Boosting The Branch Office
Boosting The Branch Office
Telephones, faxes, modems, Ethernet, WANs… each leap ahead in technology brings new challenges for business processes. Today, the challenge is data services at the branch office.
Wide Area Networks (WANs) have made it possible for business to expand irrespective of timezone, while Storage Area Networks (SANs) have kept useful information flowing through an organisation’s veins instead of being locked away waiting for a day of reckoning.
As technology fuels expansion, it also creates headaches for IT departments struggling to keep everything working together, to back up data, to ensure the company’s information is safe from theft and accessible in case of litigation.
So, the question is how do we weave together the many storage innovations, and manage them from a single point? The answer could be Tapestry from Brocade.
Many organisations struggle to keep their information safe, secure and available. A task that is made doubly difficult when offices are spread out around the country, leaving branches to manage tape backups, hardware issues and communications - often with unqualified staff.
“The challenges organisations are facing are how to better and more cost effectively manage their branch offices. Many organisations have a distributed environment: head office and multiple remote offices.
“It has always been an issue as to how to manage your storage and servers effectively at the branch office,” says Graham Schultz, Brocade Communications Systems Inc’s Country Manager, Australia and New Zealand. “Tapestry allows customers to consolidate a lot of server and storage infrastructure from the remote branch and bring it back into the head office.” To address these issues, Brocade has developed a three-pronged attack.
Strong ARMing Your Data
The first is Brocade’s Application Resource Manager (ARM). An organisation’s servers, storage system and applications have a complicated relationship, and the separation between the three is becoming blurred as they are increasingly seen as components of a lager application. A web-server, for example, is made up of the server hardware, the storage system, and the applications.
“Currently, solutions provided by some vendors tend to offer homogenous replication between their own disk arrays. When working with heterogeneous arrays, or storage from multiple vendors in an organisation, there have always been challenges to doing this at a disk level.” says Schultz. “You can do this at a server level with Vertias, but at a disk level with high speed replication you need Tapestry.”
ARM enables an enterprise to bring together all of its storage resources, irrespective of vendor, as it moves to high-density blade server environments. It also needs efficient shared storage architecture to improve data access and management. ARM provides this by automating often labour-intensive tasks. For example, it can rapidly deploy “golden” system images over a SAN without needing manual configuration and replication on each individual machine. This enables management of the entire organisation, irrespective of location, from the data centre.
Centralising data allows for better information management and protection practices. However the benefits gained in management and security can be eaten up by impacting the speed and latency of conventional WANs.
No Waiting With WAFS
This hit to efficiencies has traditionally been attacked by adding file servers at the remote location. However, this can be costly for initial setup and ongoing maintenance; and that’s before considering data consolidation and the impact on staff.
Centralised management and fast data access don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The second part of Brocade’s solution is its Wide Area File Services (WAFS). Using two appliances, one at the data centre and the other at the branch office, WAFS can potently accelerate WAN links. Called the core and edge devices respectively, the core device looks after communications between the file servers at the data centre and the edge devices at the branch.The edge devices cache the data being used by branch offices and provide a local copy for staff to work off. Only changes are sent back to the data centre. This way, the traffic is minimised across the network, which again reduces the latency for file access from the desktop.
Traffic over the WAN is also optimised using a special protocol that compresses the data, increases CIFS and NFS protocol efficiencies and further weeds out duplicate data.
This can have a potent effect on branch office productivity, especially in Australia where not every small branch has the budget or even the option for a broadband connection. If your data centre is in Sydney and you have a branch office in Kalgoorlie for example, dropping in a faster connection isn’t going to solve latency issues. However, with tapestry, it doesn’t have to.
“If you’ve got a car going down the freeway at 60km/h, and you want to go 100km/h, it doesn’t help putting another lane on the freeway.” says Schultz.
It makes more sense to make better use of what you have than adding expense. WAFS drastically cuts the amount of data being sent over a WAN link at any given time, and because all data accessed is cached locally, latency is a non issue.
Brocade claim to boost WAN performance by up to 100x, however, WAFS is not just a WAN accelerator.If a user needs some data that doesn’t happen to be cached, it gets copied from the data centre to the branch device rapidly, and any changes that are made are in turn copied back to the data centre on the fly to be backed up.Because the data is being served from a single point, and changes are immediately send back from the branch, the same file can be worked on by a number of people at different locations at the same time. This enables collaboration, more effective management and tighter security.
“75 percent of the data is stored outside of the data centre for most organisations.” says Schultz. “The data stored in remote locations needs to be tightly controlled and managed to ensure that everything meets compliance requirements.”
Minimizing Migration
The third part of Brocade’s Tapestry Solution is Data Migration Manager (DMM). IT departments routinely replace hardware as leases expire, upgrades appear and equipment explodes. Unless you’re out there with the soldering iron, hardware can be swapped with speed relative ease. Data however, can take many labour intensive hours to migrate from outdated, redundant or ruined hardware.
Many businesses also find themselves working with storage solutions from multiple vendors. They might have gotten better deals over the years from different manufacturers, their storage needs may have changed and their preferred vendor with them, either way, managing data in this heterogeneous environment requires a specialised solution.Tapestry DMM is a SAN based solution that simplifies data migration management in heterogeneous environments. It supports arrays from HP, EMC, IBM and Hitachi, and employs Brocade’s routing technology to perform migrations across SANs and WANs with terabyte per-hour speeds.
With its three-phase solution, Brocade’s Tapestry provides the means to consolidate data to a single location without compromising the convenience of LAN-like access in the remote office. It streamlines management, increases security and helps an organisation achieve greater compliance.
Tapestry is made up of three products: Application Resource Manager (ARM), Wide Area File Services (WAFS) and Data Migration Manager (DMM). Here is a quick refernce to how each one fits into the process.
Application Resource Manager (ARM)
ARM manages the relationships between servers, storage and software, allocating resources to make all three work together efficiently. It consolidates management tasks of the three sections into one place, increasing security, productivity and compliance.
Wide Area File Services (WAFS)
WAFS enables LAN-like access to the data centre from the branch office. It helps consolidate an organisation’s critical data, increasing security, availability and ease of management. It also reduces cost by eliminating infrastructure at the branch end.
Data Migration Manager (DMM)
DMM enables high-speed data migration in heterogeneous or multi-vendor storage environments. When compared to traditional, software based migration solutions, DMM makes use of Brocade’s routing technology to process data at the switch level for much faster migration.
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