STORAGE & BACKUP

Like you need a database of some sort with any software application, you need some sort of storage with every piece of hardware. In fact, in large networks, the two go hand in hand, with the size of databases determining the amount of storage needed. But then computer storage is not limited to large organizations or even to just computers. On the personal front, traditional computer storage is moving into devices like video recorders and the like.

At the same time, many new products and technologies have tried to break in to the market traditionally dominated by hard disks and tape of one kind or the other, and most have failed. The only ones to have made an impact in the last five years are CD-ROMs, CD-RWs and DVD. Flash memory is slowly becoming accepted in personal devices like MP3 players, digicams and the like. Other than these, almost all others have failed to develop long-term mass markets for themselves.

	Enterprise Storage Solutions An overview of the three basic types of storage solutions available–DAS, NAS, SAN Managing Storage An increase in data requires additional equipment and adds to management woes. What are these management challenges and the solutions being offered for them High-end Storage and Backup A brief tour of some of the really high-end products in the fields of storage and backup Remote Storage in Win 2000 Server Save your hard-drive storage by automatically moving infrequently accessed files to tapes Tape Store-ies Tape-based storage technologies have been around from a long time, but still remain as relevant today as ever, with more capacity, more speed, and more formats Save your Data Devise a foolproof, easy-to-follow backup routine Personal Storage Options Enterprise storage aside, there’s still a need for individuals to store their critical data. Presented here are the options available to them. Removable Disks Get Smaller iVDR, the latest slim removable storage disk features 40 GB storage Online Storage options Network and distributed file systems, and Internet-based data centers are some examples of online storage implementations

Storage can be divided into two broad classifications, live storage and backup. Both are equally critical and in fact, over time, we are likely to spend more money, time and effort in creating and maintaining backups than for live storage.

It is widely accepted that irrespective of the size of our business and our network, if we are into computers, then we are likely to spend significant amounts of money in purchasing storage, both live and backup, in the coming year or two. If that is the case, then it is imperative that we understand the various technologies, products and techniques that are in use and are likely to be used in the areas of storage and backup.

Let us start by understanding some trends in storage.

IDE hard disks are becoming omnipresent



There was a time when IDE was limited to low end PCs and everything else, from Workstations to servers, was the domain of SCSI. That is no longer the case. IDE has caught up with SCSI in terms of robustness, capacity and data transfer rates, and given that it is way cheaper than SCSI, is fast becoming the drive of choice in even high end servers. With IDE drives like the 250 GB Maxtor DiamondMax becoming available at fairly cheap prices (Rs 22,500. See review on page 121), it is no



longer difficult to imagine a one TB NAS box sitting on small networks.

There is no replacing tape for archival



Ask any network administrator and he would love to hate tape. But there is no escaping from tape, when it comes to archival.

The simple fact is that there is no other media that is as compact, as cheap and can have as much capacity as good old tape.

While the tape formats have evolved, from DAT to DLT, Travan and LTO (see PCQuest Buzz), and capacities have increased manifold, the basic structure–the magnetic tape spool–has remained.

CD writeables and rewriteables have become ubiquitous at the lowest end for personal backups. But their 700 MB capacity limit is now becoming a serious limitation for serious application backup. DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs offer more capacities, but only so much more (4.7 GB) and the high price of the writers and the media is keeping them away from the mainstream.

RAID is becoming inexpensive and moving to the low end It was not that far back that RAID was associated with very high-end servers. Part of the reason was that RAID system used SCSI disks, and also technologies for using RAID was built in only in high-end

OSs.

Today, IDE RAID is fairly common and more importantly, many of the technologies used in high-end servers have migrated down the line, both on the hardware side and on the OS. Thus, commodity RAID, based on IDE disks is available at an affordable price for the mainstream.

Automated backups are in



As the volume of data grows, so does the number of tapes and the time required for backup. For any systems administrator, it is no fun, sitting into the wee hours of the night, twiddling his thumbs and waiting for one tape to finish so that he can pop in the next one. Even if we keep the boredom out of it, the probability of something going seriously wrong, like tapes getting mixed up is very high. This is where automated backup systems step in.

Automated tape libraries are today the preferred option for medium sized networks upwards, and the good thing about these libraries is that you can keep scaling up as your needs grow.

Organization-wide storage planning is in



Storage and backup were typically treated as localized issues, with each server or each department being treated separately.

This led to isolated pools of storage being built up, often with incompatible products and technologies. As storage becomes a bigger part of the IT expenditure pie, and as it becomes a more critical concern of the organization, storage will start being treated as a central resource, with planning, acquisition, usage and management being done across machines and departments.

Internet data centers are gaining acceptance



Internet data centers have been around for some time now, but have not had much acceptance because of bandwidth issues as well as concerns with security of data stored at the data centers. But slowly, they are gaining acceptance from large organizations that are faced with having to set up their own data centers as primary or disaster-recovery facilities.

Krishna Kumar