Posts Tagged ‘storage management’

Is Your IT Architecture Prepared for Growth?

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Growth is something that most businesses strive for. In order to accomplish it, however, you’ll need to have the right systems in place. Having a scalable IT solution like the one NetApp provides is one part of this equation.

Your company’s IT architecture should allow you to:

1. Simplify backups so that you know that your records are up to date, your staff is on board, and downtime is minimized.

2. Support testing and development efforts. Some tools are available for one operating system and not another. Web design work needs to be tested across numerous browsers and on a variety of platforms. Virtualization allows you to create all of the scenarios that need to be addressed on a single machine.

3. Improve storage efficiency with server virtualization so that you are able to use the tools you have rather than adding another server to the rack each time that you need more space or access to additional software.

4. Simplify recovery by ensuring that your data is stored securely and is available when you need it – whether you are in the office, on the production line, or in an airport on your way to a client meeting.

Opportunities present themselves in various ways. Being able to quickly pull up data, run comparisons related to two different approaches, and test products on a range of platforms will ensure that you’re ready to take action – and that you’re making the choices that best support your business goals.

As needs and the demands on your business change, will you be prepared to act? The right IT architecture – and support – will ensure that you’re ready and positioned to grow your organization.

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Five Steps to Better Storage Management

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

The challenge before most storage system administrators is pretty straightforward: where are you going to put your data? While the answer may seem obvious, think about the trends affecting your storage management environment. The amount of data being created is growing rapidly, and your company’s requirements are poised to skyrocket. Incremental datacenter changes won’t provide a real solution, especially if floor and rack space are already at a premium.

There is no simple solution for handling rapid data growth, but this doesn’t leave you without alternatives. You could use Hitachi Data Systems solutions, for example, to streamline your storage management operations through virtualization and use the five tips below to help you get started on a plan to adapt your datacenter:

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Are You Overspending on Backups? It’s Time to Dedupe

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Most companies commit too much of their budgets to backups, and trends in data growth mean this problem will only get worse. As more systems generate more data – with company growth and expansion contributing – your storage requirements will become increasingly expensive, ultimately diverting resources from projects with ROI potential to storage management operations that don’t deliver much incremental value. In the end, this could cost your organization opportunities in the marketplace.

Adding people and equipment isn’t the answer. While these two tactics address the challenge of managing data, they produce an ongoing expense problem – essentially, the only solution available becomes spending more. It isn’t a sustainable approach, as you’ll probably hear at some point from your CFO.

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Three Steps to Improved Data Storage Efficiency

Monday, October 11th, 2010

What’s your strategy for coping with rapidly growing storage requirements? If you’re just hoping that storage media will keep getting cheaper as the amount you have to store increases, you’re only thinking about a symptom … and you aren’t even treating it. Eventually, your organization will have a real problem – in the form of floor space availability, energy costs or operational complexity (among others). Incremental modifications to your storage infrastructure may provide near-term relief, but today’s challenges will merely be deferred.

The most effective way to streamline your storage management operation, reduce costs and increase reliability is to follow these three steps: virtualize, dedupe and prioritize storage media, particularly with solutions from Hitachi Data Systems and Quantum.

1. Virtualize: With storage virtualization technology, you can use less equipment to handle your storage needs, lowering both cost and complexity. Turn your datacenter into a pool of storage and computing resources that are portable and not constrained by platform.

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Compliance, Disaster Recovery and Cost Containment

Monday, August 30th, 2010

This is the three-part goal of any storage management operation. You have to comply with relevant regulations, be prepared to bring our company back to normal following a catastrophe and do it all while spending as little money as possible. This is possible … all of it. You just need to find the opportunities for improving efficiency throughout your storage infrastructure. Storage virtualization can make the difference.

Perhaps the greatest myth bout regulatory compliance in the IT department is that it entails a substantial unavoidable cost. Execute your datacenter compliance measures prudently, in fact, and you could actually realize a cost savings. This is especially true of disaster recovery systems and processes, where reliable and fast solutions that are easy to manage can keep expenses down, if not deliver an actual reduction in TCO.

