esg solution showcase peer software 2016

This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by Peer Software and is distributed under license from ESG.

© 2016 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Overview

Fundamentally, there have been two ways to run IT:

Centralized: delivering IT services from one or a few IT data centers, without server technologies at remote sites.

Decentralized: Running autonomous IT server infrastructure at each office location (big or small).

For as long as there have been PC servers, however, IT services supporting

remote and branch offices (ROBOs) have resided somewhere “in between.” Most

organizations with ROBO deployments would deliver services entirely through a

centralized data center model if they could. But inevitably, they encounter the

realities of trying to deliver those services over their WAN—so they can’t.

Many IT organizations don’t fully appreciate how limiting a WAN topology can be

in regard to certain applications and file sharing/collaboration activities.

Consequently, IT operations teams, storage administrators, and ROBO managers

repeatedly face challenges running centralized IT over the WAN. At many

organizations, managing a data center is science, while managing a mixed

environment of applications and data hosted centrally and locally at ROBOs

seems to be an elusive art.

A Breakthrough Approach to Managing a Distributed ROBO Enterprise

Date: July 2016 Authors: Jason Buffington, Principal Analyst; Terri McClure, Senior Analyst; and Leah Matuson, Research Analyst

Abstract: Managing information systems across remote office and branch office (ROBO) locations has always been challenging. A constant tradeoff exists between achieving users’ performance expectations and maintaining a secure, manageable IT environment. Ideally, IT would centralize everything. However, that approach has been unachievable for most enterprises because of WAN performance limitations. As a result, most enterprises continue to manage each ROBO as if it were a small, independent data center. Fortunately, an innovative approach building on the concept of distributed file services may finally eliminate the ROBO enterprise challenge.

Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the bigger truth.™

Solution Showcase

Most organizations with ROBO

deployments would deliver IT

services entirely through a

centralized data center model if

they could, but they eventually

encounter the realities of trying

to deliver these services over

their WAN—so they can’t.

Solution Showcase: A Breakthrough Approach to Managing a Distributed ROBO Enterprise 2


Legacy Challenges in Delivering IT to ROBOs

To understand the challenges an organization might struggle with when delivering IT services to a distributed workforce,

it’s smart to become familiar with the many issues associated with supporting a ROBO environment (see Figure 1).1

FIGURE 1. Top Ten IT Priorities Related to Supporting ROBO Locations

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2016

Option 1: Decentralized ROBO Infrastructure

Some IT organizations deliver distributed IT services by running each ROBO as a small, autonomous IT infrastructure,

almost as if each remote or branch office is a small/midsized business on its own, instead of part of a larger enterprise. This

decentralized approach—when managed well—provides end-users with great performance because they are accessing

their data locally.

Unfortunately, autonomous infrastructures often require autonomous local administrators to oversee them. In enterprises,

IT managers manage a broad environment at scale. ROBO environments are significantly more taxing due to the islands of

isolated data and infrastructure residing within each ROBO boundary. The result is often excessive IT management by a

combination of local administrators, remote centralized administrators, and dispatchable technicians. Isolated data and

infrastructure islands also create challenges for data sharing and collaboration between colleagues at differing locations,

leading to duplicate or out-of-date information stored at each site. The decentralized approach also requires isolated data

protection and recovery mechanisms to be in place for each location, which further increases the storage inefficiencies and

1 Source: ESG Research Report: Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends, May 2015.

28%

33%

33%

34%

36%

36%

37%

37%

41%

45%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%

Maintaining or reducing on-premises (i.e., at ROBO) ITheadcount

Ensuring compliance with government, industry orcorporate governance mandates

Improving application availability for end-users

Improving disaster recovery processes

Improving application accessibility for end-users

Improving employees’ abilities to share files/collaborate with other employees

Improving backup and recovery processes

Managing data growth

Improving application performance for end-users

Improving information security measures

Which of the following would you consider to be your organization’s top IT priorities with respect to supporting ROBO locations? (Percent of respondents, N=347, seven responses

accepted)

http://www.esg-global.com/research-reports/remote-officebranch-office-technology-trends/



management headaches at each site, while reducing reliability through myriad backup tools and iterations that are less

maintainable or monitorable.

