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Network Storage

Storage Media

• Fixed Disks
• IP disks / clustered storage
• Network Attached Strorage (NAS)
• Tape
• Optical

Storage Media has come a long way since the days of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) using SCSi and Fibre Channel drives. The explosion in storage requirements, fuelled by a plethora of hungry applications like Email, Digital Content and Scientific Images, and amplified by the legislative requirements to retain data for many years, has generated a whole new breed of storage media technologies. These range from Fibre Channel, IP Clustered storage and Network Attached Storage (NAS), to high density versions of traditional technologies for Tape and Optical drives.

For the purposes of the management and storage of data, it is important to recognise the types of data in your organisation, and most businesses now recognise two major categories of data – structured and unstructured. Structured Data is by definition held within a database (e.g. CRM data) and its storage is “managed” by the database application (e.g. CRM application). Unstructured Data is defined as ‘anything not yet in a database’, but this does not really differentiate between the different types of unstructured data, and the issues relating with each.

It has been estimated that 85% of all corporate data is ‘unstructured’, and therefore the appropriate management of it is critical to the survival of any business. Examples of unstructured data range from small files such as Email, MS Word and Excel, to very large files such as used by the Media, Biotech and Seizmic industries. How these files are managed is critical to all business.

One area which is gathering momentum, especially in high performance and huge capacity markets is Clustered Network Attached Storage. The idea is that this has all the benefits of traditional NAS, but scales capacity and performance linearly to create massive single file stuctures, with many gigabytes per second aggregate throughput.

The market leader in this area is Isilon Systems with their OneFS operating system and IQ range of enterprise class hardware. With a solution that scales from 4TB to 528TB, Isilon provide solutions for a wide range of businesses including the media, broadcast, Biotech, etc.

For businesses with smaller file unstructured data requirements, solutions are offered by CommVault’s Qinetix Unified Data Management range of products. Another innovative solution is offered by ONStor with their clustered NAS and FC SAN implementations. If your data profile is varied with a mix of millions of smaller files then ONStor is likely to reduce your business storage costs dramatically.

Whether your data is structured or unstructured, recent legislation may mean that you have to retain large amounts of it for several years. Optical storage technology solutions offered by Plasmon and Tape Library solutions offered by Spectra Logic will help you to address these needs.