Data Backup Digest

Skyera were founded in July 2010 and call themselves a “revolutionary enterprise solid state storage systems start up”. It was also recently ranked number seven in the Q1 2014 edition of the Top SSD Companies list which is researched and published by StorageSearch.com. Their main lines of products are rackmount SSDs which make use of Skyera’s design efficiency, adaptive R/W flash, big controller architecture and SSD software.

Late in June 2014 the California-based company announced that they have joined up with Seagate to collaborate on a solution that will overcome the challenges of backup and restore performance that is usually associated with disk-based backup systems.

The solution uses a combination of a variety of different systems. These are Skyera skyHawk solid state storage systems, EVault cloud storage services and Xyratex ClusterStor family of data storage solutions. This partnership will allow the offloading of CPU intensive tasks – these include compression to storage, which frees up the server CPUs for faster backup and restore speeds. This collaboration allows for restorations of up to 8TB per hour, which is much quicker than traditional disk-based operations. As such, should disaster strike within the business then these speeds will allow for a quick and easy recovery and let business operations run as they should.

This process employs a method called pointers. Rather than leveraging duplication, as many backup solutions often do, this method leaves pointers over time and marks backup data blocks as duplicates. It works in a similar way to disk fragmentation.

“These pointers are located in divergent locations on disk-based systems and restore performance suffers as the process devolves into a random I/O sequence resulting in excessively long system full restores,” explains the press release. Combining all the aforementioned solutions makes use of an offloading process that is similar to VMware VAAI, thus providing faster restores.

“While solid-state is not often thought of when talking about backup, skyHawk has the unique ability to shorten backup windows by using the power of flash to overcome random I/O workloads that typically bog down traditional disk-based systems,” said Radoslav Danilak, the co-founder and CEO of Skyera. “A seamless integration between Skyera and Seagate ensures that enterprises have peace of mind that not only their business-critical information is safely stored but that it can be quickly recovered if and when the need arises.”

This solution will allow customers to keep their current backups onsite and also have their data at a secure site that will provide geographically separated backups. Having your backups in different locations is a key part to a strong backup plan – keeping multiple copies of the data in the same room is no good against theft, natural disaster, or other malicious intent.

This is available immediately and further information can be sought from Skyera directly or from one of their channel partners. It is only through them that you will be able to find out about costs and implementation details. Curiously, there is no information regarding the partnership on EVault or Seagate’s website, with the only information coming from the press release and a PDF document on Skyera’s website.