Infoplex > Solutions > Managed Utility Services > Storage

Storage

Introducing enterprise data storage can be one of the largest IT capital outlays for many organisations. Add to the initial purchase the expert staff skills required plus the costs of the infrastructure to backup this data and the costs spiral. With the move to a hosted or storage-in-the-cloud model all these issues become the responsibility of the host provider. Customers have the benefit of only paying for what storage they require and they can turn it on only when they need it.

Our storage infrastructure includes EMC’s high-end Symmetrix arrays and we have archiving and backup technologies to provide a full managed storage solution. We can assist with modelling your storage usage to accurately meet your requirements and keep the cost down. We host infrastructure in multiple sites and can provide off-site replication to meet your business continuity requirements.

When planning storage architecture customers should consider how the different solutions meet their needs. The solutions oultined below form the building blocks of our storage services.

Storage Area Network (SAN):

By attaching servers to a SAN the scale of storage attached to a single device can include whole storage arrays. SAN data can be replicated across multiple sites and the Infoplex SANs can facilitate offsite replication, point-in-time clones and achieve very high availability levels.

Network Attached Storage (NAS):

A networking device set up with its own address rather than being directly attached, serving files to a network's users. This facilitates;

• Centralized management and administration of storage devices
• Economies of scale resulting from device consolidation
• Sharing of information in heterogeneous computing environments (i.e., such as users on Windows and Unix systems)
• Centralized backup, archive, and recovery

A typical enterprise use of NAS devices is for providing file-sharing capabilities that extend desktop storage capacity and facilitate collaboration. With the NAS technology, Infoplex has the ability to deliver the following:

• Common Internet File System (CIFS) is a platform independent file sharing system. CIFS enables collaboration over a network by defining a remote file-access protocol that is compatible with the way applications already share data on local disks and network file servers.
• Checkpoints are a point in time image of the filesystem, this can allow the customer access to multiple versions or easily reverting to a previous version of a file. This feature is integrated into the Microsoft operating systems via Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), for clients accessing this data form a Microsoft Windows XP (or later) system utilises Windows Explorers “previous versions” tab on a files properties.
• Replication: All data can be replicated to remote data centres which provides protection in the event of a disaster affecting the production site.

Archiving Solutions

Archiving of data is performed for different reasons and there is varied understanding of the role of archiving in the industry, these include;-

• The migration (manaul or automatic) of older data to lower speed, lower cost disk to reduce cost.
• A retention of a copy of every piece of data relating to a project or piece of work that is never destroyed.

Organisations should understand their requirements before committing to an archiving solution. Infoplex have different archiving solutions to meet these requirements, for example our EMC Centerra infrastructure can detect data that has not been accessed for a defined period and move it to archive disk, leaving a stub in place for the online access of that data.

Infoplex can model an archving solution as part of the full storage management strategy.