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UNITRENDS RECOVERY-943:
THE SOUL OF A NEW BACKUP APPLIANCE
CTO Series: Dr. Mark Campbell,
Chief Strategy/Technology Officer, Unitrends
INTRODUCTION
The Unitrends Recovery-943 is the next generation flagship of the Unitrends Recovery-series of backup appliances. The Recovery-943 represents revolutionary advances in engineering, technology, design, and performance. It transcends the backup appliance category
and represents the epitome of balanced performance, density, and affordability. With a full suite of integrated data protection software, 40 drives delivered in a high-density 4U chassis arranged in a three-tiered storage architecture coupled with 256GB of memory and 32 processor threads, the raw capabilities and performance of the Recovery-943 are unlike any backup appliance on the market today.
In this technology brief we’ll first discuss why backup appliances are experiencing such rapid demand and adoption. We’ll then explore the challenges that enterprise-class data protection backup appliance vendors face. After that we’ll briefly discuss the architecture of the Recovery-943 and then we’ll explore the way that the Recovery-943 designers responded to each of the aforementioned challenges.
WHY BACKUP APPLIANCES?
Backup appliances exist to lower the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) associated with the data protection of an IT environment. Backup appliances were initially designed almost exclusively for small and
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medium enterprises that couldn’t afford to have backup specialists on staff who spent all their time integrating, maintaining, upgrading, and adjusting the server, storage, I/O, networking, operating system software, antivirus software, backup software, archiving software, replication software, and the like that constitutes a backup solution. Backup software vendors in essence pushed the design and
implementation of backup solution integration to their customers. This had the effect of increasing the software vendors’ profits since this shift of capital and operational expense was transferred from the backup software vendor to the buyer. Backup appliances were created to directly address this by reducing this capital and operational expense burden from the buyer back to the backup appliance vendor.
At the same time, backup appliance engineering and technology has significantly changed over the years. Ten years ago, backup appliances were relatively simple devices that basically just bundled all of the components listed above into a relatively simple integrated hardware and software package. As data protection grew more complex and began including not only file backup but block backup, dissimilar bare metal, virtual environment backup, archiving, and replication for disaster recovery, and other features the design of the backup appliance grew more complex.
The Adoption of Deduplication
With the advent of deduplication, a new class of companies
sprung up in order to enable IT staff to lower its TCO by creating a dedicated deduplication storage appliance that could handle the often unpredictable demands of deduplication separately from the demands of backup, archiving, replication, and other data protection functionality. Eventually backup software vendors began integrating deduplication into the backup software itself. The trouble was (and is) that this made the integration and maintenance of data protection much more complex because the server, storage, I/O, and networking had to be carefully balanced to optimize deduplication with all other data protection functionality.
This dramatic increase in complexity has increased the desire for backup appliances since the task balancing server, storage, I/O, and networking performance with deduplication is the backup appliance vendor’s responsibility rather than the buyer’s responsibility.
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Virtualization Failover
A more recent advance in data protection is virtualization failover, which is more often termed by a derivation of the term “instant recovery.” There are two forms of virtualization failover: on-host and off-host virtualization failover. In on-host virtualization failover, a backup is executed as a virtual machine entirely using the resources associated with the server and storage upon which the backup software executes. Off-host virtualization failover is similar except the backup is executed as a virtual machine using primarily the resources of a second server (not the server upon which the backup software executes.)
Most vendors support off-host virtualization failover; fewer vendors support on-host virtualization failover – Unitrends is the only company currently supporting both. In addition, Unitrends and several other vendors support not just recovery but the “auditing” of machines using virtualization failover that automatically boots backups in virtual machines to test the integrity of the data protection process.
Virtualization failover, particularly on-host virtualization failover, adds even more complexity to backup software. Like deduplication, this has driven the desire for backup appliances since the task of balancing server, storage, I/O, and networking performance with virtualization failover is the backup appliance vendor’s responsibility rather than the buyer’s responsibility.
