Cloud Gateway: Cloud Based Archiving & Defined Storage
Integrate your IT infrastructure in the cloud with just one click!
The state-of-the-art QStar Cloud Gateway solution integrates seamlessly into existing infrastructures without changes for either the applications or users. Migrated or moved data continues to appear locally even when stored in the cloud. The simple data read/write approach is virtually compatible with all existing applications. QStar Cloud Gateway can archive unlimited amounts of information securely and cost-effectively within any cloud – private, public or hybrid.
The main purpose of Cloud Gateway solution is to provide extremely simple migration and archiving from existing infrastructures to the cloud, exactly like copying, reading and editing data on a local network.
QStar lets customers choose their cloud provider
With QStar, you can migrate and archive your data to a private cloud, or popular third-party clouds such as Google, Amazon, Azure, IBM Cloud and many others.
Most of the information stored on local infrastructures is unlikely to be accessed ever again! We can fix that with our cloud data archiving solutions.
The majority of files are rarely accessed more than 10 days after their creation, and many are never opened twice. The majority of unchanging files stay online by default, often on expensive primary storage disks. Holding so much unchanging data in the original storage locations is extremely costly over the years. QStar Cloud Gateway solution is very effective in limiting costs, migrating inactive data in the cloud, whilst enhancing data protection. But more importantly, it offers a better data awareness and turns it into business value.
Cloud Gateway optimizes data and cuts local storage infrastructure costs.
We all know archived information quickly loses its value over time. Market research confirms this, showing that after a year, more than 80% of data on primary disks is never, or rarely, accessed again. As if this were not enough, the same data is backed up and migrated over and over again to new and costly storage devices, resulting in an enormous waste of money and manpower, at a time when CIO’s are worrying about their shrinking budgets and staff levels.
QStar Cloud Gateway is designed to combat the relentless explosion of data, providing transparent and automatic migration of static files from local infrastructure to the cloud, using attributes such as date created, modified, accessed, file owner, size and extension. Meanwhile, it restores data to its original location in real time, completely transparently to applications, network and users.
Shifting data from local infrastructures to the cloud delivers huge cost savings, not only in data-archiving but also in total operating costs associated with:
The cloud provides secure, reliable and cost-effective technology to archive data for years, a scalable memory that can be used to store unlimited amounts of data at very low cost.
QStar Cloud Gateway Object storage third party compatibility
Replace traditional storage solutions with Object Storage using QStar Cloud Gateway on premise infrastructures. Object storage within the data center can provide significant protection and scalability advantages over traditional SAN/NAS storage products for a fraction of the cost. For private or hybrid cloud deployments, QStar Cloud Gateway offers native Object Storage APIs, for the following products:
- Cloudian HyperStore
- DELL EMC ECS
- DDN WOS
- HGST Active Scale
- Hitachi Content Platform
- IBM Cloud Object Storage
- QStar Kaleidos
- Scality
- SwiftStack
- NetApp StorageGRID
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for a wide number of vertical applications
QStar’s extensive experience in integrating vertical applications for a variety of markets such as the ones listed below, enables us to offer a range of APIs for native integration with market leading products and specific application areas. In effect our data management and archiving solutions integrate within existing applications without in any way affecting how they, or their users, work.
- Healthcare PACs with DICOM format
- Document Management
- High Performance Computing (HPC)
- Oil & Gas
- Video surveillance
- Financial Services
- Energy
- Government
Cloud Backup and Cloud Data Archiving for efficient data reduction lowers total cost of ownership.
QStar Cloud Gateway can be installed on-premises for a very fast migration of backups to cloud. Many customers now wish to move their entire IT infrastructures to cloud and remove the expense of their on-premises purpose-built backup appliances such as EMC Data Domains. QStar Cloud Gateway supports several backup products, which can use Cloud Gateway as a target including:
- Commvault Backup and Recovery
- HP VMX VM Backup for SMBs
- NetWorker Unified backup and recovery
- Oracle RMAN (Backup Cloud module)
- Veeam backup for VMWare and HyperV
- Veritas Backup Exec backup for SMEs
- Veritas NetBackup
Cloud Gateway vertical markets native integrations
QStar Cloud Gateway General Features
A secure data archive with AES-256 encryption.
