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Managed Storage Services

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Storage of information is one of the most critical tasks for any

organization. Add government and company regulations regarding retention of old

data to this, and you create a heady mix for the IT department. Besides these

difficulties, it is also extremely difficult to figure out storage requirements

in future. For eg, one can never assess what would be storage requirements

related to web trends, projects in development or pending business alliances.

Providing cost-effective, secure, scalable and reliable storage infrastructure

is very difficult to achieve. As data is generated every moment in

organizations, in the form of emails, documents, databases, etc, storage needs

are also increasing with time and lot of IT resources are consumed in managing

storage related activities. Research has shown that cost of managing storage, on

an average is three to five times higher than the cost of purchasing it. To

overcome these difficulties and to let organizations focus on their core

business, plus to make storage more cost effective, Managed Storage Services are

becoming popular and coming up as a great alternative to conventional storage

management.

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Storage management modes and their benefits



Significant contributors to storage in an organization include emails and

the various databases that link to key business applications like ERP, CRM and

SCM. Backup and recovery of such data is high on the priority list for any IT

department. The storage solutions used by organizations to store their data are

broadly classified as network storage solutions. The most common amongst these

are NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) along with

connectivity options (Fiber channel etc). By outsourcing storage services, one

can efficiently provide and manage all data storage related activities and

services, as most vendors who offer Managed Storage Services are experts in this

domain There are two different ways of implementing Managed Storage Services. If

you are starting a new branch, organizations can completely outsource their

storage infrastructure and services. This implies organizations don't have to

invest in storage infrastructure, they just pay for service like any other

utility bill (fixed amount per Gigs of storage). This also helps new branches to

be functional quickly. Other way of implementing Managed Storage Services is via

remote management, here the managed service provider remotely manages storage

activities and devices sitting inside your premises. Some benefits of using

Managed Storage Services include: a customized and flexible solution with

best-of-breed facilities like continuous performance monitoring, end-to-end

problem management, change management, real time response to additional storage

needs and comprehensive reporting.

Additional services include backup and restore, information strategy

development, infrastructure assessment, storage consolidation and total cost of

ownership studies, interoperability testing, data migration, capacity planning,

cabling, configuration, installation, and multi-vendor maintenance services.

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Security of data



As mentioned earlier, information management is very critical for an

organization, and leakage of data can completely break business processes and

reputation of an organization. Under Managed Storage Services, one has to put

this critical data under service providers' control. Moreover, as the service

provider is at different geographical locations, movement of data over a public

network further adds to security concerns. So, we should focus on techniques

that enable secure data transfer. Some of them are as under:

SAN Zoning



Arranging Fiber Channel devices into logical groups or zones is known as SAN

Zoning. Only devices that are in the same zone can recognize and communicate

with each other through switched port-to-port connections.

A hard zone is implemented within the Fiber Channel switches and consists of

two or more port switch/port definitions. Effectively, the addition of ports to

a hard zone creates an isolated point-to-point tunnel. A soft zone consists of a

list of World Wide Port Names (WWPNs) that uniquely identify the Fiber Channel

Host Bus Adapter (HBA) within the customer servers and the storage subsystems.

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When an HBA is first connected to the SAN fabric, it goes through a fabric

login process that uses the burned-in WWPN of the HBA to uniquely identify the

adapter to the SAN fabric. The WWPN within the Fiber Channel switches are unique

and cannot be changed.

LUN masking



A LUN (Logical Unit Number) is a logical unit number assigned to a logical

disk image within a storage subsystem. LUNs are associated with customer servers

via the WWPN of the HBA within the customer server. LUN Masking is an

authorization process that makes a LUN available to some hosts and unavailable

to others. LUN Masking dictates which hosts can see logical disks within a zone.

Host access by port



Host access by port is implemented within a storage subsystem that contains

multiple HBAs. The storage subsystem maintains a table that indicates which HBA

ports a given customer server must connect through to gain access to the LUNs.

Host access by port, in combination with SAN zoning, effectively defines a

point-to-point path through the SAN fabric from the customer server to the

logical resources within the storage subsystems.

Port binding



Port binding is implemented by defining the WWPN that may log into a

specific port. All ports in the fabric will have a WWPN, which is assigned port

by port. A null value will be entered for ports that are not utilized, thereby

preventing any unauthorized login access to the fabric. Invalid login attempts

on ports will send an alert.

Next:

Managed Data Center Services

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