Multi-Vendor Storage Solution

Introduction

Many large organizations rely on their server vendor or major third party storage vendors for their primary storage. This is an understandable strategy as the convenience of one-stop shopping from the server vendor is attractive in many cases since it simplifies purchasing and service considerations when any storage device can easily meet the storage requirements. Alternately, there are times when the organization will seek the brand name assurance and special functionality of a major third party storage provider for their primary storage. This is also understandable when non-technical people including corporate officers and directors need to approve the decision and the comfort level of those executives is important.

However, when it comes to selecting storage for local mirror backups, snapshot backups, continuous data protection recovery points, virtual tape libraries or remote data backup – a very different set of decision criteria come into play. When selecting primary storage, brand name assurance and comfort level play a major role. For secondary copies, it is often the simplicity, openness and great price/performance value that drives the storage selection decision.

Once the organization has heavily invested to store the primary information on expensive storage devices purchased from the server vendor or major third party vendor, the question to be posed is, “Do I really need to pay all that expense again for the secondary copies?” Often today, the answer is no. Fully functional, completely open and far less costly alternatives exist from smaller third party vendors such as Winchester Systems to provide the secondary storage for the backup and replicated copies.

Many organizations including Massachusetts General Hospital, General Dynamics, Brooktrout, Adelphia, NASA and the US Army rely on Winchester Systems for their primary storage so it is perfectly reasonable to use Winchester Systems for secondary storage. The cost savings can be quite significant while absolutely providing the quality secondary storage required for mirror backup, snapshots backup and replication data. At the very least, purchasing a portion of the organization’s requirements from a small third party vendor communicates to the primary vendor that there is a willingness to consider a third party vendor seriously. This strategic move provides the organization with much needed bargaining leverage on the next purchase of primary storage as a side benefit – perhaps saving enough to pay for the secondary storage completely.

How It Works

All Winchester Systems disk array products emulate SCSI disks and are recognized on every industry standard operating system and logical volume manager as logical units. Just like most storage offered by the server vendors and major third party vendors, Winchester Systems disk arrays work in every popular environment. All mirroring, replication, snapshot, virtualization and virtual tape software will recognize Winchester Systems disk arrays and be capable of reading and writing the native operating system files to and from the device like any other.

The differences include: simplicity of installation, ease of management and far lower cost. Literally, the storage is old-fashioned “plug and play” hardware that is simply connected, initialized and run. It could not be a more perfect match for a secondary storage application. The hardware is taken out of the box and is storing your secondary data on the same day.

	The diagram depicts a typical primary data services environment with primary storage devices from server vendors and major third party vendors operating side-by side with secondary storage from Winchester Systems. For completeness, a variety of backup and replication options that deploy cost effective secondary storage are shown.