FUJITSU Storage ETERNUS - Business-centric Storage

November 6, 2013

The new generations of ETERNUS DX and ETERNUS CS storage solutions enable customers to allocate storage resources according to business priorities, delivering a complete new and differentiating value proposition - "Business-centric Storage".

The Big Workaround - Rethinking Storage

Storage Professionals today face a multitude of challenges. Data storage currently grows by 50% per year on average, with some industries reporting 100% annual growth rates. At the same time, many performance-hungry applications are pushing storage systems beyond their limits.

Whereas today storage systems have theoretically no upper limit from a capacity point of view, the picture looks completely different from a storage performance perspective. Often there is a mismatch in the storage performance consumption of an application and its importance. The lack of quality of service or prioritization functionality is another root cause of performance shortages. As a result, storage is consuming an increasing part of the IT infrastructure budget.

Rethinking storage to overcome these challenges was the underlying strategy when developing the next generation of ETERNUS DX storage systems. One basic objective was aligning available storage resources according to business priorities. The second pillar of the development strategy was to create a new performance architecture contributing to better system utilization, which directly influences return on investment.

To better illustrate how the new ETERNUS can deliver enhanced business support, here is an example. A company does its business via an online shop. The online shop is closely linked to an ERP system to give potential buyers information about the availability of goods and provide the shop with access to a CRM system for reading the address and payment data of registered customers. Should the storage system create a bottleneck in data access for the shop, ERP and CRM application the potential buyers face long response times and may decide to buy elsewhere. By defining the response time and priority to business-critical data, good user experience is ensured. On the other hand, data from internal processes are given a lower priority to avoid performance degradation of the high-priority customer data.

With these enhancements, ETERNUS DX enables enterprises to consolidate their storage environments on a single storage system and provide excellent business support at the same time. This example shows why the new generation of ETENUS DX systems uses the motto "Business-centric Storage".

The new ETERNUS CS8000 series Data Protection Appliances

The tricky parts of backup and archiving (data protection) is to match service levels like data recovery, disaster resilience scenarios, and long-term storage to the cost pressure of today's business environments. At the market there are different solutions available for data protection such as tape libraries or appliances for backup or archiving. Each solution has its pros and cons depending on the individual customer use case. But almost all storage vendors focus on developing point solutions with a specific technology only.

The new ETERNUS CS8000 series provides the flexibility to unify all solution approaches in one appliance, enabling large-scale consolidation and cost reduction gains. The new ETERNUS CS8000 delivers three main enhancements which further strengthen the all-in-one approach.
Enterprise-class deduplication increases the utilization of the available disk space, reducing the cost of capacity.
Including stronger server hardware and larger storage system increase overall capacity by more than 200% and throughput of data by 50% enabling customers to manage extreme data growth without the need to migrate to other systems.
Asynchronous replication for the NAS part of the system enables disaster recover concepts for archives over long distances.
We will be able to provide the optimized individual customer solution, really based on the customer need - and not based on a limitation of the portfolio to point solutions.

By applying ETERNUS CS8000 our customer can allocate storage resources for data protection according to business priorities: To fulfill the right levels in terms of speed, capacity and reliability, and at the same time to minimize the investment cost and the total cost of ownership.

Applying ETERNUS CS8000 results in "Business-centric Storage".