Products & Services

Our SAN server stores data securely on an IP SAN and is mirrored across several drives with hot swaps available, should your drive fail. The server boots off the SAN and if a fan or CPU fails we can replace them within minutes, using a shared standby server without any data loss. A standard dedicated server would stand alone and in the event of drives or CPUs failing they would need rebuilding or replacing which would mean more downtime.

Yes, however ISCSI, the protocol used on the Griffin SAN has been designed with security in mind. Although your data may be stored on the same SAN as other customers, your volume will never be accessible by another customer nor will any other customer's data be accessible by you, therefore it is safe and other customer's data with not be able to corrupt your data.

RAID 50 refers to a storage methodology whereby the data is striped using RAID 0 across a number of RAID 5 arrays. This provides excellent protection from disk failure whilst still providing very high performance. In the Griffin SAN, your data is striped across at least 4 RAID 5 arrays - this means that up to 4 disks could fail (one in each array) before any data would be lost.

RAID 0 simply "stripes" data across two or more disk drives to improve performance - it offers no protection against disk failure. In a RAID 0 array a disk failure will result in the loss of data.

RAID 5 "stripes" data across three or more disks as well as using some space on each disk for parity information. This means that in the event of a disk failure the parity information from the remaining two disks can be used to rebuild the data onto a new disk, therefore a single disk failing will not result in the loss of data.

No in fact it is the exact opposite, as more storage is added to the SAN, the raid runs faster and therefore improves performance.

No you can order as much storage as you need to within reason.

The volume will read as a local drive and you will be able to check a server by using 'properties'.

Contact us and we can add more GB instantly without any downtime or movement of data.

We currently have two server specifications available for use on the SAN. You can upgrade from the lower server specification to the higher server specification with very little downtime. You can also increase the amount of RAM in either server.

Yes, please contact us for a bespoke quotation.

Snapshots allow point-in-time copies of your data that is stored on the SAN. When a snapshot is carried out, a record of all the blocks in use at that point in time is saved. As a general rule we recommend that you start with a minimum snapshot volume of the same size as the volume that you are backing up. If you have a lot of changing data then this volume can be increased in size to allow you to store more snapshots.

We simply replace your server with an identical specification and point to your SAN volume configured with the same IP. This process takes minutes. If you had a standard server a hardware failure could involve a rebuild, loss of data and ordering in parts which would take a lot longer.

Each shelf in the array has two "hot spare" drives for use in the event that a single drive in the array fails. If a drive fails, then the array is automatically rebuilt using one of the spare drives without any downtime or loss of data.

Snapshots are point in time copies, stored with the original volume in a SAN. Snapshots provide improvements to back up operations in open file handling, and the ability to offload the back up copy operation to a different server than where the application is running.

While snapshots provide a fast and efficient manner to create copies of SAN volumes, the snapshots are still stored with the SAN volumes. This means that both primary application data and its snapshots are vulnerable to catastrophic loss scenarios such has fire, flood, and earthquake. Any administrative mistakes can not only open the possibility to loss of primary data, but also the snapshots of this data.

Snapshots are inherently temporary - while an administrator can ask the system to keep many snapshots, they typically have a life span measured in weeks to months, rather than years as typical of back up archives.

To make this decision you will need to consider your operating system, size of websites, database, log files and any other applications you are running.

Yes it will take up part of the space and be dedicated to you.

You can add more servers to your set up at any time.

Yes, 8 IPs are included as standard.

Yes.

Yes redundant firewalls will sit in front of your server. Tell us what rule you require and we will set it up for you during our set up process. There is no extra charge for this.

Twelve months. However we will consider 6 month contracts.