for the heavy 

lifting," added Shaw. "After a few minutes of 

on-site tweaks to configure the system to our 

preferences, we were up and running - at 

astonishing speed - without the slightest 

disruption to our operations." 

More info: www.gblabs.com 




MAGAZINE

STRATEGY: RANSOMWARE RANSOMWARE 

RANSOMWARE IS EVERYWHERE 

BILL ANDREWS, PRESIDENT & CEO OF EXAGRID, OUTLINES THE STEPS NECESSARY TO ENSURE THAT 

ORGANISATIONS CAN RECOVER FROM RANSOMWARE ATTACKS WITH MINIMAL IMPACT ON THE 

BUSINESS 

You cannot read an industry publication 

today without seeing articles about 

real-world cases of ransomware. The 

attackers hack the network, encrypt the 

primary data, take control of the backup 

application and backup storage - and delete 

the backups. There is no way to recover. And, 

unless you pay the ransom you cannot 

operate your business. 

Let's assume that the primary storage is 

encrypted, and the hackers took control of 

the backup application or backup storage 

and issued 'delete all' data commands. In this 

case, if the backup storage is low cost 

primary storage disk or a deduplication 

appliance, then the backup data is deleted 

and there is no way to recover. 

HOW TO GUARD AGAINST THIS RISK? 

First, you need to have a network-facing tier 

of storage for high speed backups and 

restores. Second, you need a second nonnetwork-facing 

tier for long-term retention. 

The hackers can get to the network-facing tier 

but not the tier that is not on the network (this 

creates an air gap). 

Second, you need a policy-driven backup 

system that delays delete requests. If a delete 

request is issued, the network-facing tier is 

deleted, however the second non-networkfacing 

tier driven by the policy does not 

process the deletes for days or weeks, 

depending on the policy setting. If the policy 

is set to 30 days then the delete request won't 

execute for 30 days. When a ransomware 

event happens you simply go to the backup 

storage second tier and recover, as any 

backups in the second tier are not 

immediately deleted. 

In addition, the second tier, typically a longterm 

retention tier, needs to have 

deduplication objects that are immutable; 

meaning they are never changed, deleted or 

overwritten. If any data is encrypted in or 

written to the first tier of storage from the 

backup application, the new deduplication 

objects are added but never overwrite the 

previous deduplication objects. This 

approach ensures that the long-term retention 

data is not compromised. 

The combination of a primary tier for 

performance, coupled with a non-networkfacing 

tier for long-term storage that has 

delayed deletes, ensure that the backup data 

is not deleted and ready for restore. The 

combination of a second non-network-facing 

tier coupled with immutable deduplication 

objects ensures the long-term retention data 

is not comprised. You can restore the primary 

site data and you still have all your long-term 

retention data. 

To keep up to 30 days of delayed deletes 

only takes an additional 10% of storage 

versus a total separate retention lock store 

that can double the backup storage and 

requires maintaining two data stores. This 

new advanced approach is called 

Retention Time-Lock and is only available 

from ExaGrid. 

More info: www.exagrid.com 




MAGAZINE

Plug-and-Protect 

Direct-to-Cloud Backup Appliance 

Try-then-Buy Program 

FREE for 45 Days *

ST Sep-Oct 2020

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