Managing mountains of data: The big picture
To craft a complete storage strategy, you need to drill into all levels of the infrastructure -- but don't forget the big picture
Follow @infoworldWhen I think of enterprise storage, I reflexively think of a big stack of highly redundant, high-performance disk.
That disk generally gets a lot of attention because it's flashy, fast, and expensive, and it plays a central role in your most critical workloads. But the enterprise data explosion goes beyond your core primary storage assets; it also touches everything that protects, monitors, and secures that data. As you weigh storage investments, remember to consider the secondary effects of throwing all that snazzy disk onto your network.
[ Check out InfoWorld's new iGuide to the Enterprise Data Explosion. We'll be adding content all the time, so keep checking back for updates. ]
Primary storage. Storage in the form of spinning disk has been around for more than 50 years now. All businesses, from large enterprises to SMBs, need a coherent primary storage strategy to deal with the continuous and rapid expansion of data. The process begins with a thorough assessment of business needs, current data throughput, and the state of the existing storage infrastructure. A host of technologies, including storage virtualization, new SSD products, enhanced caching schemes, and disk deduplication provide new tools to craft a rational storage architecture that provides performance where it’s needed and scalability as a matter of course.
Backup infrastructure. For as long as we've had primary storage assets, we've needed to protect them from loss. Backup infrastructure is just as critical to your organization's survival as primary storage. Natural disaster, fire, viruses, data corruption, user error, and administrator error are only a few of a nearly limitless number of bad things that can happen to data. Recently, backup options have expanded dramatically; what used to be a commodity space filled with varying types of tape drives and and write-once media has opened up to all manner of disk-to-disk and offsite backup solutions. Automated backup deduplication, compression, and site-to-site replication are rapidly evolving as the technology matures.
