Data Storage

better data storage with Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud solutions

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Hybrid Cloud

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Computer Servers

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Data Storage

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Hyperconverged

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Data Protection Services

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Data storage is the collection and retention of digital information using computers and other devices. The information is kept in a digital format to be retrieved and accessed later by users and applications. The methods and technologies used for data storage vary greatly, but the basic concept is always the same: information is kept so that it can be accessed again later.

Managing data storage grows more difficult year-over-year. Organizations from small businesses, mid-size enterprises, to large corporations are more reliant on their data than ever. Performance-hungry applications and the rapid progress and the growing need to store data are making it more costly and increasingly demanding to ensure data is available when needed. Businesses need powerful yet cost-efficient solutions that can help streamline data management, reduce latency, enable stronger data protection, and make data continuously available.

Data storage today is more diverse than ever and resides in many locations, thanks to evolving technologies like hybrid cloud, multi cloud and public cloud, software as a service (SaaS), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), in addition to traditional on-premises compute, applications, databases and storage requirements. The challenges for managing data today include:

Managing Growth – As data demands grow, the cost and complexity of storing, managing, and protecting it increases as well.

Containing Costs – IT budgets can hardly keep pace with the growing complexity and data storage demands.

Protecting Data Resources – Data is a very valuable asset and is constantly under attack and must be protected from loss, theft, and corruption. Data must be backed up at geo-redundant locations.

Simplifying Management – Managing data storage can easily overwhelm IT teams that are also working on other priorities.

Reducing Latency – Evolving technologies need real-time access to data, requiring data storage solutions with minimal latency.

Providing Easy Access – Developers, IT operations, security, compliance, and a wide variety of users all need access to data quickly and easily.

Compliance – Increasing volumes of data make it hard to determine whether data follows policies, regulations, and laws.

Better Data Storage with Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud Solutions

Nfina Hybrid Cloud solutions are not only more effective, but they are also economical enough to be affordable for businesses of any size and make it simple and easy to safeguard their data. We combine on-premises compute in your own private cloud with the security of public cloud backup & disaster recovery at an affordable monthly cost. We offer peace of mind with geo-redundant backup and disaster recovery, enhanced performance with minimal latency, reduced and predictable cost, system monitoring, plus an entire team of qualified engineers with decades of real-world experience eliminating concerns related to staff expertise, workload, or the need to contact multiple vendors. Nfina also includes Managed Services that allows your business to off-load IT operations to us or your Nfina MSP Partner, enabling you to focus on your business goals while we deal with the challenges of an optimized IT environment. We are able to customize a hybrid multi-cloud solution to fit each client’s individual architecture requirements.

Don’t waste your time thinking about how you will recover your data in the event of a natural disaster or cyber attack. Nfina understands how valuable your data is to your organization. Our team will deal with any unforeseeable event rapidly keeping your data and operations up and running. Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud combines on-site virtual machines (VMs) with cluster-to-cluster replication along with off-site storage for backup and disaster recovery. Nfina engineers will work with your stakeholders in the development of your IT infrastructure including IT policies, standards, processes, systems, measurements, and maintenance. This enables your company to manage risk, cost, control, IT governance, compliance, and business performance objectives.

Nfina-Store Data Storage Solution

Nfina-Store provides unlimited options to architect storage environments with iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC) and NFS, SMB (CIFS) protocols for companies of any size – from small businesses, mid-size enterprises to large enterprises. The Linux-based architecture provides Nfina-Store with much better hardware compatibility than competing products based on other operating systems. Nfina-Store is a perfect choice for any virtualized storage environment as it supports VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V and ProxMox. It can be set up on physical servers or as a virtual storage appliance (e.g. in hyper-converged environments).

Data Acceleration

  • Acceleration of random writes with Write Log (ZIL) See illustration below
      1.  Writes are written to ARC first
      2. Writes are copied to ZIL
      3. After data is written from ARC to the Storage Pool, ZIL data blocks are freed
  • Hybrid Read Cache with first level in RAM (ARC -Adaptive Replacement Cache) and second Read Cache level on an SSD or NVMe (L2ARC) See illustration below
      1.  Attempt to read requested block from ARC
      2. If block is not in ARC then read from L2ARC to ARC
      3. If block is not in L2ARC then read from Storage Pool to ARC
ARC-Pyramid Graphic
  • High cache hit rate by using ARC’s most recently used (MRU) and most frequently used (MFU) Read Cache algorithms. See illustration below
MRU-MFU Cache Graphic
  • Compression for improved performance
  • Data resilvering rebuilding of used space only

Data Accessibility

  • iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), NFS, SMB (CIFS)
  • Use of Virtual IPs
  • Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) for FC protocol

  • Virtual LAN (VLAN) support

Data Availability

  • High-Availability Dual-Controller Clustering
  • Active-Active and Active-Passive HA Cluster
  • Dual Storage (Stretched) Metro HA Cluster and Common Storage Cluster architectures

Data Protection

  • 12 Copies of Your Data with Nfina Hybrid Cloud and Geo-Redundancy
  • On- & Off-site Data Protection
  • N-way mirrors, Single, Dual and Triple Parity RAID
  • Copy-on-Write
  • Snapshots support AES Encryption while in Transit
  • Snapshots support SED Encryption while at Rest
  • SED Drives Supported

Data Integrity

  • Data and Metadata Check-summing

  • Self-Healing: Detecting and correcting Silent-Data-Errors with Scrub utility

  • Atomic Transaction Writes: Data always being consistent, no need for repairing the file system

Data Backup & Restore

  • Unlimited Snapshots and Clones

  • Snapshot Rollback

  • Clone Promote (CLI only)

Data Optimization

  • Inline Compression (LZ4, LZJB, ZLE, GZIP 1-9)
  • Inline Deduplication
  • Thick, Thin and Over-Provisioning

User Authentication

  • Local LDAP users and groups authentication for SMB /CIFS protocol
  • External Active Domain Server

File System & Storage Virtualization

  • 128-bit ZFS file system
  • Pooled storage model
  • Unlimited scalability with storage expansion during production
  • Unlimited file and volume size
  • Unlimited Snapshots and Clones (Copy-On-Write)

System Monitoring

  • SNMP
  • Nagios, Checkmk
  • GUI statistics
  • Nfina-View

  • REST API

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