What is really happening with storage costs? How does storage management, or the lack of it, impact the datacenter? When is SAN the right strategy? These are the key questions, and the real issues that IT managers face when making storage decisions. But five storage myths tend to distort the real answers to these questions.
| 1. |
Storage is getting cheaper |
| 2. |
It’s cheaper to add storage rather than manage it |
| 3. |
Capacity on Demand is a great idea |
| 4. |
Backed up data is always recoverable |
| 5. |
SAN will lower my costs |
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On Wednesday 27th of October our very own Martin Conway, in association with C2 & Primus Solutions, will be presenting on Logical Data Migration.
This Case Study covers the innovative use of block-based SAN virtualisation and replication technology – delivered as a service – to support the logical data migration to a new data centre. The logical data migration service had to integrate with the overall data centre migration which included the physical move of all servers and their associated applications. A key part of the solution was the use of “IO splitter” technology in the SAN to allow in-flight replication without any integrity risk or change to the existing production disk volumes. The solution incorporated a centralised application and configuration database, developed for the project, which managed the logical data migration workflow, and allowed integration with existing disk based asynchronous replication technology over 1,000km for Disaster Recovery. The migration workflow and architecture allowed for the re-synchronisation of data volumes in the new production data centre without the requirem ent for a re-synchronisation over the WAN. The solution provided automated processes to manage over 1,200 disk volumes across three locations; over 3,600 in total. Significant transformation elements were delivered as part of the project including new zone configurations, Fibre Channel port assignments, RAID set and LUN optimisation, VSAN separation, Inter-VSAN routing, N-Port Virtualisation, and FCIP.
Visit SNW Europe 2010 for more information.
ESG estimates that database data is growing at 25% per annum, with unstructured data increasing at two to three times that rate. This growth is fueled by a dependence on digital assets to conduct business and the need to support an increasingly mobile workforce. Collaboration, Web 2.0 applications, and use of messaging systems also contribute to information growth.
Retention policies dictated by corporate and regulatory mandates exacerbate primary information growth as organizations are required to save data for longer periods of time. Additionally, companies are saving historical information in an effort to improve business intelligence processes as decision support functions benefit from having access to more data.
(Source: ESG REPORT – Why CIOs Should Look To Data Deduplication)
When used appropriately Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) can have a dramatic effect on your backup window. VTL uses disk array technology to deliver fast data backups which, from within your backup software, looks, feels and behaves just like physical tape drives.
Modern tape technology like LTO has tremendous capacities and speed – if used in the right way. If you are able to stream data at high speeds and continuously then physical tape can be blisteringly fast – big databases are perfect for streaming to physical tape.
VTL comes into it’s own when there are lots of files to backup. Effective use of caching and de-duplication technology maximises the throughput and ensure VTL space is used in the most effective way.