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As enterprises continue to adopt and expand VMware-based environments, protecting data used by virtualized applications is crucial for ongoing business operations. IT departments, therefore, have to maintain rigorous backup and replication processes in order to achieve recovery time and recovery point objectives. However, with data growing exponentially and backup and replication files multiplying equally fast, IT managers are faced with increasingly costly purchase/upgrade cycle of storage systems and tape silos in addition to the space, cooling, and power expenses, and staff to manage them.

Nirvanix cloud storage services not only provide superior economics over onsite backup and replication of virtual machines, but also maximize data protection through globally distributed redundant copies for disaster recovery. In addition, Nirvanix offers usage-based pricing for on-demand storage to meet spikes, while reducing power and cooling costs, and freeing up data center space and IT staff for applications that will enhance enterprise competitiveness.

Nirvanix Enterprise-Class Cloud Storage: A Seamless Extension of the VM Environment

Nirvanix’s battle-hardened, second generation implementation of cloud storage services seamlessly extend the backup and replication of VM environments and deliver:

  • Usage-based pricing – Lower CapEx from day one
  • Elastic, on-demand storage immediately deployable: expand or shrink storage pool as required – No physical storage systems or tape silos to buy, manage, and house; No idle storage
  • Guaranteed enterprise QoS – No excuses SLAs with up to five nines of data availability
  • Multi-level security – Safeguard critical business data used by virtualized applications
  • Global network – Access files from any location; Leverage redundant copies for disaster recovery
  • One flat monthly rate for unlimited uploads, downloads, bandwidth and replication – No maintenance fees; No tech refresh costs
  • Backup and Replicate VM Environments to the Nirvanix Cloud

Protecting business critical data used by VMware-virtualized applications by moving to Nirvanix cloud storage requires no changes to workflows or processes. The Nirvanix cloud is tightly integrated with backup and replication products from leading providers or you can simply establish the Nirvanix CloudNAS® Gateway as a target for CommVault, Symantec, or Veeam software.

Choice of Cloud Deployment Options

Nirvanix is the only company that offers public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployment options under its CloudComplete™ portfolio to protect VMware-based environments – with flexible, usage-based pricing available for all options.

Safety, Compliance & Peace of Mind – Nirvanix Meets Today’s Data Protection Challenges

You can move beyond the limitations of traditional backup and archiving solutions by leveraging the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network as a secure remote repository for your critical data. Data stored with Nirvanix are quickly and easily saved at one or more hardened, geographically remote locations, but always remain instantly accessible for compliance and business needs. Data are encrypted both in flight and at rest for extraordinary security. Our CloudNAS software and open API allow many popular backup and archiving products to write directly to our storage cloud and they support the leading deduplication and compression solutions. With Nirvanix, you maximize IT budgets by paying only for what you use rather than continually building out complex, expensive, and error-prone tape infrastructures.

We believe that policies equal control, which equals compliance. Our policy-based solutions give you unsurpassed control of your data, opening up new possibilities for your archives. Customize your storage by storing copies of files at multiple sites to meet stringent retention policies. Precisely control who accesses your accounts and assign different policies to different data sets. Quickly verify, find, and retrieve files for compliance needs. In the process, you will replace hefty capital investments with a flexible, monthly operational expense. We simplify the safekeeping and maintenance of archival storage, even automatically and seamlessly migrating data to new discs on standard refresh cycles. You will free IT resources for production data and meet all compliance, business, and governance requirements securely and cost-effectively.

Key Benefits

Reduce Costs

Eliminate hardware purchases and labor-intensive tape backups

Secure Storage

Data is copied to one or more remote SAS 70-compliant locations and encrypted both in flight and at rest

Instant Access

Data is immediately accessible for restore, reuse, or compliance

Reduce Complexity

Eliminate management and maintenance of tape and disk systems

Effortless Control

Policies, monitoring capabilities, and a familiar file system provide complete control over your stored data

Why do I need the headache and cost of keeping copies off-site?

Whether bound by regulations or good business practices, all enterprises must store copies of their critical data away from their data centers to protect this information from natural disasters and accidental or malicious modification. However, long-term retention demands complex and difficult to manage technology refreshes and data migrations. Moreover, an effective retention policy today must meet stringent demands.

The offsite storage repository has to be highly secure, continually monitored, and, of course, cost-effective. It has to be forever scalable as the volume of data generated grows inexorably and regulatory guidelines impose longer retention periods. Data also must be available constantly and easily to satisfy business and recovery needs. Finally, files must be quickly searchable and accessible to verify and fulfill regulatory compliance. Enterprises can meet these requirements using internal resources, which typically strain budgets and IT staffs, or by turning to simpler, more economical solutions offered by storage service providers.

Why not continue to rely on backup tapes?

For decades, tape media has been the traditional data retention strategy for most enterprises. Although tape locks away large volumes of data, it is a generations-old technology that no longer meet business needs in the age of high-speed data networking and regulatory compliance.

First, tape is burdensome. The media requires IT staff to manually and routinely make backups and ship the tape offsite. Moreover, enterprises suffer from vendor lock-in because they must use the same hardware and software environment five years from now to read tapes made today. Therefore, while tape may initially seem practical and cost-effective, it generates many expenses that elevate its long-term cost of ownership.

Second, accessing data from tape is cumbersome. Retrieving data demands poring over indexes of tape contents, obtaining the appropriate tapes, and carefully rebuilding the files on production networks. This laborious process consumes IT resources and delays access to business-critical information.

Therefore, and this is a deal-breaker, tape is woefully inadequate in today’s regulatory environment. Administrators must verify that vital data are stored and quickly locate and retrieve specific information should a compliance issue arise. Yet tape indexes are limited and provide no full-text search capability. Consequently, tape suffers in comparison to modern alternatives like the Nirvanix cloud storage service.

Is your data really secure on tape?

If used properly, tape media can effectively warehouse data offsite, but this is a mission-critical “if.” The process of writing, handling, shipping, and retrieving tapes is notoriously error-prone. There are few error-checking procedures to confirm that all data have been properly stored. In fact, many high-profile data-loss incidents were due to the improper handling of tapes.

These limitations undermine the security of a long-term tape backup strategy, particularly since superior alternatives are now available. Advanced solutions from Nirvanix encrypt data both in flight and at rest and enable you to instantly verify the integrity of your files.

Is in-house data replication a good alternative to tape?

For years, enterprises have replicated their data to disk at offsite locations for the rapid recovery of operations in the event of a disaster. Yet, merely retaining a single active mirror of a data set leaves much to be desired when it comes to meeting backup and compliance demands. Long-term retention requires multiple point-in-time copies, permitting a rollback of data to a previous state. Additionally, compliance archives must be immutable if they are to show the state of a system at a certain point in the past. Therefore, while replication and mirroring are excellent choices for disaster recovery, they do not meet all today’s data protection needs.

Moreover, in-house replication is expensive and complex. It requires building, staffing, configuring, and operating a remote data center, which is very costly. It also entails installing over-provisioned hardware to ensure future capacity, driving up capital outlays still further. The fact is the costs and complexity of maintaining long-term, compliance-ready storage repositories are only going to worsen. Addressing compliance and business demands with in-house backup is becoming too expensive and burdensome for all but the most highly capitalized enterprises