Cloud Gateway migrates and archives data securely across multiple copies, different locations and different media. The data can be also encrypted for an even higher level of security. Secure AES-256 encryption provides even higher levels of data security and compliance with the most stringent industry regulations to prevent unauthorized data access. The Advanced Encryption Standard used by 3D Gateway, is a symmetric block cipher chosen by the U.S. government to protect classified information and is implemented in software and hardware throughout the world to encrypt sensitive data. Regarding 256-bit AES encryption, we are actually referring to the key that is generated when encrypting your data. The data itself is secured by the software by creating a ‘key’ that uses 256-bit encryption to unlock that data.
Cloud Gateway with deduplication engine
QStar Cloud Gateway with deduplication engine is installed on-premises to deduplicate data before it is sent to the cloud. QStar Cloud Gateway is designed to meet the unique requirements of companies using public, private or hybrid cloud storage for large volumes of data. QStar Gateway with embedded deduplication module sits between your applications and cloud storage, transparently deduplicating data inline, reducing storage costs, speeding up the time for transfer between clouds and freeing your data for use in the cloud via standard cloud APIs. The deduplication engine is optimized for scalability, high throughput and low latency. The internal architecture and code are highly optimized for data deduplication, and to ensure that performance is maintained even when running in a public cloud environment.
Reduce the backup window and recovery times
Most people don’t realize that most backup time is spent (wasted would be more precise) on inactive data, files that never change for months or even years!
A waste of time and resources that any reasonable person would find hard to justify.
Despite the enormous growth in data, this practice has remained virtually unchanged for years.
What’s more, the client/server model was designed over 25 years ago under completely different operating conditions to today. But the majority of backup products still use this model, putting further constraints on data centers overflowing with data. Data deduplication systems have certainly reduced storage space requirements and simplified backup procedures, but save times have stayed more or less the same, and restoring a few TBs takes even longer because “rehydrating” deduplicated data is a laborious, time-consuming process.
It is time for change. QStar Cloud Gateway shortens backup and restore windows by shifting files that haven’t changed for months or years to the cloud where they are stored for long-term protection, and no longer subject to unnecessary backups.
Only information of real use to the company is backed up and for periods determined by the data life cycle. Once it has served its purpose, this too is archived in the cloud to make room for new data.
WORM compliance for Cloud and Object Storage
QStar Cloud Gateway incorporates WORM Technology to produce non-rewritable, non-erasable archives in the cloud that cannot be overwritten, modified or manipulated. The Gateway can also add WORM functionality to any Object Storage that does not support this feature through the majority of S3-compatible private object stores. Depending on the specific needs, the WORM retention period can be set to expire after a certain number of months or years, or never for permanent retention. As soon as a bucket (Cloud or Object Storage) is designated WORM, objects in that bucket are automatically locked and cannot be later modified once written. The QStar WORM process complies with the strictest national and international standards (SEC, FINRA, MiFID II, FDA) on sensitive data protection, document management, electronic record storage and log file archives to guarantee secure, legally-acceptable, long-term retention of archived data.
Capex and TCO savings
Cloud Gateway offers businesses significant savings in capex and TCO as only inactive files are tiered to the cloud. These often represent the lion’s share of the organization’s storage footprint, freeing up valuable tier1 and tier2 capacity and delivering significant expenditure savings.
Cut storage costs with document dematerialization!
Legal, accounting and administrative records must be kept for at least 10 years, some permanently. Meanwhile, standard disk-array storage systems have a much shorter life cycle, on average 4 to 5 years, before they become obsolete and are no longer supported by the manufacturer. Dematerialized documents are therefore migrated over and over again throughout their life cycle, an aspect frequently forgotten in the cost-benefit analysis.
Attention nearly always focuses on the document application, forgetting the question of where to archive them for long periods.
Such hidden costs can significantly reduce the financial benefits of dematerialization by concentrating on the application and ignoring the broader operating environment.
QStar Cloud Gateway solution offers secure cloud document dematerialization for years or even decades, an expandable memory that can store unlimited amounts of data at a fraction of the cost of other currently-available storage technologies.