Affordable Enterprise-Class Protection for All
In the introduction, we stated that the Recovery-943 transcends the backup appliance category. What do we mean by this? In the past, backup appliances have been focused on the small and medium enterprise market. Why? Larger enterprises typically have had the resources to have dedicated backup specialists who had the time and budgets to integrate, maintain, adjust, and upgrade the raw executable backup software along with the server, storage, I/O, networking, operating system, anti-virus software, and other components of an overall data protection solution.
However, enterprises of all sizes have increasingly demanded affordable enterprise-class data protection regardless of their size. Some of the primary reasons for this include
• Explosive growth in the amount of data that must be protected.
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require a great deal of storage.
• An increased strain on IT to manage more data and systems with less IT staff.
• The backup specialist role transforming into and
encompassing the storage, server, and virtualization specialist roles.
The Recovery-943 is designed to be used by midrange and large businesses that have these characteristics.
CHALLENGES
In this chapter we’ll briefly discuss the general challenges facing enterprise-class data protection backup appliance vendors. After this chapter we’ll discuss the Recovery-943 architecture and the specific responses that the designers of the Recovery-943 had to each of the challenges discussed in this chapter.
Integration
One reason that you buy an appliance is the convenience – the integration of functionality so that you don’t have to worry about the underlying implementation. Take a common appliance in your kitchen – the toaster. You don’t want to worry about the alloy composition of the nichrome heating element or the spring tension in the tray that holds your bread; you just want toast.
In a backup appliance, integration can refer to either vertical integration or horizontal integration. Vertical integration is a defining characteristic of a backup appliance: the storage, server, operating system, data protection software, and support are vertically integrated in a functional “stack” and delivered by a vendor. As a buyer, what you want to be concerned with are companies that take commodity backup software and put it on a generic hardware platforms and call that a backup appliance. Not only is there a lack of real integration and “balance” – but even more importantly you don’t get a primary advantage of what some call the “OTTC” effect – One Throat To Choke – which means that a single vendor is responsible for everything and there can be no “finger pointing” when it comes to support.
Horizontal integration is also incredibly important in a backup appliance. Functionality for different components of data protection should
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a wide variety of servers, storage, hypervisors, operating systems, and applications should be available. And pay particular attention to licensing: complex licensing schemes and a plethora of licensing codes can quickly erode the value of horizontal integration by making the user feel that the backup vendor is constantly “nickel and diming” the customer.
Thus the challenge with respect to integration for the backup appliance vendor is insuring that they can deliver an end-to-end
vertically integrated data protection appliance while also enabling their customer to use the functionality of the device across their entire IT infrastructure.
Time to Value
Consumers are increasingly demanding simpler and easier to use devices of all types – from cell phones to portable generators.
Business-based IT personnel at businesses are no different; with fewer IT staff responsible for increasing user functionality it’s important that the benefit of a product be realized ever more quickly with a relatively shallow learning cure.
Time to Value (TtV) is a metric that represents the total time it takes to deploy and realize the first value to a buyer. With respect to TtV, more time is bad; less time is good.
For a backup appliance, the definition of TtV is the total time that it takes to set up an appliance and begin performing the first backup. For backup software, on the other hand, the definition of TtV is the time it takes to set up a server, set up the storage, install an operating system on it, install backup software on it, perform set up, and begin performing the first backup.
The challenge with respect to TtV is that most appliance vendors, despite having a natural advantage given the appliance model, have setup software that is difficult to use and/or has a steep learning curve. This causes a lengthening of TtV and an attendant frustration by the user of the appliance.
Storage Performance
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced “Glacier” – cloud-based storage at only about one penny per gigabyte per month. It was at the time of the announcement about an order of magnitude less
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expensive than the typical AWS storage. It has one primary drawback – it typically takes at least a few hours to begin transferring your data. It’s by far more affordable – but if you need your data quickly, all the affordability in the world isn’t going to matter to you.
As we discussed in the prior section, performance balanced with affordability are key design criteria for backup appliance vendors. Of particular importance is the architecture of the storage. Backup appliances have a relatively unique set of I/O characteristics. Most people tend to focus upon the massive amounts of data that must be written to very highly protected and very affordable storage. But in a modern backup appliance, there’s also a tremendous number of smaller reads and writes due to not only the metadata database associated with the backups but also deduplication as well as virtualization failover and other advanced recovery techniques.
