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How do you make an appliance more than just an appliance

Eric_Seidman
Moderator
Moderator
Employee

Veritas Technologies announced a new storage appliance—the Access 3340.  It’s a couple of servers with a bunch of disks attached.  Amazing!Access appliance image blog 2.png

Let’s start from the beginning.  You know, the tsunamis, eruptions, explosions and landslides of data that’s taking place in our data centers.  While all these apocalyptic metaphors are tired and overused, they do indeed describe what’s happening.  Between the growth in unstructured data and the increasing pressures required from regulatory compliance (GDPR, etc.), finding somewhere to store all this data—safely, cost-effectively and easily—is a big problem!

The software-first approach

Let’s say that you’re a company that specializes in developing storage software, specifically software-defined storage (SDS) solutions that can be licensed by customers to run on the hardware of their choice.  You naturally create these solutions to help conquer the impending doom of the natural disaster metaphors.  Veritas has done exactly that—and in fact is quite good at it.  For example, Veritas has been a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions for fifteen consecutive years (since the report’s inception).[1]

Software-defined storage is now a widely-accepted alternative to the traditional appliance acquisition model.  SDS decouples the software from the hardware, allowing customers to deploy storage software on the hardware of their choice. SDS provides deployment flexibility, lower hardware costs, organizational agility, and easier, more affordable growth.  It’s perfect for organizations that have sufficient time and IT resources to support a “do-it-yourself (DIY)” deployment model.

But—there’s a ton of cases where SDS doesn’t quite fit the bill.  Customers often need a complete solution—a tested, tuned and supported solution stack—for a variety of reasons.  For example, an organization may need additional resources sooner than it is practical to execute an SDS deployment, or they may lack the resources to test and tune an SDS solution on their own hardware.

Ideally, customers need an end-to-end packaged solution, with the flexibility of SDS, while retaining the option of deploying their own hardware when and if the occasion arises.

Enter the Access 3340—Cost-optimized for high-capacity workloads

Let’s get back to the original “you have some servers and a bunch of disks” thread.  We’ve established that SDS is good, but a turnkey appliance is an often-needed alternative.

To that end, Veritas has developed several storage-related appliances—the latest being the Veritas Access 3340 Appliance.  Yes, it’s some servers connected to a bunch of disks—but wait – that’s not all, there’s more!

The Veritas™ Access 3340 Appliance is a turnkey deployment of Veritas’ software-defined Access scale-out network attached storage—a storage solution optimized for unstructured data use cases. The appliance is cost-optimized and tuned for the high capacity workloads like long-term retention (LTR), tape replacement and archiving. It supports multiple protocols, including NFS, CIFS, FTP, SMB, and S3 to increase infrastructure and application agility.  To improve cost, capacity, and resilience, policy-based tiering orchestrates data migration to next-tier on-prem, off-prem, or multi-cloud object stores.

The Access 3340 is deeply integrated with Veritas NetBackup and NetBackup CloudCatalyst, providing a turnkey, cost-optimized LTR solution for large-scale (PB) deployments where Veritas NetBackup is the primary backup utility.  Integration with NetBackup and CloudCatalyst deduping capability increases backup retention capacities and reduces media transfer costs (especially to public cloud), reducing storage and networking costs by as much as 30x.

When an appliance is more than just an appliance—It’s an “Un-Appliance”

Like all Veritas appliances, Veritas™ Access 3340 Appliance comes with everything needed to put the system into production—including pre-tuned OS, security enhancements, simplified hardware and software monitoring and the latest version of Veritas™ software.  Veritas appliances are tested, tuned deployed and supported as a single entity—giving customers a solid optimized and fully supported solution that can be deployed quite quickly.

But (an important “but”), it’s really an “un-appliance,” because the software is decoupled from the hardware.  The decoupling allows future (possibly DIY) hardware upgrades “underneath” the licensed software. Think of it as the best of both worlds: immediate deployment of a total solution stack, with the potential to tailor the underlying hardware to more closely fit the needs of the associate workloads or data center policies.

Key Features

Veritas Access 3340 key features include:

  • Highly resilient. The 3340 Appliance has multiple levels of resilience, including dual servers and RAID-protected disk volumes.
  • Low Cost. Not only is the Access 3340 Appliance optimized for low-cost archival storage, but the integration through NetBackup CloudCatalyst can further lower the cost/TB by as much as 30x.
  • Scalable architecture. The Veritas Access 3340 appliance is a pay as you grow, scale-up appliance model that starts at 700 TB of usable capacity and scales to 2.8 PB.
  • A single pane of glass to manage multiple instances, including integration with Veritas NetBackup and Veritas Enterprise Vault
  • It’s not just an appliance - it’s a Veritas Un-Appliance. An end-to-end packaged solution, with the software licenses decoupled from the hardware.

So, yes, the Access 3340 Appliance is some servers with a bunch of disks attached.  But (a) the packaging of the servers and disks is cost-optimized for large-scale deployments (to the tune of one of the best on-prem $/TB in the industry), (b) it’s tightly integrated with Veritas NetBackup, and (c) it’ll give you an immediate deployment of the highly respected and popular Veritas Access SDS storage solution.

For more information visit Access 3340 Appliance.

 

[1] Veritas Technologies Named a Leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Re...