Most company's data set is on the increase and unlikely to reduce in the future. It's fair to say that IT professionals in most organisations, large or small, have at some point suffered from the continual act of balancing their systems' available storage between application servers. This usually involves the high risk, time consuming task of adding disk and possibly a RAID set expansion, if physical server limitations permit.
Control storage growth to cut cost
The result is still an inefficient use of available server storage that a compounding problem of having to backup an increasing distributed dataset.
ISN Solutions approach to address all these issues is to adopt a centralised data storage strategy.
Dedicated high performance network filers, allow additional storage to be added on the fly, whilst the system is running making any new storage available to the network immediately. Host connectivity is achieved using gigabit Ethernet, in the form of CIFS and iSCSI, or can be directly attached using traditional fibre channel host adaptors.
Using iSCSI connectivity allows the filer appliance to appear as local storage to a host server and therefore it becomes transparent to server based applications. This makes the appliance ideal for database applications such as SQL and Exchange which are optimised for block level storage.
Support for iSCSI is native in Windows Server 2003, 2008, XP and Vista.
Backing up the appliance can be achieved by attaching a traditional SCSI tape device directly to the unit (which has the benefit of keeping data backup traffic off the network), or you can utilise built in replication features embedded within the filers operating system.
These appliances can best be described as a cross between a NAS and a SAN, without the traditional SAN complexity and cost.
ISN recommends any organisation with more than 1 Terabyte (TB) of data to consider the advantages of centralised storage model. One of the most attractive features of these products is, surprisingly, their cost effectiveness compared to relying only on servers' internal disks. Check out the NetApp FAS 2000 range of SAN solutions such as the FAS2020, FAS2040 and FAS 2050 units for raw storage of up to 68TB or 104TB.
Call one of our storage specialists on 020 7313 9900 to find out more about how you can rationalise your storage and at the same time control costs and give your users faster data access.