Creating a storage architecture that can be trusted not to lose data, that can perform a variety of tasks with excellent performance, and that is affordable is one of the foremost challenges in designing a backup appliance.
Failure and Data Loss
Imagine you were designing an airplane that would be used for trans-oceanic flight. If you design the airplane with one engine, you minimize failure. There are fewer things to go wrong, right? And there are other advantages. You can sell the airplane you create for less money and still make more profit. And the airline service that buys it can thus charge less for tickets and make it cheaper for people to fly to visit their families and do business across the ocean.
Minimizing failure seems like a really great idea – until you think about the consequence of failure. If you design your airplane with two engines and insure that the airplane can successfully fly with only a single engine, you double the risk of single engine failure on any particular flight but you dramatically lower the risk of the airplane crashing into the ocean.
Backup appliance designers live in a world in which failure is a constant threat which must be avoided when possible but always planned for and handled regardless. Backup appliance designers carefully use an assortment of advanced techniques to handle failure. A backup appliance overall and each component in a backup appliance is
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evaluated for its potential for failure using tools such as MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) and AFR (Annualized Failure Rate.)
Failure is acceptable in a backup appliance; however, data loss is not. A backup appliance designer uses techniques such as MTTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss) to provide an evaluation framework for measuring data loss risk. While these types of techniques are invaluable, the most important tool for a backup appliance designer is constant, agonizing, white-knuckled, ulcer-inducing, teeth-grinding paranoia. The mantra of a backup appliance designer is not “what can go wrong might go wrong”; instead it’s “what can go wrong will go wrong.”
Diagnosability
As products have increasingly grown more complex, it’s been more and more difficult for users of those devices to figure out what’s broken when something goes wrong. Even well-trained support personnel at companies selling products often have a difficult time diagnosing issues. And as everyone can attest, finding well-trained support personnel at companies is often impossible – quite often when I call support for a product I own I feel that I know more about it than the person paid to help me resolve what’s broken.
One advantage that vertical integration brings in terms of products is that it makes it easier for designers of products to build into the product itself enhanced diagnosability. This only makes sense, right? One key trade-off of any all-in-one integrated product is enhanced diagnosability at the expense of a more flexible (and complex) potential ecosystem in which it operates.
Apple figured this out long ago and has a design philosophy around the tight control of its offerings. From music players to computers, Apple offers less flexibility than its competitors but offers greater degrees of both usability and diagnosability.
Ecological Sustainability and Density
The “green” movement toward a more ecologically sustainable society means to business a new examination of its roles and responsibilities with respect to environmental responsibility. Vendors have flocked to label themselves as “green” from a marketing perspective; however, there’s an underlying reality associated with the fact that by reducing and optimizing carbon footprints and other ecologically damaging
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characteristics tends to translate to lower capital and operational expenditures for those businesses as well.
Higher density data centers provide businesses with a reduced cost of ownership when compared to low density data centers. As a result, whether your equipment is housed in your own data center or is co-located in multi-tenant data center, the best capital and operational efficiencies are gained with the highest density equipment. Density in this case refers to the compute and/or storage capability per “U” of rack space within the data center.
Affordability
I recently bought my family some very upscale Tumi™ luggage. One piece is a beautiful hard case carry-on. Unfortunately, I can’t use it – I have a tendency to pack more than the hard case carry-on can hold and I end up using a soft case carry on instead that holds more (and was a lot less expensive.) What I value is the amount I can carry. Others in my family value the superior aesthetics of the hard case carry-on more than the amount of stuff that fits in it.
As more companies have sprung up to take advantage of the new technology of solid state drives, an interesting argument has been proposed by the vendors of these products. An argument is made by most of these vendors that affordability should be measured not by traditional measures such as dollars per terabyte but by new measures such as dollars per I/O operation over some unit time. It’s an interesting position – compelling in some compute critical environments while utterly erroneous in other environments.
Affordability in data protection environments is an example of an environment in which affordability is still measured on your “backup bang for the buck” – the overall cost of capital and operational expense associated with backup functionality and retention available for each dollar spent.
