Middle Market DISASTER RECOVERY

No company can be without a disaster recovery solution. The threats posed by terrorists, hackers, disgruntled employees, and natural disasters should make protecting electronic data a top priority for every business. RAID (redundant array of independent disks) has been a popular way of mirroring data to insure information is not lost forever. Unfortunately, not every company has been able to afford a RAID solution. The advent of RAID solutions that incorporate ATA (advanced technology attachment) disk drives, however, is about to bring disaster recovery, and low-cost disk storage in general, to the masses.

ATA Brings Down The Cost Of RAID
An ATA RAID solution incorporates a RAID controller and off-the-shelf ATA disk drives, which are commonly used in desktops and servers. ATA drives are inexpensive because they are mass-produced by the drive manufacturers. An ATA solution provides redundancy by incorporating standard RAID levels such as 0+1, 3, or 5.

Traditionally, companies have been using either SCSI (small computer system interface) or Fibre Channel drives in their RAID solutions. "Fibre Channel drives have been the disk drive of choice at the enterprise level," says Ed Zraket, general manager of RAID, Inc. (Lawrence, MA). "But data sets continue to grow and customers keep finding new reasons to replicate their data. If a company is using Fibre Channel disk drives, the cost of storing and replicating data becomes very expensive."

The cost difference between an ATA solution and a Fibre Channel or SCSI solution can be quite substantial. Zraket notes the reseller cost for a 160 GB ATA drive is $235. The cost for a 144 GB Fibre Channel drive is around $1,000. Since a typical ATA RAID solution produced by RAID, Inc. contains around 50 drives, using an ATA RAID solution rather than a Fibre Channel solution could save RAID, Inc.'s customers over $38,000. The lower cost to end users also means more sales to those customers that previously wanted RAID but could not afford a SCSI or Fibre Channel RAID solution.

Sell A RAID Solution, Not A Bunch Of Drives
At a time when low margins are a concern of all VARs and integrators, selling commodity hardware (such as ATA drives) might seem like a step in the wrong direction. But Zraket believes there is money to be made in ATA RAID solutions. "Commodity hardware typically leads to lower margins," says Zraket. "But if the ATA drives are put into a product set and sold as a complete solution, they can be very profitable. ATA RAID allows VARs to sell a disaster recovery solution to customers they could not reach before."

RAID, Inc. actually sells a platform, which is a combination of hardware, software, and services. In today's business environment, IT budgets are not growing as fast as the information companies need to store, provided they are growing at all. But Zraket cautions against trying to sell a generic ATA RAID solution to every customer. RAID, Inc. has been successful in the RAID market by consulting with each customer and building a customized solution to meet that customer's needs. "We are not just slapping drives and enclosures together and shoving them out the door," says Zraket. "We are building affordable solutions that our customers need."

The Need For Data Replication Grows
Although disaster recovery seems to be the most popular application of ATA RAID, Zraket has found that customers will replicate their data for two other reasons. The first is to insure a backup copy of data is readily accessible. "Electronic data is growing so fast that restoring data from tape, a job that used to take hours or maybe a day, could now take three or four days," says Zraket. "If a customer needs to restore data, they can go back to the last time the data was stored on an ATA device and recover the data in minutes."

Another reason customers need to make copies of data is for developmental use, and this is also becoming a popular use for ATA RAID. If a company needs to update a production database, that database is typically not available to users during the update. With additional disk storage, a company can replicate the database and perform necessary upgrades on the copied database while users still have access to information in the original production database. When the update is complete, the updated database replaces the original, thus eliminating any downtime for the customer. Companies running tests on their databases would also want to use a copy of the data for the testing, and not the production database itself.

Overcome The Performance Objections
Although ATA RAID solutions are less expensive than RAID solutions incorporating SCSI or Fibre Channel drives, customers still need to be sold on the technology. The most common concern Zraket has to overcome revolves around performance. "ATA drives are simply not as robust as SCSI or Fibre Channel drives," says Zraket, referring to the fact that ATA drives access data at a slower rate and are more prone to failure. The reason, of course, is that ATA drives are made for servers and desktops, not enterprise-based applications. However, Zraket believes ATA drives still serve a purpose in the enterprise. "That is the point we have to get across to customers," he argues. "Lower forms of technology can still play at the enterprise level as long as they are used with the right applications."

To overcome the performance objection, RAID, Inc. will inform customers of the performance and reliability (mean time between failures) limitations of ATA drives. The mean time between failures might be 1 million hours on SCSI or Fibre Channel disk drives, but only 30% to 50% of that time on an ATA drive. ATA drives also have limitations on how many drives can be connected on a single channel.

A lack of redundancy in the ATA RAID system is also a concern for customers. "There are currently some limitations with the RAID controllers in ATA RAID systems," says Zraket, noting that the controllers typically have a single point of failure. But despite these concerns, there are ways to get around customer objections. "We inform customers that ATA drives can sustain a failure and the RAID system will still provide ongoing access to information," adds Zraket. "We also remind customers that ATA drives are typically storing copies of their data, not their primary data. The major benefit of ATA RAID is the cost. Even if there is a single point of failure in the array, the customer's buy decision will come down to a cost analysis and deciding how redundant they want to make the copies of their data. The data they will be storing on these drives is not mission-critical."

Can Customers Afford To Not Have RAID?
Even with the lower cost of ATA drives, price is still a concern for many customers looking into a RAID solution for the first time. Whenever a customer scoffs at the price, Zraket will ask them what the cost is of their downtime or lost data. The cost of an ATA RAID solution is always far less than the amount a customer will come up with for associated downtime or lost data.

Zraket believes eliminating customer downtime should always be the primary focus of any storage VAR. While ATA RAID is an affordable secondary storage solution for enterprise customers, its primary use is as a disaster recovery solution. Although every company needs to have a disaster recovery plan, many companies still do not have one. For many of these companies, a disaster recovery plan still consists of a nightly backup with the tapes taken off-site. Not exactly a true disaster recovery plan. RAID, which would have provided those companies with the technology to implement a disaster recovery plan, was simply too expensive.

"More and more companies are realizing how critical it is for their information to always be available," says Zraket. "It used to be that if a system went down, companies went through a fire drill trying to recover lost data. Today, people are considering what would happen if a disaster scenario happened to them and what they can do to better safeguard their data. ATA disk drives now allow a lot of customers to install a disaster recovery solution they could not have even dreamed about a few years ago."