QStar S3 Application Gateway
QStar Technology, leader in cloud based archiving and defined storage, announced the availability of S3 Application Gateway software solution to respond to the growing need for S3 API integration within traditional storage environments.
“Through the QStar S3 Application Gateway software, part of the QStar Archive Manager suite of products, we offer unprecedented freedom of choice to company interested to take advantage of all the applications and devices that use the S3 Cloud protocol for storing information without having to purchase another expensive storage system. Simply turn the existing storage into an S3-Cloud compliant storage space. Optionally, replicate the same data to Amazon, Azure, IBM or StorEasy Cloud for disaster prevention. Companies can now decide to use part of their existing storage infrastructure as S3 Private Cloud Storage, creating S3 buckets for need of specific applications or operational needs, yet at the same time, continuing to have access via SMB and NFS protocols”.
To answer to the continuous changes imposed by the market, companies of all sizes and across different markets must be able to face innumerable transformations in the IT sphere, such as the integration with cloud-native applications ad example.
IoT, mobile Apps, business software applications and many others that use S3 API are becoming more and more prevalent due to their flexibility to be used in several environments including cloud and on premise.
At the same time, with very few exceptions, traditional storage systems capable of natively managing the S3 protocol are not so common within on-premise customer infrastructures.
To safeguard the investments already made by companies in storage systems, QStar provides the S3 Application Gateway solution, that allows the transformation of traditional storage into S3 resources for storing data coming from applications that are using this protocol.
QStar adds new features and compatibility to traditional Storage / Server / NAS which is accessed via standard SMB / NFS protocols.
Through the QStar S3 Application Gateway, the entire, or a part of the storage infrastructure currently accessible via SMB / NFS will now be exposed to clients directly via S3, so emulating Object Storage technology. Storing and retrieving data via S3 protocol is extraordinarily simple; the objects are grouped into logical containers called buckets, which in practice are the volumes created within the existing SMB/NFS storage infrastructure.
The QStar S3 Application Gateway solution was developed to easily integrate applications using S3 API with existing storage infrastructures without having to make any changes to existing storage environment.
QStar’s S3 Application Gateway offers multi-tenancy management to ensure secure access from/to different clients. It is possible to assign and share the existing local storage space for any customer based on specific operational needs.
Furthermore, the QStar’s extensive experience in integrating vertical applications for a variety of markets and technologies, enables to offer, in addition to the S3 protocol also a range of APIs for native integration with market leading products for specific application areas such as: Healthcare PACs with DICOM format, Media Asset Management systems (MAM), Document Management, High Performance Computing (HPC) and Video surveillance.
Related Solutions
The QStar Kaleidos is an S3-compliant object storage platform that enables enterprises and service providers to build reliable, private, hybrid or public cloud storage environments that deliver reliability, security and unlimited scalability.
Kaleidos offers enterprise-class customers a tremendous reduction in TCO compared with traditional NAS/SAN storage, unlimited scalability, superior data protection and flexibility, while achieving improved customer retention through enhanced service delivery (SLA), reduced acquisition costs, and enhanced agility through global accessibility across all end user devices.
Kaleidos Object Storage is made with standard high-performance capacity servers. QStar Object Storage Manager (OSM) software runs on all server nodes and forms a cluster to provide a single pool of storage resources across all nodes.
QStar LTFS as NAS architecture virtualizes a Tape Library, effectively converting it into network-attached storage – NAS for sharing with multiple users and applications. The solution supports common networking protocols (SMB and NFS) plus S3 compatible API commands and is integrated on either a Windows or Linux server. Files that are stored in a LTFS as NAS environment are retrieved in the same manner as the native operating system, even though the data is actually stored in a Tape Library. Not only do users not realize that the volume (file system) they are accessing was created on tape and not on disk, but, through a sophisticated cache architecture, the read/write data activity is managed so effectively, that performance is comparable to a NAS device. Transparency is such that the architecture is also supported by virtual machine (VM) environments, even though the VM environment is not designed to support tape drives; existing applications installed in a VM can access the Tape as NAS architecture just like a standard NAS disk. Data can be accessed transparently over the network.