Great designers of backup appliances are constantly aware that they must balance affordability with superior functional capability and performance. In other words, the most capable and
highest-performance backup appliance in the world doesn’t do much good if it’s built entirely out of solid state devices and thus the price per terabyte is so high than no one can afford it.
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Virtualization
When my daughter was in her mid-teens, one of the things she said that I absolutely despised was when she responded with “whatever” when I asked her a question. I still don’t like it when people use that phrase – it implies to me an abdication of not only responsibility but of opinion that I typically just want to verbally fight through to understand the person to whom I’m speaking.
Paradoxically, I love virtualization – even though I’ve always felt that with the abstraction it affords it was the computer industry’s way of saying “whatever” when confronted with technical challenges. And sure enough, with each passing year, we as an industry and those of us in IT learn that “virtualization” isn’t an answer – it’s a technique for coming to a better answer.
Backup appliances, and backup software, of course must use various techniques to protect virtualized environments. The arguments regarding HOS (Host Operating System)-level and GOS (Guest Operating System)-level virtualization data protection techniques are beyond the scope of this paper ; however, it’s worth noting that any serious data protection product should be able to flexibly adapt and handle multiple virtualization use cases.
An entirely different challenge for backup appliances is incorporating virtualization to accelerate recovery, in other words, to minimize what is typically called in our industry the RTO (Recovery Time Objective.) The use of this technology, which is called virtualization failover, can significantly impact the operations of a backup appliance.
Networking and Connectivity
Henry Ford is famous for saying “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants as long as it is black.” As can be seen by simply driving down the road today, that particular philosophy didn’t last long as it came crashing headlong into the reality that customers wanted choice.
Today there are several backup appliance vendors new to the space who offer any type of backup appliance that you want – as long as it’s the single model that they offer.
But beyond this foolishness, there’s a tendency across the backup appliance space to limit the capabilities associated with networking
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and connectivity. The overt rationalization is that appliances should be simple – and that’s absolutely true. But the underlying reality is that vendors do this in order to limit their internal configurations. This makes short-term sense in terms of these vendors saving money; however, it doesn’t respond to the incredible importance of adapting and optimizing networking and connectivity with respect to the incredible diversity of today’s agile IT infrastructure.
Replication and Archiving
When I was a kid, I thought one of the greatest things about Star Trek was the transporter. The ability to physically move a person (or a thing) from one place to another instantaneously was really “fascinating.” I particularly liked the episode where there was a malfunction and the “copy” of the person being transported wasn’t destroyed – that was the first time I thought about the fact that transporters worked by copying rather than by moving the individual.
Replication and archiving are important features for modern data protection. Replication does exactly what it sounds like – it replicates, or copies, data from one place to another. It does this electronically by copying data to what is typically a distant location. Replication offers disaster recovery at the lowest operational cost – but takes WAN bandwidth and also takes capital expense in the form of equipment at the other end of the replication. Advanced replication takes source level deduplication, compression, and encryption as key technologies to make it possible to protect large amounts of data over limited WAN lines effectively and safely.
Archiving creates a copy of a backup on either rotational or fixed media. Rotational media are devices such as disk drives (connected via USB or eSATA, for example) or tape drives (connected via LVD SCSI or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI.) Rotational archiving is sometimes called “sneaker net” because you’re “walking” your copied backups (or archives) to safety. Safety here can mean the trunk of your car each night, shipped via truck to a mine underneath a mountain, and the like. Fixed archiving is typically performed for nearline retention extension from the backup appliance. A typical target is a SAN or a NAS.
One thing that’s important to realize about archiving is that the
boundaries between rotational and fixed tend to blur. You can archive to a small NAS and then take it off site. You can use disk and tape to
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extend retention. And there’s even blurring between archiving and replication with the new cloud-based NAS and SAN products from companies such as TwinStrata, AWS’s integrated cloud gateway, and even Dropbox.
ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW
Car aficionados know that the key to a well-designed top-flight automobile isn’t just power but balance. Without the proper
transmission, suspension, steering, brakes, and other components the biggest engine in the world won’t matter.
