Users of TwinStrata Cloud Arrays

[mongie]

Hello,

Just wondering about the users of Veeam with TwinStrata Cloud Arrays...

• How big is your cloud volume
  How big is your cache?
  How much data are you writing to the cloud volume per night?
  How fast is your internet connection?

I ask these questions, because I am finding it dificult to understand how the cloud array can work for most people.

I don't see any level of deduplication or compression (above what Veeam already achieves), I find it almost impossible to keep my moddest amount of data uploaded with a 20Mbit internet connection, and through discussions with TS support, I don't think anyone using v4+ is able to restore-to-the-cloud, given that the latest marketplace appliance in AWS is 3.5 and the downgrade is not supported.

Given that so many people recommend the product here, I'm just wondering (and hoping) that I'm missing something.

Thanks,
Alex

[Yuki]

Alex - we've looked at TwinStrata and for 2 out of every 3 clients - it made little sense. For some due to costs of their appliance (which negated the cost benefits of some cloud storage providers), in others due recover-ability issues. With them limiting the size of cache through licensing is a bad idea IMHO and kills the appeal of it in some cases.

At the end, we found it to be cheaper and more productive to build the infrastructure for the clients and make them their own "cloud". This way they can get not only the backups but also replicas which can be powered up right away. They are moving data across 100Mbit layer 2 connection to a remote datacenter, and that link costs about 1/2 of what 100Mbit of internet connectivity would cost. With terrabytes of data, glacier is not an option and everything else becomes expensive in long-term

Cost of storrage on Amazon S3 alone is higher than the monthly payment for a cage+100Mbit link+ server for replicas (30TB local)+NAS (55TB) if cost of equipment is amortized over 5 years. And for Amazon or other 3-d party backups we would need to pay for fat internet link (Similar to our p2p L2) and possible ingress/egress charges.

TwinStrata could work for some of our smaller clients, but then to the smaller ones we can just provide them replica/storage space for Veeam jobs and not even charge them.

[mongie]

Funny that despite how often people recommend them on the forums, nobody has replied that they use them...

As for licensing, we basically paid a flat rate for our virtual appliances... I don't think it was THAT expensive (assuming it worked well).

[dellock6]

I'm almost sure I never recommended Twistrata. I briefly tested it and seemed ok, but as Yuki said, their pricing and licensing model is non-sense at all. I understood a starting price is 5000 usd for the virtual appliance, with physical appliances beeing even more expensive I suppose. To me it does seems expensive, especially now Veeam has its own cloud solution (even if I do not know Veeam pricing...)

Luca.

[Yuki]

As for licensing, we basically paid a flat rate for our virtual appliances... I don't think it was THAT expensive (assuming it worked well).

• CloudArray Model V100 - Virtual appliance with 6 TB of assignable local disk cache, scalable to 12 TB and unlimited TB of local cache.
o MSRP = $9,995
o Partner Price = $7,996
• Annual Support & Maintenance for V100
o MSRP = $1,799
o Partner Price = $1,439


• CloudArray Model 100, 6 TB of on board disk cache (Our 2 TB model would work but not leave much room for growth)
o MSRP = $14,995
o Partner Price = $11,996
• Annual Support & Maintenance
o MSRP = $2,699
o Partner Price = $2,159

Ain't that cheap....

[mongie]

We bought 5... I believe they came out at around $6k each (including tax).

Oh, and they don't have a cache limit or a volume limit.

[dan]

Just to chime in here - we've been using TwinStrata since October of last year in conjunction with Veeam. We went with their subscription model, which includes an unlimited cache virtual appliance plus up to 1 TB of cloud storage all for about 19 cents per GB/mo. So far, it's been working pretty well for us - we haven't had any performance issues as it relates to upload time.

We went with the subscription model because we could bundle the cost of cloud storage in with the appliance, which helped us manage costs and the finance dept prefers seeing it as an operational expense. It also enabled us to increase capacity pretty easily once we reached the 1TB mark.

To answer Alex's questions:
Cloud Volume to date is about 2.5 TB
Cache size is 250GB
Currently writing approximately 60GB of data to the cloud each night on average.
Internet connection is 100mb.

Hope that helps.