Data growth
It took 300,000 years for the human race to accumulate 12 exabytes of information, that's 12 billion gigabytes! With the digital age and numerous software applications, e-business and other enterprise technology trends such as ERP, CRM and data warehousing, are doubling the amount of corporate data every 6 months. Businesses are looking for technologies to help them manage and store the information flowing in and out of their computer systems at an alarming rate, 12 times the data stored in 1998.
Data Storage systems have always been a critical part of any business IT infrastructure, whether it is a server's own direct access storage hard disks or shared network storage.
The traditional DAS - Direct Attach Storage approach has many shortfalls when trying to plan and scale servers and storage. In the past they have to be packaged as one, whereby a server has disk, tape, memory and processors. Whilst this was ideal as companies grew so did the fragmentation and management of the information. Today we have multiple tape drives, multiple copies of backup software, excess disk space on some servers and not enough on others.
For example when you purchase a 400GB disk drive or 4TB RAID array this is:
400GB = 429,496,729,600 Bytes = 429.5 Billion Bytes
4TB = 4,398,046,511,104 Bytes = 4.4 Trillion Bytes
A byte could be a full stop, letter of the alphabet or number multiplied by the above.
Business Continuity
As more and more businesses operate 7x24 the increasing pressure to make information highly available is becoming an issue. In the wake of recent events in London and New Orleans businesses must ensure systems are adequately protected against disasters resulting in possible interruption of services. We can assume most of the data on these servers is protected by RAID which can prevent loss of data. What would happen if it wasn’t the RAID that failed it was the processor, network card or another component within the server. There are in many companies servers that are not critical to continuous operation but are none the less critical to business. An Exchange server is critical to 7x24 operations, a file server is probably not. Now let’s assume that the file server is a non critical server to the business and it fails. What do all of the people within your organisation who centrally store files on the file server do when they have no access to the information?
Another scenario is we need to update an application on a cluster. The update corrupts the application and therefore brings down the cluster.
A problem for many organisations is determining the best way to protect servers, use clusters, and replicate data, mirror servers. These systems have built-in redundancy and are expensive. The problem is that everything associated with these servers is also expensive, complex and difficult to manage.
