SvSAN - HPE StoreOnce

Any x86 Server

• Turns the underlying storage of any x86 server into highly available shared storage within clusters of two servers (nodes) or more.
• Sits on top of the hypervisor as a guest virtual machine and is fully compatible with VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux KVM.

High Availability

• Shared storage works through active-active synchronous mirroring between two servers.
• Ensures there is always an exact copy of data on each server.
• If one server fails or is taken offline, the remaining server continues to operate, providing no disruption in service to the organization and no downtime.

Lightweight Witness

• Provides highly available shared storage on just two nodes.
• Can be on-site or remote to the cluster.
• Provides quorum for up to 1,000 clusters at a time.

https://stormagic.com/svsan/ 

HPE StoreOnce is specially designed for disk-based, deduplication, cloud-integrated backup systems that provide automated backup, data recovery, and data retention for hybrid IT.

HPE StoreOnce deduplication reduces the disk space required to store backup data sets by typically 20 times without impacting backup performance. By retaining more backup data on disk for longer, it enables greater accessibility to backup data for quick restoration of lost or damaged files and reduces the impact on business productivity, while providing savings on disk storage costs, computing resources, physical space, and power requirements.

The format used to store backups is very flexible. NAS, NFS, CIFS (SMB), iSCSI, virtual tape libraries over Fibre Channel (VTL), and StoreOnce Catalyst backup targets are available. This allows each StoreOnce system to be installed and used with backup applications, including Veeam Backup & Replication.

HPE StoreOnce Catalyst

HPE StoreOnce Catalyst is an optimized interface for data protection unique to HPE StoreOnce systems. It provides greater performance and more flexible control than traditional emulated tape targets (VTL) or NAS shares.

This provides the following benefits:

• Simplified management of data movement from a single interface, with tighter integration into the backup application to centrally manage file replication across the enterprise.
• Seamless control in complex environments, supporting flexible configurations that allow simultaneous movement of data from one site to multiple sites and the ability to cascade data across the enterprise, sometimes referred to as multi-hop.
• Improved performance through distributed deduplication processing using StoreOnce Catalyst stores on StoreOnce systems and multiple servers to optimize backup hardware, network links, and backup servers.
• Scaling with object storage through the Cloud Bank extension to Catalyst.
• Faster backup times to meet shrinking backup windows, with up to 288 TB/hour of aggregate performance.
• StoreOnce Catalyst prevents backup exposure to ransomware.

This last point is crucial. Although traditional NFS shares can be created and used to store backups, it is recommended to use Catalyst stores. Catalyst is a proprietary HPE API through which Veeam communicates to launch backups and perform restores.

Typically, backup vendors reference the 3-2-1 backup methodology.

• Backblaze 3-2-1 Backup Strategy 
• Veeam 3-2-1 Backup Rule 
• Acronis Backup Rule 

Introducing SvSAN alongside backup ensures an even more resilient architecture is implemented through high availability and SvSAN synchronous mirroring.

The value proposition includes:

1. SvSAN's hardware flexibility to build appliances that are correctly sized for each use case, including environments affected by potential supply chain constraints.
2. Software-based solutions.
3. Elimination of single points of failure (SPOF) and single points of connectivity (SPOC).
4. Creation of immutable, deduplicated, compressed, and dual-authorized backups to protect against critical data loss and ransomware attacks.

Datacenter to Dedicated HA Backup Servers

Datacenters are typically larger, multi-node clusters in a single environment, with backups then needing to be taken to separate physical hardware and subsequently off-site. This helps prevent ransomware from locking data to an irrecoverable point.

StoreOnce ensures backups are stored through the Catalyst API securely, immutably, deduplicated, and compressed as efficiently as possible. By introducing SvSAN, the StoreOnce repository becomes highly available within a datacenter or in a stretched configuration and can then potentially be replicated.

Edge to Center

The following is an example configuration for a single location within the edge-to-center use case, using two HPE DL380 servers, VMware vSphere, StorMagic SvSAN, and HPE StoreOnce.

The hardware contained an internal HDD RAID 10 set consisting of eight 1.2 TB 10K SAS disks, alongside an SSD RAID 1 set consisting of two mixed-use SSDs leveraged as SvSAN cache.

SvSAN Caching 

The hypervisor, ESXi 7.0.3, and the SvSAN VSA VM were deployed to separate disk-based boot storage, for example an HPE NS204i-u.

Alternatively, a split virtual disk configuration can be used as described below:

SvSAN Leveraging Split Virtual Disks/Logical Volumes with HPE Servers 

The server's internal storage was provisioned through the hypervisor to SvSAN as Raw Device Mappings.

This storage was then used to present an SvSAN-backed VMFS datastore to the hypervisors for hosting the StoreOnce VSA and its storage.

Option 1 uses a VMDK assigned to StoreOnce. Option 2 uses a Raw Device Mapping of the SvSAN mirrored disk.

HPE StoreOnce can be deployed as a virtual appliance by following the official HPE deployment documentation.

The deployment guide is available below:

HPE StoreOnce VSA Deployment Guide 

Once deployed, add the required storage to the appliance. This may be presented using either a virtual disk (VMDK) residing on the SvSAN datastore or by directly presenting an SvSAN mirrored disk using Raw Device Mapping, depending on the deployment architecture.

After the appliance has been deployed and storage assigned, complete the initial StoreOnce configuration.

After completing the initial configuration, create one or more StoreOnce Catalyst Stores that will be used as the backup repositories.

Catalyst Stores provide optimized backup performance while supporting deduplication, replication, immutability, and secure communication between StoreOnce and supported backup applications.

Configure the required users, permissions, and replication settings according to your organization's backup strategy.

• StorMagic Product Documentation 
• StorMagic SvSAN 
• HPE StoreOnce