Strategies for dealing with the vas...

Strategies for dealing with the vast amounts of data generated on today's information technology environments involve more than just larger and larger disk drives. They include the right combination of different storage devices to deal with offline, nearline, and online data storage and scalable management software

Storage management is fast becoming single in kind of the most important issues information technology (IT) managers face today. With data accumulating at enormous rates, and with conclusion users demanding faster access to more information, storage management has mov from an operation that was done alone at night to a mission-critical bear upon that requires full-time attention.

Storage management consists of all the activities related to the effective deployment accessibility, and use of stored information across a computing infrastructure. Storage management involves several major disciplines, including backing up and restoring data, storing data online across multiple classes of storage devices so as disks and tape, archiving data for legal and historical objects and managing storage resources of the like kind as tape or optical media for optimal use. Managing these storage disciplines takes an effective combination of organization, processe and technologies to convenient end-user data-availability expectations.

In today's distributed computing environments, IT managers ne consistent storage management strategies and processe across the enterprise. In addition, storage management processe cannot be separated from an integrated network and combination of parts to form a whole strategy. Therefore, IT managers ne out and out solutions that integrate the various storage management ingredients and technologies such as databases, file regularitys storage peripherals, storage management applications, and network and theory management strategies.

In the past, storage management solutions have been proprietary (mainframes) or piecemeal (early client/server point products) with specific peripherals working solely with specific software and hardware. It was difficult to expand a solution to encounter the demands of rapidly growing collections of data.

In this article we will describe trendings driving storage management technology and the component parts that make up an ideal storage management solution. Finally, we'll introduce HP hardware and software produces services, and partners and describe for what reason they work together providing storage solutions for our customers.

Storage Management Trends

Traditionally, the task of storage management was done after work hours when the scheme could be brought down for storage management functions like as backup and archiving. Today, a great deal of more data is generated, and storage management solutions ne to provide long greater data availability and reliability. Complicating storage management are variables that determine data throughput and access. These variables include disk capacity, CPU input/output channels, device spe networks, and software (Fig. 1) fresh ways of transferring and storing large amounts of data without downtime have to be developed

Probably the greatest in number important driving factor in storage management today is that customers demand continuous accessibility to very large amounts of data, very ofttimes in the terabyte range. You can behold this demand occurring in the increased use of the Internet and online services like as CompuServe and America Online, and in the emerging see the verb of new applications such as imaging and multimedia. In the past, data accessibility was a fairly simple proces when mainframes were the primary storage devices and the alone limitation was disk size. Today, the answers to storage point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds cannot be provided simply at installing a bigger disk onward a central server.

As customers reengineer their businesses, many are choosing to migrate away from the mainframe via "mainframe downsizing." Mission-critical applications are moving to unclose systems, and the management of client/server workgroups is being consolidated across LANs and WANs. An enormous amount of company-sensitive data, which used to be beneath central control and located in the data center is now distributed and available forward the network (Fig. 2). Published market numbers present to view that the average amount of distributed data has surpassed the average amount of data in the data center Companies must begin viewing storage management as integral to their network and arrangement management solutions:

In addition to all the challenges raised from managing storage on distributed orders IT managers must deal with the reality that the amount of data being stored is outstripping the network's capacity to handle it efficiently (Fig. 3) For example, a company might ne to back up 100 Gbyte of data in an hour. As the storage staff apply the minds for solutions, they see processor performance improving faster than disk performance. They also descry the performance of both disks and processors outstripping the performance of the installed network infrastructure. At the rate network infrastructure is improving, it will be a enormous challenge to catch up to processor performance.