Likewise, the key to a world-class backup appliance is the balance of its processor, memory, I/O, networking, and storage capabilities with enterprise-class data protection software. From 32 processor threads to 256GB of RAM to 40 drives in a highly-optimized 4U chassis coupled with the Unitrends data protection software, the Recovery-943 has been designed from the ground-up to offer this balance.
An overview of the hardware platform architecture of the Recovery-943 is shown in the figure below.
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This state-of-the-art hardware platform is embedded within the overall Unitrends data protection architecture, which is depicted in the figure which follows.
In the chapter that follows, the implementation of this architecture will be discussed in detail.
IMPLEMENTATION
In this chapter we’ll respond to each of the challenges raised earlier with the specific implementation information for the Recovery-943. In other words, we’ll tell you how our designers and engineers specifically responded to each of these challenges to build our flagship data
protection device.
Integration: Vertical and Horizontal
Vertical integration is the integration of the hardware, software, and support services; horizontal integration refers to the data protection functionality available on the appliance. Both of these concepts in terms of their implementation on all Recovery-series appliances are explored in the subsections that follow.
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Vertical Integration: Platform/Software/Service Stack
The 943 continues the tradition of all Unitrends Recovery-series appliances with respect to a strongly interconnected stack consisting of the
• Hardware platform consisting of an integrated server, networking, and storage complex;
• Software platform consisting of our RecoveryOS™ Linux CentOS-based operating system and Unitrends Simply Scalable™ backup, archiving, instant recovery, and disaster recovery software;
• Support platform consisting of our proactive monitoring
coupled with our world-class support organization with a 99% NPS (Net Promoter Score) customer satisfaction rating.
Horizontal Integration: Backup, Archiving, Instant Recovery, and Disaster Recovery
Horizontal integration for the Recovery-943 is achieved through the use of our all-in-one integrated Simply Scalable™ backup, archiving, instant recovery, and disaster recovery software. This is depicted in the figure that follows.
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Horizontal integration can easily be limited by restrictive licensing that treats each component as a separately licensed component. Unitrends offers its No Limits™ licensing in order to bring the full value of our horizontal integration to our customers.
Time to Value: Shrink-Wrapped Enterprise-Class Data Protection
In order to minimize TtV on the Recovery-943 as well as all of its Recovery-series appliances, Unitrends created a first in the data protection industry – shrink-wrapped enterprise-class data protection. Enterprise-class data protection has tremendous advantages in terms of flexibility and adaptability with respect to the IT infrastructure that it protects. In addition, enterprise-class data protection caters to the power user – thus delivering the maximum capability in the fewest number of clicks (this is also termed click minimization.)
But there is a downside to enterprise-class data protection – the wide number of choices available with enterprise-class data protection typically means a steep learning curve for users when they first begin using the system. This means more limited data protection systems - such as those offering limited heterogeneity, or offering only GOS-level protection, or offering only HOS-level protection – can be easier to use initially before the user gains experience and begins chafing against the restrictions of these types of systems.
In order to solve this, Unitrends created data protection software that is adaptive to both the environment and to the expertise of the user. A simple setup system enables the backup appliance to be configured within minutes after it is racked. Resisting the tyranny of “either/or” types of choices, we instead created “and” choices. As an example, Unitrends offers both simple single server backup and multiple servers per job backup which are context sensitive with respect to how the user chooses to navigate her or his IT infrastructure.
All of this enables Unitrends to achieve best-in-industry TtV while simultaneously addressing the needs of not only intermediate but advanced power users.
Storage Performance: Industry’s First 3-Tiered Backup Appliance
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architecture that takes the best characteristics of each is profoundly challenging. And yet that’s what our designers and engineers have done with the storage architecture of the Recovery-943.
The storage architecture of the Recovery-943 consists of the following primary storage components:
• A pair of mirrored RAID-1 solid state drives that consist of the hardened, performance-optimized, and space-optimized RecoveryOS™ Linux-based operating system and a small amount of metadata that is optimized for random I/O performance.
• A pair of mirrored RAID-1 deeply cached high-speed rotational drives that consist of the core metadata associated with backup, archive, instant recovery, and disaster recovery operations. This storage pool is optimized for random I/O performance.
