COPAN De-Dupe and Enterprise MAID to Remote Office Environment

COPAN Systems announced the introduction of the COPAN Systems 100T Remote Office VTL, a new solution with deduplication that delivers a fast, reliable and secure back up for remote offices. Combined with COPAN Systems’ intelligent replication and the highly scalable 300T with industry-leading Enterprise MAID technology at the primary or disaster recovery data center, COPAN Systems provides an enterprise wide disaster recovery solution that cost effectively meets growing recovery report objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) service level agreements.

In today’s distributed enterprise, reportedly over 70 percent of corporate data for a typical Fortune 1000 company is generated outside of the corporate office. This presents a unique set of challenges for ensuring consistent levels of data protection for remote office data backup and disaster recovery across the entire enterprise, particularly when data is backed up on unreliable and insecure tape formats. With multiple copies of the same data stored in multiple remote office locations, the cost of reliably storing these increased volumes of backup data enterprise wide continues to mount.

The new COPAN Systems 100T provides reliable, local backups for geographically dispersed remote offices. Data deduplication is used to dramatically decrease the amount of storage used, lowering local storage costs. Like the larger, MAID-based 300T VTL for the primary data center, the 100T utilizes post-processing deduplication to obtain significant space savings while not impacting critical backup windows. With the intelligent replication feature, only unique data that has changed since the last remote backup is sent electronically to the COPAN Systems 300T at the central data center. Additionally, a common data element need only be sent once from any one of the 100Ts attached to a 300T for replication. This eliminates copies of the same backup data stored in multiple office locations, reducing data by up to 15x or more and eliminating the strain on WAN resources.

Once the remote office data is aggregated to the 300T in the central data center, it is stored via the Enterprise MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) platform, which only powers up drives when requested by the application. This ensures no more than 25 percent of the densely packed drives are ever turned on at the same time. As a result, customers reduce power and cooling costs by at least 75 percent as well as reduce the solution footprint while significantly increasing the life of the disks.

"It’s an unpleasant fact of IT life that backup and recovery process can easily become fragmented and inefficient, and that the situation is often exacerbated when systems are not centralized, with processes that rely on error-prone manual tape-based operations at remote sites," said Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Far better is a centralized, enterprise wide DR and backup strategy to ensure that users’ data is both protected and also available if needed. Systems such as the new COPAN Systems 100T Remote Office VTL can contribute significantly to such an approach, and also leverage deduplication and MAID technologies to enhance the cost and energy efficiency of the overall solution."

The COPAN Systems 100T VTL extends a number of Enterprise MAID benefits to the remote office including:

• Seamless integration: The COPAN Systems 100T supports the industry’s broadest range of tape drives and libraries. This means there is no need to re-engineer the backup process, and customers can protect and leverage existing investments with the deployment of the 100T.
• Enterprise class deduplication: The 100T uses the same deduplication technology found in the massive and ultra reliable 300T VTL. Effective capacities of 38TB, 120TB and 240TB in a form factor as small as 2U are available to be installed in your remote office 19-inch rack.
• Affordable electronic replication: The 100T with Intelligent Replication reduces the amount of WAN resources significantly by sending only changed data to the enterprise. The system is also tape format aware and therefore able to optimize the identification of duplicate data for higher deduplication ratios.
• Secure data movement: By cost effectively replicating data over a WAN, the risk of lost, mislabeled or stolen tape cartridges is eliminated.
• High performance: Disk-based backup and optional 4 GB/s Fibre Channel connectivity combine to greatly accelerate the backup process. Multi-streaming and multi-session backup capabilities add parallelism to further enhance performance.

"The importance of an efficient enterprise wide disaster recovery and data backup strategy cannot be underestimated," said Chris Santilli, chief technology officer, COPAN Systems. "Companies have been struggling with cost effectively ensuring the security and reliability of their backups not just in central data centers, but across the enterprise. Through the 100T, COPAN Systems believes that businesses will realize significant performance and reliability gains with the combination of Enterprise MAID and data deduplication."

The COPAN Systems 100T is generally available since October 15.