Helping to reduce backup and archiving costs

Fujitsu announces further technology enhancements that underline why many customers consider the Fujitsu Storage ETERNUS CS8000 appliance to be the first choice for data backup, archiving and consolidation of data protection environments.

The latest generation of the technologically-superior Fujitsu Storage ETERNUS CS8000 Data Protection Appliance delivers unbeatable data availability and efficiency in business-critical IT operations. Uniquely, ETERNUS CS8000 is the most flexible appliance on the market to support mid-range environments as well as high-end enterprises with a reliable and cost efficient solution, based on the individual customer needs. Already a segment leader in terms of product quality, functionality, and scalability in capacity and performance, enterprise-class deduplication technology of the ETERNUS CS8000 has also been further refined.

Not all data are the same, and not all data require the same protection levels. The unique flexibility of ETERNUS CS8000 allows organisations to treat data according to the business requirements. More importantly, ETERNUS CS8000 is not limited to optimising the backup process, but also to optimise the restore and recovery processes – the fundamental task of any backup.

Fujitsu believes that organisations should not be forced into making future-facing choices about data storage media. That’s why the latest version of the ETERNUS CS8000 follows its natural development in automating the cross-media mix of disk and tape technology – now with an even deeper integration of the use of tape in combination with backup-to-deduplication-disk scenarios for a holistic data protection solution. Highly automated processes further reduce infrastructure and administration costs.

Bernhard Brandwitte, Vice President Global Storage Business at Fujitsu, adds: “Data protection is not about backup – it is about recovery! Pure deduplication appliances in particular can dazzle customers with theoretical peak performance numbers for the backup process. But in the end all that matters is recovery speed, especially for large data sets like a complete database. If your productive IT system is down, then every second counts. ETERNUS CS8000 provides a ten-fold performance premium over systems from other vendors – even better for disaster recovery. To keep the costs low, ETERNUS CS8000 uses disk, deduplication disk and tape in the right mix to best fit the customer’s individual needs. And this whole process is automated to align resources based on business requirements – this is what we call business-centric storage.”

An optional NAS subsystem within ETERNUS CS8000 offers enhanced archive and second-tier file storage capabilities that enable disaster protection with the parallel use of both replication and copy-to-tape for the same file system. Integrated backup functionality even allows the protection of files against user errors, and no complex and costly backup concept is necessary to protect archive files. The integration of tape also means that tape can still be used cost-effectively for file storage, while IT managers can keep their options open regarding future changes in their choice of storage medium for unified data protection environments.

KPMG AG has also audited the ETERNUS CS8000 for compliance in Germany with legal regulations concerning commercial and tax law for storing, indexing and retrieval of electronic documents.

Fujitsu customer, Deutsche Rentenversicherung Berlin-Brandenburg, a German pension fund, enjoys the simple administration, operational safety and cost savings related to the use of tape for long-term data storage. Sabina Winzer, Head of Division, Corporate Services Department IT Division, comments: “With ETERNUS CS8000, we have selected a storage system that perfectly meets our need for secure digital archiving of important data such as our policyholders’ pension files. On top of that, we benefit from a consolidated IT infrastructure and simplified IT management, since ETERNUS CS8000 is used for storing our backup data as well as our archive data.”

Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Analyst, Storage at IDC says: “In today's highly virtualised and mixed workload environments, enterprises can benefit from using scale-out storage architectures that enable them to linearly scale capacity and/or performance independent of each other while keeping management simple and costs low. Large enterprises – with their no-compromise requirement around performance, resilience, quality of service, high availability and reliability – are likely to rely on newer, more scalable iterations of established enterprise storage systems for their business-critical workloads.”