• 36 affordable and high-speed rotational drives that contain the raw backup information. These 36 drives are arranged as a pair of striped RAID-6 arrays consisting of 16 data drives and 2 parity drives. This configuration is commonly referred to as a RAID-60 and is highly fault resilient. The creation of two logical spindles that are striped means that this configuration is not only more fault resilient than a single large RAID-6 but has better read and write performance characteristics as well. See the next section for more information concerning RAID-60s.
This independent three-tier architecture allows significantly less seek time and rotational latency for the raw backup data write and read operations due to not only the striped RAID-6’s in the RAID-60 but also because random I/O is independently distributed among the deeply cached high-speed rotational drives and the solid state devices.
Failure and Data Loss: RAID-60
Unitrends has historically used a RAID-6 for the core backup array of drives in its 2U and 3U Recovery-series appliances. As our designers and engineers were developing the Recovery-943, it became clear than for the 36 drives that constituted the backup array that we needed a higher degree of fault tolerance than a RAID-6 provided. In other words, on a device with this many disk drives and of this class, it became apparent that we needed to drive MTTDL (Mean Time To Data
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Loss) much higher than we could on a simpler RAID-6 architecture and implementation.
Unitrends used in its Recovery-943 a tiered RAID-1/RAID-1/RAID-60 storage architecture in order to minimize MTTDL (Mean Time To Data Loss.) While we use a RAID-1/RAID-6 storage architecture in our 2U and 3U based systems, the 36 drives that are used primarily for backup is large enough that we felt it was important to divide the 36 drives into two RAID-6 stripes. This had the secondary effect of improving performance as well.
The simplest way to view the defining characteristic of RAID-6 versus RAID-60 is to look at how many drives can fail at the same time in a RAID-6 versus a RAID-60 without losing data. A RAID-6 can lose up to 2 drives without data loss; however, a RAID-60 can lose twice that number without data loss.
Diagnosability: Proactive Diagnostics and Vertical Integration
One advantage to vertical integration is enhanced diagnosability. As we mentioned in the vertical integration section, the Recovery-943 continues the tradition of all Unitrends Recovery-series appliances with respect to a strongly interconnected stack consisting of the
• Hardware platform consisting of an integrated server, networking, and storage complex;
• Software platform consisting of our RecoveryOS™ Linux-based operating system and Unitrends Simply Scalable™ backup, archiving, instant recovery, and disaster recovery software;
• Support platform consisting of our proactive monitoring
coupled with our world-class support organization with a 99% NPS (Net Promoter Score) customer satisfaction rating.
Typically when technologists talk of a “stack” they are referring to components that work well together through a set of well-defined APIs that allow abstraction among the elements of that stack. Unitrends uses this concept to create its hardware, software, and support stack – but it extends that concept such that the components have intimate knowledge of each other. This enables, for example, the proactive monitoring such that each of our backup appliances can “phone home” via an SNMP trap each day with collected information
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concerning not just the software but the underlying hardware as well. Unitrends support then uses that information to monitor events and notify customers proactively. This enables a complete “virtuous cycle” of monitoring, analysis, and action for the entire vertically integrated solution.
IPMI 2.0 is also supported on the Recovery-943 for deeper hardware and firmware diagnostics.
Ecological Sustainability and Density: 40 Drives in only 4Us
The Recovery-943 has unparalleled compute and storage density that in turn lowers the U-based footprint within the data center and delivers far more capabilities per U than any other backup appliance.
One way to measure the ecological sustainability of a backup appliance is to determine the maximum backup that may be used for data
protection per watt per U of rack space. Note that this is a worst-case measure and does not take into account fault tolerance – and fault tolerance tends to lower the ecological sustainability because drives are used for parity. This also doesn’t take into account the impact of deduplication on increasing retention.
Nevertheless, the Recovery-943 offers a maximum backup size of 50TB with a maximum AC power consumption is 1400W over 4U’s of rack space for 142GB per watt. Compare that with a Recovery-833 that offers a maximum backup size of 20TB with a maximum AC power consumption of 760W over 3U’s of rack space for a rating of approximately 9GB per watt. The Recovery-943 thus yields more than 15X more backup space per watt per U of rack space.
