It is a common issue for many organisations today — How to cope with the ever increasing data volumes, where to store it and the best way to access it and of course the most efficient way to manage and pay for it.
Datanet has invested heavily in high performance storage and we want to share the benefits with you. If you have a rack (colocation space) at Datanet, or you want one, with your own compute resources we can now give you iSCSI access to literally hundreds of TeraBytes of Dell EqualLogic storage.
Today we are looking at the benefits of a Storage Area Network (SAN) presented over iSCSI ( a technology based on SCSI commands and IP protocols for networking). With a networked storage infrastructure multiple storage devices can be linked to many servers thus enabling better resource utilisation and ease of storage management. The solution is scalable and designed to grow with the increasing volumes of data as a server can be allocated a new disk volume without any changes to hardware or cabling.
The SAN protocol allows storage to be consolidated into a Data Centre storage array whilst the iSCSI protocol, which knows no limit in terms of distance as long as there is network connectivity (i.e. a Local Area Network), gives the illusion of locally attached disks. Big data can therefore be stored and retrieved at a very high speed, with high reliability across a common network infrastructure.
This storage management approach offers the following benefits:
- Backups can be performed without system performance loss
- The storage pool is easily scalable
- The load on each physical device can be balanced
- The computing resource can be managed separately from the storage resource
- Manage your storage resource easily and efficiently
- The storage pool can be shared by many devices
- Datanet looks after the hardware and connectivity for a modest monthly fee
So, if you need more high performance storage but don’t want to go and spend a small fortune on a storage device and you need a second site copy (offsite), talk to Datanet about our data centre based production storage and our offsite Backup & Recovery services. Call us on 01252 810010
