Computing plays an increasing role in all industries. Staff need to contend with limited resources and shrinking budgets but still deliver fast results. Many businesses are being challenged by the need to store and manage ever increasing amounts of data and provide teams with powerful, flexible infrastructure solutions.
Traditional storage solutions such as physical file servers offer a centralized space for file storage and management but are limited in extensibility and features and are tied to expensive hardware. The explosion in virtualization has led to the need for highly scalable, efficient storage solutions.
Storage Attached Network (SAN) devices fill the gap between traditional server architecture and Big Data. These storage appliances take storage off the server allowing for better centralization and management of data, lowering the cost of administration and support for your infrastructure and allowing greater flexibility in deployment configurations. These appliances go far beyond simple centralization of data with innovative features built in to allow for more efficient data storage and access.
Data Deduplication allows for block level deduplication of information stored on the appliance reducing the amount of storage space required for your data, improving the economics and reliability of your storage solution.
Some models offer automatic, on-the-fly RAID tiering across solid state drives and traditional hard disk drives based on inbound requests for data. This intelligent self automated system prioritizes traffic and places heavily utilized data on the fastest storage media available. It also has the ability to assign different RAID levels across single physical disks allowing for the greatest optimization possible balancing performance against cost.
SAN’s cut infrastructure cost by separating the cost of storage from your server infrastructure allowing for a highly extensible architecture that can scale to huge amounts of storage with several connection options to multiple physical servers. The ability to store your virtual machines on these storage devices also reduces the required resources on physical host servers allowing for greater flexibility in server deployments and reduced cost in overall server infrastructure.
While these storage solutions do require a relatively high initial investment compared to some traditional storage methods, for businesses with high demand for data availability or that require large amounts of storage space the overall return on investment will make the move to a more robust storage solution worthwhile.
For more information, please contact VS Technology 705-475-0323.