Advertisment

Storage Matters

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

According to some astrologers, this is the time when Mars

is as close as it can ever be to Earth. Throw in a bit of Greek mythology, and

it spells a lot of terror, because Mars is the God of war. Whether the mythology

is anything to go by or not, one thing's for sure, this has been the year of

natural disasters, whether it was Katrina that completely devastated



New Orleans




or the earthquake that shook

Kashmir


and took so many lives. Who can forget the floods in

Gujarat


and Mumbai, which caused such huge losses to businesses and property or the

storms and lashing rains in



Bangalore




soon afterwards? Who knows where disaster will strike next? Mars is not

expected to distance itself for a few more months if that's any consolation to

the 'believers'. Even if you're not superstitious, this year has been a

wake up call to all businesses. So it's time to figure out the loss to your

business should another disaster strike, and plan a disaster-recovery strategy

or business-continuity plan. Do you just need your data safe, or do you want

your business to be running immediately after a catastrophe? If it's the

former, then you need some form of an offsite back-up solution, while for the

latter, you need a remote DR site that can take over quickly should the primary

site go down. Whatever the plan, you can't afford to ignore storage, because

that's the heart of any disaster recovery or business continuity plan. You

have to choose an appropriate storage solution depending upon what type and

volume of data you need to store.

Advertisment
Predictions for 2006
  • Storage

    virtualization will pick up with data center consolidations



  • E-mail archiving

    becomes more important as it can be used as legal evidence







  • Remote DR




    sites will become increasingly important, given the spate of natural

    disasters this year



  • Storage becomes

    ubiquitous



  • Hard drive

    capacities to really zoom up, making multi-terabyte storage boxes more

    affordable

Storage has been the center of attraction for many years

now and one of the reasons is that it's evolved with times. In fact, storage

is perhaps one of the few segments that has grabbed every possible opportunity

and made use of it. Take disaster recovery for instance, the concept is nothing

new. In fact, it's been there for ages, and yet it picked up only after the

9/11 attack. This was further reinforced with the concept of remote DR sites.

Companies don't only have to back up their precious data to local storage

only, but they also have the option of doing it to a remote location over a

leased link. There are lots of other examples besides this, which have kept the

storage industry on its toes.

Storage and compliance



Compliance became a major concern for US companies after HIPAA and Sarbanes

Oxley acts were introduced. Even Indian companies catering to international

clients had to worry about compliance to these two acts as well. The storage

industry identified compliance as an opportunity and created a need for good

storage solutions for effective data management. They were no longer selling

dumb storage boxes, but intelligent information management solutions. With HIPAA,

storage vendors introduced Information Lifecycle Management or ILM, which stored

and managed data right from its creation to its deletion. With Sarbanes Oxley,

ILM was reinforced, but besides that, e-mail archiving also picked up. So ILM is

still hot, and organizations should consider doing it from the point of managing

their information properly.

Advertisment
Tech/Influence

Momentus Seagate



Seagate has introduced a 2.5 inch notebook hard drive that uses perpendicular recording technology that enables its capacity to reach 160 GB, without increasing the power consumption or heat dissipation. This will take care of the storage needs of mobile executives. 

Maxtor One Touch II external hard drive 



Hard drive capacities have reached a half a Terabyte, and the manufacturers are finding different ways of marketing them. Take this one for instance, wherein Maxtor has created a back-up solution for SMBs. 

NetApp FAS270C



Network storage products that can work either as a standalone NAS or as a part of a SAN were visible this year. This device from NetApp, which we reviewed in March this year supports an array of 14 hot swappable disks. It's powered by NetApp's ONTAP 7G OS, which allows dynamic storage virtualization. What that means is that you can whatever volumes you create on this device can be dynamically resized as per the requirements. 

E-mail archiving



This is a key trend today, and not without good reason. Most official

communication happens over e-mail today, which means it can be used as legal

evidence should the need arise. It's, therefore, very important to back up all

the important email. That may not sound like much at one glance, so let's do

some calculations. Even if a single employee gets 1 GB of e-mail a month, you

can imagine the storage requirements. If a company has 100 employees, then

that's 100 GB of e-mail a month, meaning 1200 GB per year. You would need to

store it for at least five years, which translates to 60,000 GB of e-mail! Where

do you store all of it? You could back it up to tape as that would be more cost

effective since tape is still cheaper than disk. To add further complexity in

the matter, a lot of companies allow their employees to use e-mail for personal

communication needs as well. If your company allows that, then you would have to

take some tough decisions on whether you'd like to continue allowing it or

change the policy. This space will see more action next year, so stay tuned and

work out your plans.

Storage virtualization



There are three types of virtualization-servers, storage and network. Out

of these, server virtualization has really picked up this year, with some pretty

good solutions are available from IBM, VMWare, Microsoft, McAfee and several

open source communities. Storage virtualization has been talked about for a long

time, but is still an emerging technology. Very few large enterprises across the

world have implemented it. However, it is picking up, and one should see more

action on this next year. The technology is supposed to let you combine various

pools of storage and show them as one, so you can manage them from a central

location as well. This can really help reduce management overheads and save

costs. Should you be concerned about it? If you're running a data center with

disparate storage resources, then you should definitely take a closer look. Even

if you're planning to move all remote applications from your branch offices to

a data center, you'll need to set up a separate storage network. Here again,

you might like to look at doing storage virtualization from the beginning

itself.

Advertisment

Other trends that matter



One thing that emerges from all this is that storage has become ubiquitous.

Whether you're a consumer or an



enterprise buyer, storage touches your life in some way. If you're an

enterprise, then you should look at storage solutions from an information

management point of view. Not all information is equally important, so

everything need not be stored on the same type of storage medium.

Another area of concern that's picking up is storage

security, which you need to pay special attention to next year. For consumers,

storage is crawling under all digital gadgets, whether it's digital cameras,

MP3 players camcorders, DVD-players and even automobiles.

Advertisment

Drilling deeper, a lot of what you see today is happening

because the cost of individual storage elements is coming down, and capacities

increasing. Seagate for instance, introduced its perpendicular recording

technology this year, which will allow them to increase the capacity of their

drives quite a bit. They launched their 2.5 inch Momentus drive for notebooks,

with 160 GB capacity using this technology. That really takes care of all the

storage needs of a mobile executive. Regular hard drive capacity has already

touched 500 GB, which makes it easier to build multi-Terabyte NAS boxes.

Much more has happened in storage this year this year, but

we're restricted in talking about it due to the space crunch. We will be back

again next month with another more in depth story on storage.

Advertisment