Here’s a question we are getting almost every day at this point. How is Seven10’s StorFirst EAS software technology different from EMC’s File Management Appliance (FMA)? StorFirst EAS may sound like FMA (Rainfinity). Both products help customers archive unstructured data to allow for better data management. But these are two different products doing very different things. Let’s take a look.

There are 2 major differentiating factors between StorFirst EAS and FMA: 1) the relation to NAS and 2) the tiering process.

1) Each Product’s Relation to NAS

FMA is a NAS file mover. It cannot function independently of a NAS device and is most commonly used with EMC’s Celerra platform, but is also compatible with NetApp. The software can either deploy automated data movement within NAS (i.e. move files from CLARiiON to SATA disk within Celerra) or it can take files out of Celerra and place them on Atmos or Centera. FMA will not support Windows file server systems; it only supports NAS.

StorFirst EAS works completely independent of NAS. EAS essentially “NAS-ifies” a customer’s storage – aggregating it, virtualizing it, and representing it as a Global X drive, a standard share on the network. Think of StorFirst EAS as a target. The customer points his application to Seven10 (target, Global X drive) and we automate tiering from there. Seven10 is NOT confined to working within the context of NAS. We will support NAS as a target to which one can archive data. StorFirst EAS is Windows-based software, sitting on a Windows 2003 or 2008 server.

2) The Tiering Process

FMA will follow an HSM-type model when tiering data. FMA will actually move a file from one tier to another based on policies.  FMA leaves behind a stub when tiering. If a file is being moved from a SATA disk in Celerra to Centera, a stub will be left behind in the Celerra system.

StorFirst EAS will synchronously archive a file to up to three tiers of storage, writing to multiple platforms at the same time.  Seven10 is a 100% virtual file system, so stubs or agents don’t exist in our world. Since data will be sitting on all available tiers of storage, there is no need to move a file from one tier to another; the file will already be there. The customer simply sets up retention policies that will determine how long data lasts on a tier before it is automatically purged from that tier.

Additional Differentiating Factors:

FMA cannot write to block data, like DMX. StorFirst EAS can write to block-based storage (like DMX) or file-based.  As long as the actual file can be routed through our file system, Seven10 doesn’t care if it was block or file.

FMA has a 250 million file limit. StorFirst EAS has a soft limit of billions of files and directories. Our scale is only limited by the amount of disk space it takes to house our database.

When EMC developed their Centera platform, it was designed as an archiving platform to protect static data. Centera was built for hospitals, government agencies, banks – any institution with heavy compliance requirements that mandated data be kept for a certain period of time. In theory, Centera doesn’t need to be backed-up. It comes fully equipped with security features and functionality that keeps data safe.

But it’s still hardware, it’s still live, and something could still happen. IT administrators can never be too safe. Plus, some regulations (especially overseas) require data to be kept one more than one storage platform. Having important archive data just sitting on Centera didn’t quite cut it for some folks.

EMC recognized this customer concern, and developed the Centera Back-up and Recovery Module (CBRM). This product allowed customers to back-up their Centera C-clips to disk as an added layer of disaster recovery. However, what EMC eventually found was that this method did not maintain Centera’s compliance features.

CBRM was backing up data to disk that was still live on the network. Then a back-up application was required in order to move that information to tape. What if the back-up application copied the data 3 hours after it had been backed-up to disk? That data is vulnerable for three hours. Not good. Customers were happy to have data somewhere else, but were not happy that their data could potentially be compromised.

Four months ago in April 2010, EMC discontinued Centera Back-up and Recovery Module (CBRM). Customers can no longer purchase it. Those customers who currently use the product will be granted support until April 2011.

Several years ago, Seven10 developed software that replicated Centera data directly to tape without compromising compliance. EMC has chosen Seven10’s StorFirst Altus software as the replacement product for CBRM. Seven10 is the only company that licenses software technology enabling Centera users to back-up their data to tape or VTL.

So Centera users out there – contact us for details. We recently sold StorFirst Altus into a government agency that had their data center flooded. Don’t wait until that happens. Add that disaster recovery layer to your Centera today.

The newest technology in tape, LTO5, is making news lately for both its performance and its impressive capacity per piece of media. IBM recently announced a Long Term File System specifically designed for LTO5. The idea is that the file system enables tape to become a better medium for data archiving and not just backup.

Of course, adoption of LTFS is going to be driven by both ISVs and the makers of the operating systems. After all, if the intention is to use tape as a “drag and drop” drive, then an O/S is going to have to mount that tape and present it as a file system just as it would any old disk.

But what folks like us are more interested in is the new partitioning feature. Since tape is linear (Linear Tape Open), it must be written sequentially, and ideally, at the maximum rate the drive and tape supports. This makes it ideal for fast streaming backup targets, but makes search and discovery, a key component of archiving, a bit difficult.

We agree that tape is a great archive medium, even given the challenges of the linear format. Seven10 has been archiving file system data to tape for 5 years, albeit with a proprietary file system and through our tiered storage product, StorFirst EAS. Even older technologies without partitions can be used with intelligent tiering and caching.

Today, our customers can tier SAN disk and tape for a mirrored WORM archive file system. Or, they can simply use a locally attached disk to cache data written by users and set policies for how large the cache should be before flushing it out to tape.

Our CIFS/NFS presentation and highly scalable virtual file system takes care of the bits and bytes of media support for them. Want to mirror that tape and bring to another site for use? That’s absolutely possible by simply inventorying the mirror at another site and then reading the data from the share. Our read caching even enhances 1 + n access read times.

The advent of the partitioning on tape has been thought of internally for years now. There is even preliminary support in the product today; we were just waiting for the appropriate physical technology to work with. We’re really excited about the possibility of making search and discovery even quicker than it is now.

Repeat after me: Tape is not dead.

- Adam Marcionek, Principal Engineer for Seven10