- IP Video Surveillance Storage
- Maximizing NVR and Storage Performance
- Network Attached Storage (NAS) Solutions
- Clustered File Systems
- Database Management
- Content Management
- Data Life Cycle Management
- Disaster Recovery
- Disk Backup and Restore
- Email Archiving
- Host-Based Replication
- Controller-Based Replication
- Intelligent IP SAN
- Storage Consolidation
- WAN Provisioning and Management
Storage Consolidation
Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, the distributed computing, client-server paradigm promised better cost, scalability and performance than the traditional mainframe computing environments. Corporations shifted their applications to a highly distributed midrange client-server environment where systems were distributed throughout the organization. Separate storage and servers were dedicated to the application needs of individual business units or functions. This has left the IT organization today facing “server sprawl”, the proliferation of widely distributed, heterogeneous systems that are difficult to manage and have not lived up to expectations.
Despite the apparent lowered cost of the individual hardware and software packages, the availability and total cost of ownership of these systems does not meet the requirements of the modern enterprise.
Some of the most significant issues include:
- Large numbers of different storage platforms and operating systems have led to significant costs associated with IT staffing resources, management, and maintenance. These costs have swamped the expected cost savings.
- The lack of consistent management and data protection policies or tools leads to single points of failure resulting in downtime and loss of revenue
- CPU and storage resources are underutilized because the individual systems are sized for peak loads and it is difficult to move resources from one application to another. Some analysts have estimated the utilization of storage resources at 50% or less and CPU resources at 20%.
What is Storage Consolidation?
Storage consolidation is part of shifting the corporate IT focus back to centralized management and allocation of computing resources across the enterprise to best meet the goals of the business. It essentially involves re-deployment of the separate storage platforms on a smaller number of more scalable and robust platforms that use modern architectures and resource management software.
Through standardizing platforms, management processes and tools, and dynamically allocating resources as needed, significant benefits are realized including:
- Lowered equipment costs through better utilization
- Significantly lowered management costs
- Improved availability
- Improved scalability
- Significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. With easily managed storage virtualization software and interconnecting over the standard Ethernet via iSCSI, the StorStac platform is the perfect solution for storage consolidation.
StorStac Delivers!
The StorStac product family introduces a sophisticated architecture and management software that enables customers to easily add storage capacity from 2 to 50 terabytes (TB) and consolidate high volume e-mail and collaborative environments such as Microsoft Exchange, databases, backup and restore applications and other mission-critical data management and disaster recovery applications. The StorStac product family provides IT administrators an attractive alternative to expensive Fibre Channel components since the StorStac product family leverages network infrastructures that already exist in the data center. The StorStac product family also provides excellent data management and reliability.
- Seamless storage pool and volume expansion to keep up with rapidly growing data needs
- Efficient management of storage volumes on the fly, eliminating wasted storage capacity and allowing storage to scale independently of servers
- Built-in enterprise-class storage management features
- Provides block-based storage
- Intelligent disk utilization and virtualization with dynamic volume expansion for flexibility and adaptive storage provisioning
- Reliable, highly available, and standards-based SAN with built-in volume mirroring and snapshot capabilities
- Scales up to 50 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity
- Easy to connect to standard iSCSI compliant host initiators (IETF RFC 3347)
- Ideal SAN for Windows and Linux host platforms
- Ready to address mission important applications such as email, functional database, and web serving