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Unfortunately, the constant pressure to reduce storage costs has led many IT departments to settle for the status quo when it comes to protecting their data. This typically means utilising high-capacity, lower-performance HDD arrays (significantly less costly than primary-grade solutions) to perform backup and restore functions. In the past, this approach proved to be quite effective. But backup performance (along with scalability and manageability) has failed to keep pace with the needs of today's organisations, driving up IT costs and reducing efficiency while jeopardising effective data protection.

The good news is that innovative hybrid technology, which combines the speed of SSDs with the capacity and economy of HDDs, now brings affordable high-performance backup storage to organisations of virtually any size - even those working within tightly-constrained budgets. IT pros no longer have to play catch-up when it comes to backups and restores.

ALL HYBRID STORAGE IS NOT CREATED EQUAL
SSD is currently the marquee star in the storage world, bringing astonishingly high performance - but also gulp-inducing prices. While there are some heavy-duty enterprise applications (e.g. a large number of users simultaneously accessing vast quantities of mission-critical data) that can justify investment in SSD's capabilities, the cost/benefit profile of SSD solutions don't make economic sense for the majority of storage environments.

But thanks to the growing sophistication of hybrid technology, organisations can now leverage the speed of SSD for backup applications that would never merit the daunting cost of an all-SSD solution - or even the premium prices commanded by some primary HDD storage systems. This is made possible by thoroughly understanding how SSD is used to handle data, and cleverly integrating DRAM, SSD and HDD.

All hybrid storage solutions utilise a flash-based storage controller that provides intelligent storage management, enabling SSDs to provide fast performance for more active data and back-end HDDs to house the far greater quantity of less frequently-accessed data. As long as there is enough flash memory available to accommodate the system's active data, the performance delivered by a hybrid solution can be very close to that of an all-SSD solution.

As noted above, how a hybrid storage solution integrates DRAM, SSD and HDD plays a critical role in determining its performance, efficiency and data protection. One of the most important factors to consider when evaluating a hybrid solution for backup and restore duties is the method it employs to dynamically manage data between SSD and HDD: caching or tiering.

WHY CACHING ENABLES FASTER, SAFER BACKUPS
The path for caching data is short, and data is inherently protected; read caching uses predictive algorithms to proactively copy data from HDD to SSD in order to enable faster I/O. When an application looks for data and the data is stored in the cache, it receives a cache hit and begins an accelerated read operation. All data continues to be stored in the underlying HDD RAID protected storage, with copies of the most active data retained in the cache.

By contrast, the path for tiering data is longer and more complicated. Data is dynamically moved between HDD and SSD storage by an automatic process, using algorithms that predict the need for such moves. The SSD tier holds the only copy of the data in a system and uses a RAID-like data protection scheme. This creates overhead that impacts both performance and capacity, and adds complexity because it requires extra SSD.

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