Consolidated, centralized, shared mass storage memory is a fundamental pillar of any today’s IT environment. Our team has extensive experience with installation of both small and significantly large mass storage memory systems, providing space for processed data or for the backup and archiving systems.
Owing to the ability of flexible service of various transmission media and protocols (ranging from FibreChannel to iSCSI and CIFS/NFS), using the mass storage memories by servers does not limit the construction of work models of the entire environment – server systems may run both in dispersion (also in geographical terms) and in the integrated virtual or cloud environments.
Mass Storage Memory Systems include elements of intelligent data management and various types of access thereto, e.g. many access paths (multipathing), data compression and duplication, thin-provisioning, as well as virtualization of hardware resources (internal and external).
Latest developments include systems capable of making snapshot copies in the “application-aware” mode, which helps get consistent and possible to accurately restore the copies of gathered data, with no need to stop applications that use them (e.g. databases), and solutions integrated with virtualization systems at the firmware level, which significantly increases efficiency and flexibility of mass storage memory systems for such range of applications.
Our team also implements systems of mass storage memories created for the purpose of storing backup and archived copies, in which the drive systems supplement the offer, so far based on tape carriers. A major inhibitor of such way of development of archiving systems was so so far the high cost of data storage “per TB”, made contingent on the hight cost of hard drives.
Owing to continuing technology development, this concern is not as much significant any more (i.e. owing to the introduction of cheap high capacity drives and advanced algorithms of data deduplication), thus, in the economic and technological terms, when taking a decision on the purchase of devices, more and more often the benefits from using these technologies take the upper hand – i.e. flexibility, easy operation of various, heterogeneous environments, etc.
Tape systems also provide great advantages, including, without limitation: great scalability of capacity and efficiency, very low cost of data storage “per TB”, ability to create systems taking into account storing of data copies outside locations where IT systems operate (the so called Disaster Recovery), guarantee of immutability of saved data (e.g. on WORM tapes), etc.
Choosing the right technology requires a thorough and detailed analysis of needs, expectations, and capabilities in the context of achieving a maximum of a safe and business-justified solution.
When working on projects, we use the latest and most efficient and effective hardware of proven producers, such as IBM, HP, Fujitsu, EMC, Netapp, Hitachi, StorageTek, and others. Rounding off the offer is a wide range of the most innovative software products used for automation of processes consisting in making backup copies and data archiving, such as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, HP DataProtector, Symantec BackupExec, NetBackup, and others.
Choosing the right solution requires a thorough and detailed analysis of needs, expectations, and abilities in the context of achieving a maximum of a safe and business-justified solution.
