NEWSLETTER - THE BENEFITS OF STORAGE CONSOLIDATION
The unrelenting growth of company files, e-mail, databases and application data drives a constant need for more storage. But with storage directly attached to servers, growth means burdensome storage management and decreased asset utilisation. As a result, storage resources remain trapped behind individual servers, impeding data availability.
Consolidation in a Storage Area Network (SAN) can alleviate much of this pain - but until recently this has been a costly and over-complex solution for many organisations.
The symptoms of growing storage requirements
A SAN is a dedicated network that is separate from other LANs and WANs that may already be implemented in your organisation. It generally serves to interconnect the storage-related resources that are connected to one or more servers.
It is often characterised by its high data transfer rates between member storage peripherals and by its highly scalable architecture. Though typically described in terms of hardware, SANs very often include specialised software for their management, monitoring and configuration.
Typically your organisation will benefit from a SAN if:
- Your storage needs are growing quickly on an annual basis
- You are frequently running out of disk space
- You are receiving regular complaints because your servers are not operating at peak performance
- You are experiencing regular outages because of storage-related issues
- Regulations means that you have to keep many years data available online
- You are having frequent problems with your backups
The rise of iSCSI
Until recently if you wanted to implement a SAN you would have to use Fibre Channel (FC) technology. Whilst providing a fast network, it is disadvantaged by the fact that you would have to invest in a new FC infrastructure as it cannot utilise your existing Ethernet investment. Fortunately that situation has been remedied with the rise in the number of iSCSI solutions that are now available for SANs.
Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) is an IP based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities, developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force. It facilitates data transfers over intranets and manages storage over long distances by carrying SCSI commands over IP networks.
It is now a key technology in the SAN marketplace as it increases the capabilities and performance of storage data transmission and can be used to transmit data over existing Ethernet LANs, WANs and the Internet.
iSCSI uses Ethernet as a transport for data from servers to storage devices. When an end user or an application sends a request, the operating system converts standard SCSI commands into TCP, encrypts it (optional), adds a packet header and sends the packet over standard Ethernet. When the packet is received it is decrypted (if encrypted) and dissembled. The SCSI commands are sent to the SCSI controller and onto the SCSI storage device. As iSCSI is bi-directional it can also be used to return a response to the original request.
The best solution
Although there are number of iSCSI solutions available on which to build your SAN, we believe that we have found the most cost-effective and efficient option.
Through our partner EqualLogic, we can offer a range of affordable iSCSI SAN solutions that are based on standard protocols and bring the benefits of storage consolidation to all your data. They provide a fully redundant solution that enables you to leverage centralised storage to gain simpler management, data sharing, and improved availability.
A single pool of storage makes allocating volumes easier, and improves backup and disaster recovery. You can grow on demand as your needs change and gain better performance through the unique architecture, which automatically load-balances across multiple arrays, disks, and ports. Built-in intelligence delivers the highest levels of performance, scalability, and availability.
If you would like to find out more how an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN can help your organisation solve its storage problems, please contact us at this address: nburrell@nviron.co.uk
THE BENEFITS OF STORAGE CONSOLIDATION Having problems managing your growing data storage requirements? If so a SAN can help you overcome ....
VIRTUALISATION - THE WAY FORWARD If you analysed the server usage within your organisation you would probably find that very few of them are actually running ....
PROTECTING YOUR E-MAIL As spammers and hackers continue to exploit weaknesses in the world's e-mail infrastructure, organisations are faced ....
PREVENTING THE MISUSE OF YOUR IT RESOURCES Preventing employees misusing e-mail and the Internet is a 2 stage process. First ....
KEEPING YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE Have you ever stopped to consider what would happen to your business if your ISP failed for whatever reason? The implications could be catastrophic ....
WHY EVERY ORGANISATION NEEDS HIGH AVAILABILITY Traditionally the costs of implementing a true high availability approach have been prohibitive ....
NVIRON UPDATE Over the course of 2006 some significant events have occurred for Nviron ....