Once your company hits a particular size, the ethos of “save every piece of data” starts to become problematic. In a security company that captures and archives live video, this point is reached sooner than, for instance, a 25-person copywriting agency, where the stored media comprises mostly plain text.

As far back as ten years ago, running out and buying a truck full of extra hard drives seemed to be the best way to solve the storage/archive problem, but as data capture rates climbed inexorably, new solutions needed to be found.

Apart from mere capacity and the emergence of data in silos (a terabyte here, a dozen backup archives there), businesses just aren’t leveraging the data they’ve spent significant resources accruing.

There’s a supplier of data management, protection and optimization solutions that delivers instant data recovery and scalable storage – StorageCraft. Wherever your data might be now – in the cloud, on virtual machines, on bare-metal servers or in widely-distributed edge locations – StorageCraft solutions make sure that your data is always safe, always accessible and always optimized.

Two of the company’s newest products are worthy showcases of the company’s thinking. ShadowXafe is deployed as a virtual appliance and abstracts out much of the underlying complexity of cross-platform backup and restore. OneXafe is an appliance that combines data protection with object base scale out storage capabilities. Both platforms are centrally managed by the company’s OneSystem, as a central interface.

ShadowXafe is very simple to configure and to use; its benefits can be felt immediately, as policies can determine its configuration – either internal or external SLAs, according to the user’s business model.

First, you define the environment to be protected, which can be any combination of virtual or physical machines, hosts or server clusters. Then the storage targets are set: networked arrays of NAS, NFS/SMB-connected drives, StorageCraft’s Cloud repositories, and so forth. Then it’s just a matter of defining policies, such as how often snapshots are taken, how long each is kept, and so forth.

ShadowXafe takes care of overcoming the technical barriers associated with managing data in diverse environments – this is software abstraction explicitly designed for business continuity and data protection.

Data restorations are quick, efficient, and malleable: snapshots from physical machines can be dropped onto VM clusters if required, and servers rebuilt from bare-metal upwards.

OneXafe can be deployed as a range of physical appliances and equipped as desired with 3.5″ HDDs or 2.5″ SSDs, in multiple units (the 4400 range comprises a 1U device). It is a converged data platform that unifies enterprise-class data protection with scale-out storage in an easy-to-use, configurable solution. For organisations that are looking to protect and manage data in heterogeneous environments, OneXafe eliminates complexity and provides flexible deployment to accommodate various workload requirements. At the same time, it significantly reduces costs associated with primary and secondary storage as well as data protection software.

When it comes to archive and restore, the OneXafe has all the advantages of the ShadowXafe solutions. OneXafe-powered restores are managed centrally, pulling backups or snapshots from wherever they may be, for swift restore, and systems are back online at the click of a mouse.

OneXafe is a converged, highly scalable and granularly-configurable solution. Hot-swapping drives is one thing (possible, of course with OneXafe devices), but new storage can just be snapped into wherever possible in the storage network. It immediately becomes part of the overall provision seamlessly, ready for use.

By integrating cloud storage with a unified data provision from the virtualized and physical resources in-house, any business no longer needs to worry about unused, fallow data silos. Data is protected and optimized on the fly. Plus, its disaster-recovery-as-a-service capabilities are perfect for mixed storage: cloud and in-house.

To learn more about StorageCraft’s offerings, and particularly about OneXafe and ShadowXafe, get in touch with a representative today, or request a demo.