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Which data is important enough to be stored on highly available storage systems?

The recoverability of data varies greatly and also depends on data ageing. Still, a large number of companies do not make any distinctions in data storage.

Which data should be stored and how?

The introduction of different storage classes will put things right. Classes can be defined depending on your business processes, which will lead to an optimum between benefit and cost.

Wrong storage behavior leads to data and cost explosion

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is the magic word for modern storage and modern data management. Today's digital data storage must fulfill a wide range of requirements. This aspect is often forgotten. For example, critical ERP data is treated the same way as the "home shares" of its users. Data ageing is only very rarely considered.

Low-end data can also be stored in low-cost storage systems.

The area of storage system offers optimized solutions for virtually any area of application. This includes high-end storage systems and Dual-Fabrik-SAN offering data mirroring across multiple records as well as SATA-NAS storage solutions and archiving solutions.

Lifecyle Management

Data does age.  The value of an executive board presentation changes at least 50% within two months.

 

However, every employee saves the PowerPoint presentation multiple time in most cases (Exchange, locally, and file/home share). In most cases, all systems follow a redundant design; i.e. RAID disk mirroring, mirroring of the storage systems with appropriate backups. It is therefore not surprising that the ever increasing storage requirements for data and backup systems leads to a data explosion and thus an inherent cost explosion.

Lifecycle Management is the answer to this threatening development of the information flood. For example, based on a TIER level based storage infrastructure, all data older than three month is automatically moved to special archiving systems. These systems offer a reasonable price per gigabyte ratio and ensure that identical files existing multiple times are saves compressed only once and are assigned a pointer. The user is unaware of this, and the loading times are longer only marginally.

Interested? – Contact us – Fiberworks is manufacturer independent and has unrivaled knowledge and experience in the area of planning, implementation and operation of complex data centers. We would be happy to offer you performance/profit based consultancy services. If you are not fully satisfied with our consultancy services, then you do not have to pay us!

Dual Vendor Strategy

An idea storage solution can never be manufacturer dependent.

Fiberworks recommends engaging at least two vendors for larger installations.

There have been cases in which firmware bugs causes total failure in high-end storage systems. A company that was solely dependent on this product suffered enormous losses.

Optimum availability with a great savings potential

The modern design of a storage solution has to perfectly support your business processes.

This includes pricing, an aspect that is often forgotten. A slim IT budget offers more freedom in terms of products and services. Our Fiberworks experts will create SLAs based on the importance of your business processes. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • What does it cost when a business process becomes unavailable for an hour?
  • How many OFFLINE hours can the company afford?

These questions put to the management team help quickly and realistically evaluate the importance of the relevant IT services. TIER level (storage classes) and backup classes are defined on the basis of these SLAs.

SLA defines the maximum duration for which a service may be unavailable.

TIER levels define the requirements (availability and performance) of the disk system.

Based on this information and taking into consideration the existing infrastructure, the storage infrastructure can be planned. The following technologies can be deployed:

  • High-end storage
  • Midrange storage
  • Archiving systems
  • Tape robot
  • Backup to disk
  • Mirrored systems
  • Mirrored disks (BCVs, clones, snapshots)
  • SAN (Dual Fabric or Single Fabric)
  • Multiprotocol router
  • NAS heads or gateways
  • iSCSI
  • Hard disks (FiberChannel, SAS, SATA)
  • RAIDs (1, 10, 5, 6)
  • Virtualization technologies

Much needs to be considered.  Fiberworks has many years of experience in the area of complex infrastructure. Your own employees may not necessarily have in-depth expert knowledge that is relevant.

Fiberworks would be happy to advice you independently – don't just rely on the information provided by the manufacturer, it might prove very costly.

We recommend an SLA based TIER level infrastructure with central management and a reasonable contract framework (price per gigabyte) with at least two manufacturers to meet the individual TIER level storage requirements.

If the size of your storage environments is already 50 TByte or more and if you are not yet using TIER levels, you have a savings potential of at least 50%!

Interested? – Contact us

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Friday, November 21, 2008  |  Contact  |  Imprint  |  Login