Computing Systems

Data Center Outsourcing and Cloud Computing

What is it?

Cloud computing is a type of data processing in which all computing resources can be used as a common pool. Key advantages of this approach include: higher system utilization and fault tolerance, reduction in time required for deployment of new computing environments, lower IT ownership cost, greater simplicity, and increased unification and manageability of IT resources.

CROC’s Services

When implementing a cloud computing infrastructure, CROC offers its outsourced data center's virtual platforms as a public cloud, thereby allowing for the adjustment of storage and computing system capacity depending on the customer's needs. In addition, the customer only pays for the resources that it uses. This solution is particularly beneficial to companies that experience fluctuations in computing capacity and storage volume demand.

CROC also offers private cloud computing solutions–providing higher data confidentiality and protection, improved system utilization, and considerable OPEX savings.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure involves the migration of the entire user environment (applications, desktop, and user settings) from unreliable local workstations to a centralized computing environment and the organization of remote access. This helps reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for workstations by up to 50 percent (via centralized change management of system configuration and security policy monitoring). In addition, end-users become fully mobile.

CROC’s Services:

• Analysis of requirements
• Design and implementation of complex multi-vendor desktop virtualization systems, primarily based on VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and Quest solutions
• Integration with hardware (networks and storage systems, servers, local and global networks)
• Technical support services

Case study: CROC Desktop Virtualization

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan

What is it?

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) is the description of employees’ activities when disaster strikes. The DRP mitigates disaster consequences and allows for the control and recovery of business-critical operations as quickly as possible in the case of a disaster.

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) comprises a range of activities that are carried out in order to prevent the disruption of business-critical applications. 

CROC’s Services

CROC’s individual DRP and BCP solutions are based upon deep analysis of each customer's business processes. The characteristics of each solution depend on the type of business the customer is involved in as well as the existing processes and security levels.

Disaster Recovery Planning includes:

• Evaluation of business operations and identification of correlation between assets
• Analysis of client's vulnerability in all fields
• Business impact analysis (with regard to client's operations at all levels)
• Elaboration of short- and long-term DRPs
• Testing, maintenance, and updating of DRP in line with client's business growth

CROC's Business Continuity projects comply with all relevant standards. CROC is a partner of the British Standards Institution (BSI) and employs two BS25999 certified auditors. As a result, CROC is well placed to prepare clients for meeting BS25999 certification.

Case Studies: Disaster Recovery Plan for MTS

Integrated Business Continuity Project for Alfa-Bank

ILM, Tiered Storage, and Data Deduplication

What is it?

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is a process for storing information at lower cost while maintaining transparent access and required reliability. CROC offers a full range of services and solutions to help an organization implement its ILM strategy.

The first phase in the Information Lifecycle Management process is to determine what information is being stored and how relevant it is for the business via the use of automated tools designed for various applications that can help with this process. After the assessment, there should be a clear picture of the organization’s storage requirements. The second phase of the ILM process is to align those requirements with available storage and modernization plans.

Storage options include primary storage solutions such as SAN (Storage Area Networks) storage, NAS (Network Attached Storage), and DASD (Direct Access Storage Device). The second class of storage options includes backup solutions such as disk and tape libraries, magnetic tapes, etc. In addition, there is a possible third class of storage solution typically comprised of magnetic and optical storage which is stored off-line.

In short, Information Lifecycle Management is a business analysis of the trade-offs between cost and availability. While primary storage solutions are the most expensive per megabyte, they also offer the greatest availability. Information Lifecycle Management is a process that helps businesses and IT departments determine how to invest their information storage budgets.

Automated tiered storage solutions are the easiest to implement and are a very efficient subset of ILM. These solutions automate the identification of data volumes for relocating application data across different performance and capacity tiers within a storage array. The storage system proactively monitors workloads of all chunks of data (that can be less than 1 Mb) in order to identify ‘busy’ data that would benefit from being moved to higher-performing drives (usually SSD). Automated tiering will also identify less ‘busy’ data that could be moved to higher-capacity drives, without affecting performance. Data movement is performed without impacting data availability.

Data deduplication is a method of reducing storage capacity by eliminating redundant data. Only one unique instance of the data is actually stored on a disk array. Redundant data is replaced with a pointer to the unique data copy and lower storage space requirements help to reduce disk expenditure. Data deduplication can be implemented via primary, archive and backup storage. Using primary storage, an organization can normally reduce space requirements 20-40 percent by performing deduplication on some volumes of the disk array. Disk libraries that serve as storage for backup benefit the most from deduplication. Backups usually contain a huge amount of redundant data and deduplication lets the company reduce backup storage space by 90-95 percent. In addition, data deduplication also reduces the amount of data that must be sent across a WAN for remote backups, replication, and disaster recovery.

CROC’s Services

CROC uses an integrated data storage system optimization approach in order to reduce corporate information storage expenses, improve flexibility, and enrich the functionality of storage systems. In order to identify client needs and infrastructure specifications, CROC conducts a comprehensive assessment and offers system optimization guidelines. CROC is experienced in the detailed evaluation of client data storage environments and guarantees a high return on data storage optimization investment. CROC helps clients implement all required optimization solutions based on archiving, deduplication, and automated tiering technology.Read more: CROC brings cloud technology from theory to practice and offers free demo access to its cloud platform

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