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News Release from: Storage Expo | Subject: Storage Expo 2006
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 04 September 2006
Matching technology to business
requirements
Service Providers and Enterprises Need a New Class of Storage that's Big, Cheap, Reliable and Simple
Today, enterprises face unsuitable options for storing non-transactional data: primary storage, such as NAS (Network Attached Storage) or SAN (Storage Area Network) storage and archival media, such as tape or optical Primary storage is designed for transactional data processing like databases, e-mails and user file edits and comes with large non-volatile memory, high prices and limited scalability
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 11 Jul 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Email generated by the corporate world continues to grow dramatically and storage-related costs of email are an escalating concern for IT executives.
Users need a new class of storage, disk-based bulk storage, to store non-transactional data cost effectively with the ability to reference and mine data for business intelligence.
Bulk storage is the term for buildings utilised to store large quantities of similar material.
Capacities may vary from a few hundred tons to many thousand tons.
Disk-based bulk storage signifies the required attributes of this new class of storage - big, cheap, reliable, and simple.
Big: The storage capacity of a single disk-based bulk storage system ranges from tens of Terabytes to a few Petabytes.
This high storage capacity translates into hundreds or even thousands of high capacity SATA (Serial ATA) disk drives.
It's rare that a customer would deploy the biggest bulk storage system from the beginning.
So the ability to scale from a relatively low capacity system to higher capacity and greater access bandwidth is the key.
It's clear that none of today's SAN and NAS products, which only scale up to tens of Terabytes, is the answer for bulk storage.
Customers should look at emerging technologies such as RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) as potential solutions to address their scalability needs.
Cheap and Reliable: Bulk storage vendors usually achieve low cost of storage by employing commodity hardware and low cost SATA disk drives.
The lowest cost per gigabyte should not, however, be achieved at the expense of data reliability.
Bulk storage customers should pay close attention to how data is protected in a vendor's product.
Data replication is the most common technique to protect data in a bulk storage system, but it costs two or three times as much as a single data copy.
Technologies such as N+1 parity protection preserve the low cost of a single data copy without sacrificing data reliability.
Because of the amount of data stored, a reliable bulk storage system should also employ self-healing techniques, such as automatic error detection and recovery, to protect against silent data corruptions caused by faulty hardware components and the inevitable disk medium errors.
Simple: Disk-based bulk storage needs to be simple, both in terms of data access and storage management.
Data access should be based on open storage standards such as CIFS, NFS, and FTP so that the customer does not have to worry about installing and maintaining proprietary software on heterogeneous workstations.
It's also an industry consensus that NAS file storage is generally much easier to manage than SAN storage arrays, which incur all the complexity that comes with volume management, including provisioning, volume grow/shrink, and capacity planning.
Emerging technologies such as distributed file systems preserve the simplicity of NAS while making it more scalable and reliable.
So what's the right solution for disk-based bulk storage? Scalable NAS, which combines technologies such as RAIN, N+1 parity protection, and distributed file system, meets all of the requirements for scalability, low cost, reliability, and simplicity.
Scalable NAS has already seen initial adoption by storage service providers and Internet service providers.
Enterprises with bulk storage needs will surely follow.
Seachange International is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2006 the UK's largest and most important event dedicated to data storage.
Now in its 6th year, the show features a comprehensive free education programme and over 90 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 18 - 19 October 2006.
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