Storage
Companies today use a number of storage and backup alternatives each having its place and focus. The decision to use one solution over another is typically driven by existing infrastructure investment and/or application requirements.
However as clients take advantage of the technologies such as server and desktop virtualisation Capito find ourselves deploying more integrated solutions which see clients move away from the traditional centralised storage solution per say, and into a solution which is intelligent, complements their business needs and is constructed to ensure their business critical applications are not only suitably covered from a back-up perspective, but can be recovered in a fraction of the conventional disk-tape backup scenario.
Ubiquitous storage
An ever increasing business trend is the movement by ICT Departments from cost centre’s to profit centre’s. As part of this migration business users are demanding not only an HA solution but levels of service which put existing resources under additional strain.
To alleviate some of this pressure there is a drive to uptake the new iSCSI SAN technology. The “everywhere” nature of Ethernet and that it’s a known quantity, allows for direct benefits in staffing and training. This coupled with the use of IP networks gives iSCSI a global reach leading from a LAN to a WAN and onto the Internet, allowing storage to be located almost anywhere.
Application specific solutions
The drive within the storage community is now to align your product with critical business applications to ensure that your product offerings are tuned for both back-up and recovery in a manner which reflects a businesses needs. A perfect example of this philosophy is demonstrated by NetApp, and in particular their alignment to MS Exchange 2007.
E-mail is still the backbone of a businesses communications strategy, and any outage can be catastrophic through lack of communications or correspondence both internally and externally. Using the NetApp SnapManager product in conjunction with an associated storage appliance, a full MS Exchange deployment can be recovered from last known backup and re initiated in under 5 minutes!
For virtualisation, you must think storage
As companies seek the benefits of virtualisation, the inclusion of a SAN is an essential element of any such undertaking. As a business dis-aggregates its computational power from other computational elements, one such element to be re-structured is the associated internal storage.
Without removing the server internal storage and deploying onto a complementary SAN, you will be restricted in the quality of servers you can deploy and the flexibility of the consolidated server solution to cater for growth and increase processing demand.