Using CloudArray for Multi-Site Consolidation

Imagine running a business where data storage is distributed across 20 geographically separated sites. What happens when one site runs out of storage capacity? What if one site was hit with a disaster? Surely there ought to be a centralized disaster site to protect against site outage or data loss, right? And who manages each site? Would there be an administrator at each site or traveling from site to site? What can you do to ease this management burden?

Cloud Storage Can Simplify Your Multi-site Infrastructure

Public and private cloud storage, accessed through CloudArray software provides a user with:

 

  • An unlimited pool of storage that's accessible from each site and never runs out of capacity
  • A centralized disaster site with unlimited bandwidth and multi-datacenter redundancy, network optimization and data security
  • A centralized portal that monitors and proactively alerts the health status of each site — without an onsite presence

 

cloud san diagram for remote branch office storage

Cloud storage does this via  cloud storage gateways like CloudArray, that provide optimized data access from each site combined with a central point of management. CloudArray lets you recover your data in minutes from virtually anywhere, on-premise, off-premise or even in the cloud using pay-as-you-go compute resources. There is indeed a better way to manage growing data storage needs across multiple locations.

DR Anywhere™

While businesses that span multiple sites may choose to rely on one of their sites for disaster recovery (DR), it may take large amounts of time and money to ready the site's fixed storage capacity for increases in data volumes.  With cloud storage, secondary data copies can reside in the cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis.  By using CloudArray's automatic and secure configuration backup, users can instantly download their data to any site in the event of a disaster. CloudArray can also be started and run in the cloud, allowing access to the cloud data from any location.

Compute Anywhere™

For data volumes that need to be accessed from multiple sites, volumes access points can move across multiple CloudArrays located across multiple physical locations or in the cloud.

Not every cloud storage solution supports the capability to access your data for compute tasks anywhere. Some gateways make cloud storage look like a local storage array, with only a single local point of access. Other appliances appear as storage arrays, with an extra tier of storage in the cloud that is only accessed internally. CloudArray gives you all of the benefits of cloud storage, with local-speed performance, seamless interoperability and a multi-site distributed storage model.