GridBank for Business Continuity

GridBank for Business Continuity ensures the highest levels of information availability through remote data replication, automated failover and integrated data integrity check summing and verification

Overview

GridBank for Business Continuity Overview

Creating Reliability

With data the lifeblood of business, a sound and scalable business continuity plan is crucial. Tarmin GridBank solutions for Business Continuity power data resiliency and availability to help enable comprehensive enterprise-wide risk control and mitigation.

Data and information play a critical role in competitive advantage in the Information Economy. No matter how stable or reliable the hardware, there is always the risk of failure of physical systems. In the event of physical failure, without adequate network design, businesses may experience inaccessible data, information and network resources leading to significant impacts on business performance. Additionally, damage to physical media can lead to corruption or destruction of critical data.

Highly Available by Default

To meet business requirements for continuous information access and data integrity, it is necessary to implement plans for high availability access, ensuring uptimes through delivery of fully scalable remote data replication systems. Tarmin GridBank offers automated hot failover and transparent access to data in the event of an outage, providing resilient business continuity functionality through its grid computing approach. It was architected from the ground-up on the latest in proven, enterprise software to embed fault-tolerant redundancy and self-healing check summing to deliver a resilient storage platform, whether on internal systems, in the cloud or replicated between the two.

Business Challenges

Business Challenges for Continuity

Continuous Data Availability

Organizations face significant challenges in providing reliable access to their critical data assets. Timely access to information is a key factor in ensuring employee productivity and providing continued service levels to customers and clients and there are inherent risks and costs involved in scheduled and unscheduled service outages.

Loss of Data Access

When access to data assets or data centers is lost for any reason, whether due to system failure, hardware failure, power outages or planned maintenance, employees are unable to continue to function effectively. In today’s information driven society, losing data access can limit ability to function, operate or service customers at all. Customer and client satisfaction is heavily impacted by outages, and organizations face considerable reputational risk due to these issues.

Compromised Data Integrity

Meanwhile, physical issues with hardware and storage media can impact on the integrity of data. Primary storage on email, application and file servers can become unstable and that can corrupt data in its primary location. Whilst most organizations have implemented comprehensive and costly backup plans, few regularly practice recovery procedures to confirm the integrity of data stored in offline media. Tape backup media is also often susceptible to variations in physical storage conditions, leading to backed up data that can no longer be restored when needed. Additionally, not only does this have business performance repercussions, it also impacts on regulatory compliance, as legal mandates stipulate increasingly strict retention and disposal periods with severe penalties for non-compliance.

Cost of Business Continuity Solutions

Business continuity planning to address these concerns involves ensuring that business critical data and data subject to legal retention mandates are replicated across separate systems, preferably in separate geographical regions with separate power and network connectivity. However, the software and hardware solutions to ensure this level of data security and availability are often prohibitively expensive. Whilst organizations aim to protect and maintain constant access to their data, often they have to make risky trade-offs between cost, protection and availability, leading to greater total cost of ownership in the medium term.

Tarmin’s GridBank offers a solution to address and control all these business challenges and risks.

Tarmin Solutions

Tarmin Solutions for Business Continuity

Comprehensive Business Continuity Platform

Tarmin GridBank addresses the business need for continuous, secure access to data in the event of system or site outages through integrated high availability data replication across remote virtualized storage pools. Tarmin’s replication engine allows geographically separate data centers to automatically protect data, ensuring that organizations are fully prepared for continued operation in the event of a disaster. Through remote access to data repositories in separate locations or in the cloud, even where central business premises become unavailable due to disasters, employees are able to continue to work efficiently.

Self-Healing Fault-Tolerant Architecture

Additionally, through ongoing data verification and check summing, data integrity is ensured. The GridBank solution automates the process of data verification and protection, operating on a self-healing fault-tolerant architecture. Furthermore, since the GridBank archive is always online, recovery from backup media is rarely required, allowing all Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) to be met without resorting to tape at all. Combined with this, the policy driven information governance toolkit allows for scheduled retention and disposal of data, reducing the risk of non-compliance with regulatory data storage mandates. Finally, since all GridBank business continuity functionality is integrated into the platform by default, there is no need for expensive secondary recovery platforms, leading to reduced total cost of ownership of data.

Tarmin GridBank Business Benefits

GridBank combines the following business continuity benefits:

Continuous replication through virtualized storage pools ensures a unified data view
High availability systems automatically failover in the event of outage for reliable data access
Checksum verification and tamper-proof data integrity protects information from loss or corruption
Hybrid cloud online data stores ensures all RTO/RPO are achieved
Retention and disposal policy framework reduces regulatory risk
All business continuity functionality is provided by default, significantly reducing cost

Differentiators

Tarmin Differentiators for Business Continuity

GridBank Industry-Leading Solutions

Tarmin GridBank takes a highly innovative approach to business continuity, built from the ground up on the latest in proven enterprise technologies. Where other vendors lock-in to highly expensive hardware platforms to deliver continuous replication and virtualization of remote storage pools, Tarmin’s GridBank is entirely hardware agnostic, leading to considerably reduced total cost of ownership. Additionally, since GridBank operates on open standards, data will always be accessible through an array of standard tools.

Software Based Scalability

Furthermore, Tarmin’s GridBank solution is an entirely software based approach, its levels of scalability are not limited by hardware, but instead only by the storage capacity in the storage pool. Since storage devices can be very simply added to pools, in practice, the GridBank solution can scale to the storage capacity dedicated to it.

Hybrid Cloud Integration

Finally, the GridBank hybrid cloud allows significant cost offsetting by plugging into external cloud providers. This enables outsourcing storage management to external organizations and minimizing ongoing data management costs for secondary business continuity data centers.