Describe new aspects of a solution that can upgrade storage

Data storage is a problem that almost all organizations face. As the company develops, the amount of data that needs to be stored on the network is also increasing. However, an upgradeable storage scenario does not only include increasing storage capacity, but performance, reliability, security, and availability must also keep up with the sheer amount of data.

It's been more than a year since we started to see how some organizations are designing scalable data storage solutions. Since then, most of the organization's needs for storage space have been expanded as a result of more and larger files, including increasing use of media files, more complex documents and presentations, larger and more complex databases, and more.

In addition, government regulations and forensic material are forcing companies to keep more data and keep it longer. For example, the federal law Amendment, which came into force earlier this month, requires federal litigants to provide electronic information as a process for investigating evidence. This means that once a lawsuit has been filed (or even an early pre-trial), the deletion in connection with the case or from the written document will be as invalid as the shredding paper file.

However, there are more things to consider about storage solutions than just storage space issues. A real upgradeable storage solution requires not only more and more data to be stored, but also good data organization and lookup capabilities, otherwise the stored data is of little use. The security of data storage is another important issue to consider, especially in regulated industries, such as Hipaa,glbact and other similar departments that require the protection of certain secret information. Last but not least, reliability is the most important thing. Losing important data can cause irreparable damage to your company. It is difficult to design a fast, user-friendly, reliable, secure, and upgradeable storage strategy, but fortunately, the development of new technologies can be used to address these challenges. Let's look at some scalable storage scenarios that can be used for organizations of all sizes.

Scalability and Scalability

One of the most important considerations for an upgradeable storage strategy is ease of extensibility. As organizations and/or data volumes grow, you can extend your storage space to meet your needs without affecting the ability of users to access previously stored data. This can be done in different ways, depending on your budget, your organization size, and the amount of data you need to store. Many small businesses can be implemented through a file server that uses a SATA or SCSI RAID disk array. There has been a significant increase in disk capacity over the past few years, and prices have fallen accordingly. The hot swap disk allows you to replace or add one disk to continue to use while the system is idle, and the SATA hot swap RAID disk array can be purchased at more than $100.

Networked Storage (NAS) is a more viable option as the organization's needs grow. A light channel connection allows you to place the storage subsystem farther away from the server. One example is the Aberdeen Xdas NAS system.

The next step is to use a storage area network (SAN), which is a separate back-end networked storage device. SAN is designed to provide higher performance and disk utilization.

Companies with large amounts of data can implement high-capacity and high-bandwidth systems, such as Sun's StorageTek system, which provides up to 330TB of storage capacity with 1100 300GB hard drives.

Scalability and performance

Fast access to data increases productivity, so when files become larger, good performance becomes more important, and new technologies can meet the need for speed.

Fibre Channel is a traditional way to solve bandwidth problems, and is typically used for storage area networks. Recently, the storage area network is running on Gigabit Ethernet, or using SCSI to achieve high-performance communication between network devices, traditionally this is the method used by networked storage. Over time, the distinction between storage area networks and networked storage is becoming increasingly blurred.

The Sun's StorageTek system mentioned above supports the maximum 68GB per second of ultra-high performance data bandwidth.

Scalability and Reliability

When storage systems evolve, fault tolerance and backup scenarios must evolve synchronously. Remember that fault tolerance and backup are two separate things, and you can't use fault tolerance instead of backups. Any well-designed upgradeable storage scenario should include fault-tolerant techniques. RAID is the most common fault-tolerant technique. When one or more disks fail, most (but not all) levels of RAID enable fault tolerance by providing data mirroring, or by writing parity information that can be used to refactor disk data.

The new networked storage system supports advanced RAID configurations, such as RAID 6, a dual parity mode that allows two drives to fail at the same time without losing data or stopping work, which costs less than RAID 1 (disk mirroring), especially large-capacity disks.

Tape backups, while relatively inexpensive, are slow and difficult to query for special files. As a result, backup to disk is more prevalent and the product has Microsoft's Data Protection Manager (a disk-based backup and recovery server), which makes backup easier to implement. More information on how it works.