If information is power, storage is the reservoir of that power. Enterprises can do better in their business with a storage solution that takes care of not only their present needs but also future ones.

As information and knowledge has become the key to the success of all businesses, data, next to employees, has emerged as the second most valuable asset of an organization. The data that is stored today could pay dividend over the years and would be key to the achievement of an organization’s business goals. However, storage is still not a plug and play affair for enterprises. They must go through a complex web of technologies and solution to understand it better.

Technology Options

SAN or NAS, or the Best of Both? The debate that whether an enterprise should go for SAN or NAS is increasingly becoming irrelevant. In fact the terms SAN and NAS would soon be junked. What is emerging instead is a convergence of SAN and NAS evolved into a single technology that includes the benefits of both. Enterprise must accept (some have already) that any efficient storage infrastructure requires both SAN and NAS. Some industry observers believe that in three to five years, customers will insist on multilingual systems that can speak block-based protocols, like Fiber Channel and iSCSI, as well as file-based protocols.

n Enterprise Storage Automation: It could be every enterprise’s dream come true as far as managing storage is concerned. Enterprise storage automation manifests a comprehensive range of solutions that integrate all major areas of storage management — data availability, storage resource management, media management, and SAN and NAS storage management. It will provide the foundation for intelligent, rules-based, and policy-driven storage management. It will automatically discover storage resources as they are added to the infrastructure and intelligently configure those resources, allocate capacity, balance workloads, move data to the most appropriate storage, and manage backup and recovery. To top it all, all this can be done without the involvement of a storage administrator; at the same time, it will provide for full administrative and managerial control whenever necessary.

n Disk-to-disk to Tape: Tape isn’t dead but it is fast loosing its prominence as a backup medium to disk. Not only are disks getting cheaper and better, they also offer faster back up. The tape drive takes 20 times longer to backup and retrieve data than disk drive. Tapes are now used more for archiving. Historically, tape has been the preferred method used because apart from being cheaper than disk drives, tape cartridges were portable and could be stored away from the computer system. On the other hand, the disk drive was internal to the PC, it could not be removed and/or stored easily or conveniently. However, today the cost of disk drives is as competitive as tape systems. Even more important is the fact that tape is slow and sequential making it difficult to find files quickly. Disk drives on the other hand, offer direct random access, significant time saving (time = money), and read/write efficiency that translates into increased productivity and lower operating costs. Overall, disk-to-disk backup technology enables fast, transparent protection and dramatically speeds time to recovery.

n SNIA Shared Storage Model: The Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) Technical Council has developed a framework that captures the functional layers and properties of a storage system, regardless of the underlying design, product, or installation. Much like the OSI 7-layer model in conventional networking, the SNIA Shared Storage Model may be used to describe common storage architectures graphically, while exposing what services are provided, where interoperability is required, and the pros and cons of each potential architecture. The model describes architectures, but it is not itself an architecture. You cannot buy it, or a system that it describes by specifying it in a bid, or a request for a bid. You cannot "build it". Shared storage is a powerful concept, bringing together into single storage systems essentially unbounded collections of interconnected and geographically unconstrained storage resources and management capabilities. The power of the shared storage environment lies in a richly interconnected set of resources and defining the storage environment as a storage system in its own right. The former opens many avenues for exploiting connectivity. The latter enables the storage system to be the focus of invention, deployment, and operation as an entity independent of the hosts that it serves. The SNIA Shared Storage Model has three main components within its scope: the file/record layer, which includes databases and file systems; the block layer, which includes both low-level storage devices and block-based aggregation and finally a services subsystem, which provides functions such as the management of the other components.

n Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM): HSM is a policy-based management of file backup and archiving in a way that uses storage devices economically and without the user needing to be aware of when files are being retrieved from backup storage media. Although HSM can be implemented on a standalone system, it is more frequently used in the distributed network of an enterprise. The hierarchy represents different types of storage media, such as redundant array of independent disks systems, optical storage, or tape, each type representing a different level of cost and speed of retrieval when access is needed. The HSM name signifies that the software has the intelligence to move files along a hierarchy of storage devices that are ranked in terms of cost per megabyte of storage, speed of storage and retrieval, and overall capacity limits. Files are migrated along the hierarchy to less expensive forms of storage based on rules tied to the frequency of data access. File migration and retrieval is transparent to users. Two major factors, data access response time and storage costs determine the appropriate combination of storage devices used in HSM. A typical three tier strategy may be composed of hard drives as primary storage on the file servers, re-writable optical as the secondary storage type, and tape as the final tertiary storage location. If faster access is required, a hard drive can be considered as an alternative to optical for secondary storage, and WORM (Write Once, Read Many) optical can also be implemented, in place of tape, as the final storage destination. HSM is complimentary to, but by no means a replacement for, data backup and archiving. The major purpose of backup and archiving is to ensure recovery of data on the server if a disaster occurs. The main goal of HSM is to better manage data storage costs and administration.

n iSCSI Standard: This year enterprises can expect lots of products based on iSCSI standard. A number of storage solutions have announced support for iSCSI following the standard’s ratification recently by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). iSCSI (pronounced "I-scuzzy") allows the creation of less storage area networks (SANs) using Ethernet infrastructures at a less expensive rate than traditional Fibre Channel protocols. This would bring down the cost of storage networks down. The Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol enables block level data to be accessed anywhere within an IP/Ethernet network.

n Storage Virtualization: Storage virtualization is one of the hottest areas today. Why? The need for storage is rising exponentially, and storage virtualization allows users to cut costs and increase flexibility. Put simply, storage virtualization separates the representation of storage to the server operating system from actual physical storage. Storage virtualization promises to enable users to pool together data from any type of physical device. Here, the pooling can be done irrespective of the vendor or device type. However, vendors have been providing their own definition of the term, depending on whether they are offering virtualization at the storage device, network device or server level. But what remains to be seen is whether virtualization solutions offered by vendors are fulfilling the promise of unifying devices. According to Aberdeen Group, storage virtualization offers the ability to logically consolidate or pool storage from various vendor sources and/or various storage systems on a SAN and control over how that logical storage is configured and used. It also offers utility software services such as remote mirroring and point-in-time snapshot copying to facilitate ensuring business continuance and dynamic storage re-configuration without interrupting applications running on host servers connected to the storage.

n Storage over IP (SoIP): Storage over IP is gaining attention as the SAN market continues to grow. SoIP aims to bring together differing network technologies and standards to help business implement storage networks that offer SAN-like functionality but leverage the ubiquity of IP-based infrastructure. SoIP also aims to ease interoperability issues between fiber channel-based SANs by offering a faster, easier way to manage, implement and maintain storage-area networks. Vendors are using two techniques when developing SoIP SANs: tunneling and native IP-based storage. Tunneling, which encapsulates Fiber Channel SAN frames in IP packets for transport to another Fibre Channel SAN, makes sense only when transporting information between Fibre Channel-based SAN islands. Native IP-based storage integrates existing storage protocols, SCSI and Fibre Channel, with IP protocol to develop native IP and gigabit Ethernet-based SANs.

n Storage Consolidation: Storage consolidation makes good business sense. It will facilitate drastic reduction in storage costs (if planned and configured well), and improves the overall quality of storage. Storage consolidation is the pooling and allocation of shared storage resources among numerous application servers. Instead of directly attaching devices to workstations and servers, the network provides access to storage which is on a need/access rights, and timely basis. Storage consolidation architectures are designed to address limitations associated with DAS.