Skyera Partners with Seagate 

Skyera Inc. today announced a joint collaboration with Seagate to create a comprehensive solution that overcomes the challenges of backup and restore performance typically associated with disk-based backup systems.

Using a combination of Skyera skyHawk solid-state storage systems, EVault cloud storage services and Xyratex ClusterStor family of data storage solutions, the joint collaboration offloads CPU intensive tasks such as compression to storage, effectively freeing up server CPUs for faster backup and restore operations.  While full restores of traditional disk-based backup systems are prohibitively time consuming, the Skyera/Seagate collaboration enables restorations of up to 8TB per hour to quickly return business operations back to a normal state.

While many backup solutions leverage deduplication, this process leaves an excessive amount of pointers over time as most backup data blocks are duplicates.  Similar to disk fragmentation, these pointers are located in divergent locations on disk-based systems and restore performance suffers as the process devolves into a random I/O sequence resulting in excessively long system full restores.  The joint solution of Skyera skyHawk, Seagate EVault and Xyratex uses an offloading process similar to that of VMware VAAI to provide faster restores.

“While solid-state is not often thought of when talking about backup, skyHawk has the unique ability to shorten backup windows by using the power of flash to overcome random I/O workloads that typically bog down traditional disk-based systems,” said Radoslav Danilak, Co-Founder and CEO of Skyera. "A seamless integration between Skyera and Seagate ensures that enterprises have peace of mind that not only their business-critical information is safely stored but that it can be quickly recovered if and when the need arises.”