INDUSTRY

YottaYotta announced today that a strategic analysis center of the United States Department of Defense has installed, trialed, and purchased the company’s new GSX 3000 NetStorage Control Node. The GSX 3000 offers a suite of Global Block Services that set a new standard for high-performance, resilient global data sharing, and fully-active business continuity, also known as continuity of operations (COOP). The GSX 3000 opens up new approaches to managing and implementing critical storage applications including transparent multi-site data sharing, site-aware geographic RAID, and high-speed data transport across multiple distributed centers. The result is increased utilization of IT resources, local SAN performance over the WAN, and fully-active business continuity or COOP. PLEASE SEE INDUSTRY NEWS. “The Department of Defense represents a large enterprise customer with significant mission critical infrastructure and COOP requirements that exceed the feature set of traditional storage networking solutions,” said Jack Kurtz, vice president of sales and business development for YottaYotta. “With the introduction of the GSX 3000, DoD and federal IT managers can now more easily and flexibly ensure vital information and critical storage network assets are protected and continuously available while at the same time greatly accelerating access to data on a daily basis.” FULLY-ACTIVE COOP CAPABILITY The requirement to provide its customers with uninterrupted operations of essential mission critical needs motivated the DoD center to re-examine its continuity of operations plan (COOP). The center conducted technology assessment studies to develop COOP plans in response to Presidential Directive 67 and Federal Preparedness Circular 65. Like most government agencies, it concluded at the time that no vendor offered a true “active-active” COOP capability in a mixed-vendor storage and server architecture environment. From these technology assessments, the DoD center concluded that its COOP needs at that time were best satisfied by traditional tape based methodologies that restored essential functions based upon a complex prioritized list of restoration timelines. A better solution was clearly needed. COOP IN A WEEK – TRIAL TO OPERATIONAL To validate YottaYotta’s claim of addressing this critical operational COOP need for continuous, high-performance protection with seamless integration into a mixed-vendor SAN distributed file system environment, the center procured YottaYotta’s GSX 3000 NetStorage Control Node and established a trial environment that simulated its production storage environment. Together with YottaYotta technical personnel, the center encapsulated existing file systems and demonstrated active-active COOP operations in one day. These integration efforts included mirroring multiple heterogeneous “production site” file systems to the COOP site. Following this initial success, the center successfully demonstrated uninterrupted continuity of operations via simulated catastrophic failures of both production site storage and servers. The entire integration timeline from start (establishment of simulated environment) to finish (site fail-over testing) was five days. The ability to demonstrate transparent and truly “active-active” operations sets new standards for performance, ease of deployment, and flexibility in COOP architectures. “By eliminating OEM dependencies, YottaYotta enables DoD engineers to design COOP environments that leverage the latest technology advancements in both disk and tape technologies,” said George Bell, founder of SMS, the systems integrator responsible for the implementation at the DoD center. “Many vendors promise active-active continuity of operations, YottaYotta actually delivers on that promise with transparent storage system fail-over that can deliver a zero recovery time objective [RTO] and recovery point objective [RPO]. Within one week, YottaYotta, and more importantly, DoD personnel, were able to install and demonstrate a functional active-active COOP capability independent of storage and server architectures.”