Option 2: Centralized IT Without Accommodations for Real-World Requirements

For IT organizations that don’t wish to be burdened with many separate islands of data and infrastructure, the alternative

is a centralized IT environment. By centralizing IT, remote ROBO users access the same or similar data center infrastructure

as corporate users, while IT tries to mitigate the performance impact of the WAN. Unfortunately, consolidating hardware,

software, data sets, and management tasks can actually result in reduced end-user productivity: ROBO end-users

encounter varying performance issues with the IT services and platforms they need, due to network issues that are neither

predictable nor, in many cases, avoidable. Some organizations have embraced WAN optimization as they rearchitect their

network topology to mitigate typical WAN traffic problems. They see varying degrees of success, but rarely do they find it

to be the complete solution.

Neither Option Will Suffice

As IT teams attempt to balance the tradeoffs between IT scalability and end-user productivity, they find themselves forced

to take a hybrid approach to centralized and ROBO services, even as they continue to struggle with the same old data

management, user enablement, and protection/recovery goals.

Managing Unstructured File Data for File Sharing and Collaboration

Nowhere are challenges more prevalent than with unstructured file data—information often found in end-users’ home

directories, in project directories, and in teams’ shared directories. This results in several productivity-limiting outcomes:

Reduced productivity (and morale) due to continually “waiting on the WAN” for basic file opens/saves.

Mail servers that become de facto file servers, as users attempt to stay synchronized while still collaborating.

The creation of multiple versions from various ad-hoc processes, resulting in further storage explosions in both

primary and backup repositories, leading to a reduction in the ability to get the version or information that is

needed.

Data Protection Shouldn’t Be an Afterthought

Many IT organizations struggle just with delivery of IT services to ROBO environments. They often overlook all of the

problems of protecting and recovering ROBO data:

All of the management challenges of distributed ROBO production infrastructures are multiplied by also requiring the

management of isolated backup tools at each site, as well.

Most data protection technologies require some level of human interaction (e.g., tape rotation), which exponentially

increases the unreliability of recovery, due to an increase in the number of locations being independently backed up.

How to Solve the Problem of Managing and Protecting ROBO Data

What many organizations should be thinking about is how to modernize their production and protection scenarios by

addressing both sets of business and IT requirements within a better framework whose solution components should

include:



Data sharing that provides “local access” (fast performance) while still assuring authoritative versioning across

sites.

Modern backup and recovery that does not require administration or legacy mechanisms per ROBO location.

Centralized backup of remote data without saturating the WAN, thus minimizing the impact on operations.

These solution components should be achievable through a complete self-managed solution onsite, or through integration

of cloud or file services that minimize WAN utilization.

The Beginning of the Solution Is “Distributed File Services”

One of the earliest solutions attempting to fulfill these requirements is a function that has been built into Microsoft

Windows for more than a decade. Distributed file system (DFS), as part of Windows Server, allows any combination of file

directories and their contents to be transparently replicated between multiple sites (see Figure 2).2

FIGURE 2. Example of Microsoft DFS File Shares and Namespace Across Decentralized Environments

Source: Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers, 2010

Replication of file directories (which can occur in near-real-time) ensures that branch offices and the corporate data center

each have the same data. ROBO users have high-performance access to the local copy, while data management, including

protection and recovery, is achieved using the data center copy overseen by IT.

Why You Need More than Microsoft DFS

Microsoft DFS replication and namespaces are only usable with Windows servers and endpoint devices, though it is

important to note that the vast majority of ROBO-deploying organizations use Microsoft servers at their ROBO locations for

local applications and file sharing. This may mean that the ROBOs can interact among themselves, but not with their

corporate colleagues who use Windows Server in complement with other enterprise file platforms (e.g., NAS). Other DFS

considerations include:

Scalability, hence why enterprise data centers may use NAS platforms.

2 Source: Jason Buffington, Data Protection for Virtual Data Centers, Wiley Press, 2010.



Lack of distributed file locking, which prevents version conflicts as users share data, which grows exponentially in

importance as the size of the organization or the adoption of DFS increases.

Is Cloud the Answer?

One interesting recent innovation in file services is the increased adoption of cloud-based file services, including some that

offer the replication and synchronization capabilities discussed earlier. Unfortunately, most of the current cloud-based file

services equate to a modern version of centralized IT, whereby a service provider has partially or completely replaced the

corporate data center. As such, all of the previously mentioned limitations that apply to centralized IT can also apply to

cloud-based file services.

In reality, most ROBO enterprises will need to support a distributed IT environment comprised of heterogeneous storage

systems housed in a combination of centralized data centers, on-premises at ROBO locations, and in the cloud.

