Fujitsu Eternus CS8000 for Backup and Archiving

Fujitsu America, Inc. introduced at Fujitsu Forum 2013 a step forwards for businesses trying to tackle increasing data volumes.

The new generation of ETERNUS CS8000 provides complete consolidation for all unified backup and archiving needs. Online (disk-based) backup capacities is extended to 15PB, coupled with almost limitless near-line (tape-based) capacity.

Enhancements to the new generation underline the ETERNUS CS8000’s position as a versatile backup and archiving solution: a failsafe solution that delivers more business-centric storage than before.

Due to virtualization of all disk and tape systems, both for mainframes and open systems, ETERNUS CS8000 offers flexibility in balancing the four fundamental pillars of data protection: speed, capacity, availability levels and cost. With ETERNUS CS8000, IT managers can ensure they are able to provide end-users with the right service levels for backup and archiving, and optimize costs.

Live data from production servers and mainframes is held on a scalable disk cache within the ETERNUS CS8000, and data can remain in the disk cache to provide near-instant data recovery. Alternatively, data can be moved to tape, or for additional flexibility, and can be held both on disk and tape.

Deduplication technology is now integrated into the ETERNUS CS8000 internal disk cache, making it suitable as an efficient final backup target. New deduplication capabilities reduce disk space requirements by a factor of between 10 and 50 times. Deduplication is also offered as an upgrade to customers of the previous-generation system, the ETERNUS CS High End.

The ETERNUS CS8000 is capable of executing the compute-intensive deduplication process in parallel on several server nodes of its internal modular grid architecture, ensuring that even data sets running into double-digit petabytes do not create performance problems on backup and restore operations. In directly addressing the multi-tenancy needs of service providers, ETERNUS CS8000 can independently operate up to 10 entirely separate deduplication storage pools.

Underlining its abilities in consolidating backup and archiving infrastructures even in very large datacenters, the ETERNUS CS8000 scales to more than 15PB of data before compression or duplication, which is also a 300% improvement on the previous model. Maximum data throughput now reaches 150TB/hour, a 50% increase, meaning greater protection for environments with data growth without performance restraints.

Large scale file store with disaster resiliency
The NAS functionality of ETERNUS CS8000, supporting up to 2,000,000,000 files, provides a consolidation platform for archiving data and as second-tier NAS storage for inactive file data. Integrated synchronous data mirroring enables businesses to run such a large-scale consolidation platform without risk. Newly-enhanced asynchronous replication functionality provides disaster resiliency, even over long distance, such as between Europe and South America.

Enhanced internal data caching and data copy functions also make ETERNUS CS8000 the gateway for copying data in the cloud. The system not only consolidates and manages all backup and archiving targets on-site and integrates local and remote tape libraries, but also now provides more flexible use of lower-cost IT services consumed on-demand for DR by adding support for cloud storage.

Scott Harrison, VP of enterprise products, Fujitsu, said:” Managing all backup and archiving data on one unified target ETERNUS CS8000 appliance can provide businesses with a failsafe, but still flexible and cost-effective, service levels for a variety of demands, as well as guaranteeing future-proof scalability. With this new-generation of ETERNUS CS8000 architecture, Fujitsu is helping customers to secure their BC while also reducing operational complexity and cost.”

ETERNUS CS8000 systems are available from December 2013.