The CLARiiON Disk Library offers the immediate benefits of backup-to-disk and is a new alternative to traditional tape-based solutions. Combining the power and reliability of CLARiiON technology with cost-efficient ATA disk drives and 100 percent compatible tape library emulation, the CLARiiON Disk Library offers customers an easy-to-deploy solution for rapid backup and recovery requiring no changes to existing applications or procedures.
Representing 60 percent to 70 percent of total storage management operations according to META Group research, the backup and recovery process is typically a tape-oriented procedure that may not be meeting business requirements. According to EMC, through the unique attributes and cost efficiencies of the EMC CLARiiON Disk Library, customers can now dramatically improve service levels and information access while lowering management costs.
Phil Goodwin, senior program director at META Group, said, "Prior to the new category of 'disk libraries' or disk-based backup devices, customers had two choices for backup and recovery: traditional tape-based backup or disk-to-disk replication software. Due to dramatic differences in cost, performance and manageability, a huge gap existed. Disk libraries fill this void, offering customers a new paradigm for backup, and more importantly, recovery."
David Donatelli, EMC executive vice president of Storage Platforms Operations, said, "Customers have long understood the advantages of disk-based backup, but many have been unable to move directly to a disk-to-disk approach. With the EMC CLARiiON Disk Library, enterprises now have a simple and reliable backup and restore solution that's easy to install."
In a recently released analysis, META Group reported, "Backup and recovery remains the top pain point among most storage management organizations. Coping with failed backups, tape-drive failures, and media errors consumes nearly two-thirds of the effort associated with storage management."
David Kadow, director of Systems Administration for CDC IXIS Capital Markets North America, a financial services subsidiary of CDC IXIS, said, "In our testing, the CLARiiON Disk Library has exhibited significant performance and reliability benefits relative to the older, incumbent backup infrastructure. In our environment, reliability, high performance and scalability are key requirements for any technology solution we would consider. These are especially important during automated, unattended processing such as our intensive, multi-terabyte data backup operations."
As tape will continue to serve as the primary medium for long-term offline storage, the CLARiiON Disk Library can facilitate the final data movement to physical tapes in native format -- using an automated process to determine the specific data and time required for movement to tape -- completing the information lifecycle.
Designed for simple management, the CLARiiON Disk Library emulates a wide range of open systems tape libraries, drives and cartridges -- eliminating the need for changes to the existing backup process and infrastructure according to EMC.
"Ease of implementation is also important. The EMC CLARiiON Disk Library integrated into our backup infrastructure in mere hours and has proven to have all the attributes we hoped for," Kadow added. "The EMC solution will help us vastly reduce our reliance on tape, significantly improve our backup and duplication windows, and will scale with our data growth."
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