One Solution to Consider: DFSR+ from Peer Software

Building on the merits of Microsoft DFS, but addressing the requirement that many larger organizations utilize

heterogeneous storage platforms, Peer Software offers solutions powered by DFSR+. DFSR+ is a file services technology

designed for ROBO environments that layers on top of the Windows Server operating system. It includes a scanning and

replication engine that incorporates real-time sync, byte-level replication, and distributed file locking (see Figure 3).

FIGURE 3. DFSR+ in a Mixed Windows, NAS, and Cloud ROBO Environment

Source: Peer Software, 2016

http://www.peersoftware.com/



How DFSR+ Delivers User Productivity and IT Manageability

As mentioned, the best end-user experience is achieved by providing a local copy of data to users who need it. DFSR+

enables business users and IT organizations to achieve their goals, instead of being in conflict between the merits of legacy

centralized and decentralized methods:

Users can access the local copy as they would any other file directory on whichever Windows server or NAS

platform is in use.

The IT file and storage management teams benefit by managing the distributed file data as easily as they manage

the centralized IT infrastructure—i.e., using a central management console.

This “best of both worlds” combination of decentralized access with centralized management would be reason enough to

consider DFSR+ as the upgrade to Microsoft DFS that ROBOs have been clamoring for. But as stated earlier, to really

address the issues of distributed IT, one must address both productivity and protection, which DFSR+ does.

How DFSR+ Ensures Protection and Recoverability

By enabling local users and centralized IT to have their own consistent instance of the data while still allowing that data to

be accessed and managed, DFSR+ arguably “solves” how ROBOs can assure productivity without exponential management

burdens. In addition, because the IT organization has a centralized copy of everything, it is less likely to struggle with

remote protection and recovery tasks for each ROBO site. Instead, corporate IT can protect the centralized copy without

any additional WAN traffic. Equally exciting—data recoveries can be initiated in two ways:

In bidirectional topologies, data restorations can be performed within the central IT facility, from the centralized

backup server to its nearby centralized file server or NAS. At DFSR+ speed, the restored “newer” data will then be

replicated to the appropriate ROBOs like any other file change.

For unidirectional topologies, data restorations can be invoked by the central IT team streaming directly to a

ROBO location. Once the data is written to the ROBO file share, it will (like any other file update) replicate the

changes to the central IT server, which “closes the loop.”

As an interesting side benefit, long-term data retention mandates can be achieved by tapes managed at the corporate data

center for data that resides within the ROBOs. Those tapes, as well as any copies, become the “offsite” copies of ROBO

data for auditing purposes, without the tape/courier burden that offsite mandates typically incur.

How DFSR+ Leverages DFS Namespaces to Deliver Corporate-wide Availability and BC/DR

Both Windows DFS Replication and Peer DFSR+ ensure that the data is synchronized at multiple locations, in smaller and

larger environments respectively. Both can be partnered with another Microsoft technology, DFS Namespaces, which

abstracts the copy of the data that is being accessed, as shown in the center of Figure 2,

where\\contoso\share_name appears instead of the names of individual servers and shares. Users accessing a DFS

Namespace gain additional availability benefits:

When all servers are working, the closest DFSR+ or DFS share will provide fastest access to users’ data.

When a server is unavailable, an alternate DFSR+ or DFS share will ensure that users remain productive.

Redirection is handled in near real-time and is transparent to the user, thus enabling some exciting scenarios for users that

roam across locations— e.g., regional personnel. Essentially, combining DFS Namespaces and an enterprise-class



distributed file system delivers BC/DR availability benefits to ROBOs by utilizing the corporate data center (or alternate

ROBO) as a hot site against site or regional crises.

The Bigger Truth

For as long as IT has been deliverable through a distributed topology (e.g., since the shift from mainframes), organizations

have struggled with delivering IT services that ensure productivity yet still are manageable. The two service-model

“extremes” (decentralized ROBO infrastructure versus centralized IT delivery) both come with tradeoffs—i.e., lower

productivity or increased management burden. One of the best possible resolutions is a distributed file system that

enables all stakeholders (end-users and IT) to access or manage data from their local perspective without burdening the

other party.

For the last 20 years, many organizations have utilized Microsoft DFS within Microsoft Windows Server as the best

conceivable answer—but Peer DFSR+ technology has raised the bar through broader filer support, scalability, and

collaboration enablement.

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group

(ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change. This publication is copyrighted by

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www.esg-global.com [email protected] P. 508.482.0188

Enterprise Strategy Group is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that provides market intelligence and actionable insight to the global IT community.


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