Affordability: Price per Terabyte and Deduplication
The Recovery-943 is an enterprise-class machine priced for the
midrange enterprise market. The storage architecture, which enables the use of affordable and yet high-performance rotational drives as the core vehicle to retain the raw backup data, is key to enabling this affordability. As a result, the Recovery-943 has the lowest price per terabyte in the industry.
One factor that significantly and at times dramatically impacts the price per terabyte is the byte-level content-aware deduplication that Unitrends offers. The effectiveness of deduplication and thus its impact on the overall data reduction rate is directly correlated to the
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amount of retention present on a system.
The Recovery-943 has a maximum backup size of 50TB. However, the rate of deduplication will be maximized not when the maximum backup size is reached but instead when the unit is used for smaller backup sizes which require longer retention periods.
Virtualization: Failover Virtualization
The 32 processor threads, 256GB of memory, and optimized storage architecture are critical in enabling the use of instant recovery for both on-appliance failover virtualization for Windows and off-appliance failover virtualization for VMware.
It must be noted that there is not a simple correlation between the amount of raw backup space and the processor and memory available for not only backup, archiving, and disaster recovery but large numbers of clients protected with instant recovery (failover virtualization) as well. For IT infrastructure that has less data but more clients for which an RTO of minutes is required, it is recommended that multiple smaller Recover-series backup appliances be used rather than a
single Recovery-943. This recommendation is qualified by other
aspects of the IT infrastructure and the specifics of the data protection environment; consult your Unitrends sales representative and pre-sales engineer for a full discussion and analysis of this situation.
Networking and Connectivity: Flexibility and Choice
The Recovery-943 comes with 4x1Gb Ethernet ports and 4 eSATA ports. In addition, LVS and SAS SCSI is optionally available for tape, optional additional 1Gb and 10GB Ethernet ports are available, and optional additional Fibre Channel 8Gb ports are available.
The Recovery-943 comes with a standard configuration of 20
concurrent backup jobs. While there is a large amount of networking bandwidth available, it is recommended that in situations in which the IT infrastructure has hundreds of backup clients and a tight backup window that multiple smaller Recovery-series backup appliances be used rather than a single Recovery-943. Further, it may make sense if using disk-based rotational archiving to use two or more smaller units rather than a Recovery-943. This recommendation is qualified by other aspects of the IT infrastructure and the specifics of the data protection environment; consult your Unitrends sales representative and pre-sales engineer for a full discussion and analysis of this situation.
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Replication and Archiving: Disk, Tape, NAS, SAN, and Cloud
The Recovery-943 supports replication as either an on-premise backup appliance that sends replicated data off-site to a Recovery-series
appliance or to Unitrends Enterprise Backup™ (our software-only virtual appliance), as an off-premise vault that receives replicated data from either a Recovery-series appliance or Unitrends Enterprise Backup™, or as a cross-vault. A cross-vault acts both as an on-premise and off-premise appliance simultaneously in concert with another Unitrends physical or virtual backup appliance.
The Recovery-943 also supports archiving. Archiving creates a copy of a backup on either rotational or fixed media. Archiving to LVD and SAS connected tape devices are supported; in fact a tape auto-loader is important to use for archiving as the amount of data being archived increases. For smaller archive jobs, eSATA-based archiving is supported with our Recovery-Archive 1U device that supports up to 24TB of
compressed data.
Fixed archiving occurs via Ethernet and exists primarily to increase nearline retention. Both SANs and NASs are supported for fixed archiving.
CONCLUSION
The Recovery-943 represents revolutionary advances in engineering, technology, design, and performance. This backup appliance brings innovative and exciting new enterprise-class features at a price point that is aimed squarely at the midrange enterprise.
In this technology brief we’ve introduced the flagship of the Unitrends Recovery-series of physical backup appliances: the Recovery-943. We’ve discussed backup appliances in general, explored some of the challenges facing designers and engineers of next generation high-end backup appliances, reviewed an overview of the architecture of the Recovery-943, and then analyzed how the designers and engineers who created the Recovery-943 met the previously described challenges.