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Turn Compliance into an ROI Opportunity

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Do you treat compliance as a cost to be contained? A business requirement to be completed with as little investment as possible? If this is how you approach such measures as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, you’re missing an opportunity to turn your compliance program into a chance to drive ROI. Think about your backup and archiving operation: the changes you make to attain compliance can have benefits throughout the enterprise.

As it is, backup and archiving is a cost that comes with little ROI opportunity. You can streamline your process to make backups faster and consume fewer resources, but this is traditionally viewed as a way to control expenses that are unavoidable … which is a long way from actually generating a return on your storage management investment. For compliance, the situation is much the same: the focus tends to be on keeping mandatory costs as low as possible. Since compliance programs often intersect with backup and archiving, you’re stuck trying to keep two significant initiatives from occupying your limited budget.

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Five Ways Virtualization Makes Your Company More Competitive

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Storage, server, desktop and application virtualization technologies can streamline datacenter operations and make your business users more effective in the marketplace. The judicious allocation of IT budget to virtualization investments provides an unprecedented level of IT flexibility and agility that has enterprise-wide implications. And with Citrix, you gain an integrated environment, which facilitates faster implementation and streamlined virtualization management.

While most IT professionals tend to focus on the technological advantages, the C-suite will want to know how these tools can benefit the business as a whole. To help you communicate the benefits of virtualization to business leadership, here are five ways that virtualization can make your company more competitive.

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Heightened Awareness of DLP

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Guest post by Brad Pierce, Senior Engineer
bpierce [at] structured.com

In the wake of the 90,000+ classified diplomatic cables being made public on Wikileaks this past weekend , I’m thinking Data Loss Prevention (DLP) has moved up a few notches of priority on the CIO wish list. What’s most disconcerting is that this was not done by an elite team of malicious hackers, but by a disaffected insider with access. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, exploited a loophole in the Defense Department security posture by burning files to CDs.

This high profile case illustrates the need to know where your sensitive information is and how it is being used.

DLP is mandated by a number of regulations including HIPAA/HITECH, GLBA and PCI DSS. Depending on the regulation or industry a company operates within this can cover a wide spectrum as there are many definitions to what DLP entails and what must be secured.

The basics of data loss prevention center on protecting data in three basic states:

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Are You Backing up Too Much Data?

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Regulatory requirements, prudent business practices and the fear of disruption make enterprise-wide backups a necessity in today’s business environment. And you don’t want to cut out what might be important. After all, you want anything that can make a return to business as usual to be available. You can have this while accelerating your backups and not compromising how much important information you store. It’s time to de-dupe your datacenter.

Few businesses aren’t touched by some kind of compliance structure. Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, the anti-money laundering provisions of the USA PATRIOT ACT and PCI are just a handful of the rules that can influence your datacenter. If your company is publicly traded, you may also have to implement and demonstrate certain disaster recovery capabilities, and businesses in the legal and financial services fields need to navigate archiving and document retention regulations (e.g., from the New York Stock Exchange and National Association of Securities Dealers).

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Datacenter on Demand: Why You Need Virtualization

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Datacenter resources tend to be constrained by platform. Capacity planning can help you stay in front of demand, but increased utilization can require specific equipment investments. Meanwhile, you have other systems on the floor that are under-utilized. With virtualization technology, you can make storage and computing power a portable commodity in your datacenter. Rather than add equipment, you can borrow resources across platform to meet anticipated – and unexpected – demand.

Capacity planning is an important part of any IT strategy, but it is driven by the resources available. If you are forecasting utilization for a storage environment, for example, you need to anticipate peak utilization and growth rates for the specific platform. Even if other equipment in your datacenter is dark, you may still need to make an additional investment. As a result, you have some infrastructure investments that perform well (in terms of utilization per dollar spent) – and others, simply, that don’t. This inequity can make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness with which you use your IT budget and can lead to expenses that seem unnecessary.

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