StorMagic, the software-defined storage company enabling hyper-converged infrastructure, has announced that SvSAN will form an integral part of Cisco's Secure Ops managed cybersecurity solution for OT (Operational Technology) networks, targeted to medium sized and large enterprises.
The Cisco Secure Ops Solution helps businesses manage cybersecurity risk and compliance requirements in industrial automation environments. It's particularly beneficial to companies where a mix of old and new IT infrastructure components are in place and where network monitoring, consistent data flow and high security are imperative. Today, companies using the solution include Diamond Offshore, a leader in offshore drilling and a provider of contract drilling services to the energy industry around the globe. It is also used by a major oil and gas company to protect its ICS Network.
StorMagic's SvSAN forms one of several tightly integrated products and services that have been brought together to form a single solution that offers a simple, cost-effective and flexible way to enable network monitoring and data flow. SvSAN was selected for three key reasons:
Simple: Effortless high-availability in virtually any environment with centralized management for one to thousands of sites.
Cost-Effective: Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint thereby dramatically lowering costs.
Flexible: Delivers on today's performance needs leveraging any CPU and storage type while avoiding over-provisioning as the solution grows over time.
Secure Ops' original architecture ran in their datacenter and was dependent on non-HA local storage to provide the required performance and uptime. However, the company recently revised the architecture to include a client-side compute infrastructure. This enabled Secure Ops to provide security protection at the client site in combination with a datacenter component that collects and analyses critical information.
The updated design uses SvSAN to gain the required clusters of highly dense rack servers for high-availability at a competitive price point, while still delivering to the customer's expectations of uptime and performance. Looking deeper in to the architecture, at each client site there is a cluster of two Cisco UCS C220 M4 rack servers that communicate back to another cluster of two Cisco UCS C240 M4 rack servers in a Secure Ops datacenter. The servers are virtualized using VMware and the storage is virtualized by StorMagic using internal server disks. There is no need for external storage arrays at any of the sites. Additionally, SvSAN mirrors data between servers that provides the required high availability at each location.
"StorMagic's virtual SAN helped us lower our infrastructure costs by completely eliminating external storage and delivering more than 99% uptime for our IT security offering. This is a huge time saving for everyone involved," Nicky Haan, Business Architect, Cisco Secure Ops.
The Cisco Advanced Services team that developed the Secure Ops solution is very happy with their choice of Cisco servers and StorMagic's SvSAN for virtual storage and high availability. They now have an extremely rack-dense solution at each site, without the cost, complexity or space required by traditional external storage arrays. Many of their end user clients are in locations that have poor network connectivity and depend on satellite links (256Kb bandwidth/up to 3 second latency) - SvSAN performs flawlessly in these harsh environments. Deployment and management have been a breeze as they've been able to handle all of it from a remote location. Secure Ops has been able to lower their capital expenditures by more than 40% and uptime went from 96% to over 99% - which eliminates a lot of headaches for their support team.
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