Posts Tagged ‘storage virtualization’

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.

Posted in Archiving & Compliance, virtualization | 59 Comments »

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Scalable Storage Systems – How and why healthcare organizations are embracing them

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

When most people think about the need for scalable data storage, they think about traditional manufacturing or cloud computing. But there’s another industry that requires flexible solutions for storing data: the healthcare industry. Hospitals, small and large medical practices, and even healthcare records storage facilities all have an increasing need to access and share data. The challenge is that, until recently, there haven’t been many options available.

Whether for the sake of storing more digital x-rays or MRI results so that they can be easily shared between the radiologist’s facility and other healthcare providers or backing up patient files, data storage is critical. The selected system needs to be reliable. Similarly, the system needs to be able to support a variety of data types, development on and access by a variety of operating systems, and to function within a variety of server environments. Records need to be secure, and both structured and unstructured data must be supported. Finally, in order to keep costs down, IT departments are looking for highly efficient systems to use for data storage that are able to operate with peak of performance without being a power drain.

Healthcare IT needs to be consistently innovative in order to ensure that needs continue to be met. Do away with their existing storage assets or risking downtime in order to upgrade systems is not only wasteful but also creates the potential for system downtime. To prevent this, VAAI – vStorage APIs for Array Integration – is a consideration as it provides a unique interface that takes the complexity out of operating VMware infrastructure.

If you’re looking to improve on a healthcare data storage system, this is one reason to look to the Hitachi VSP – the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform – which has been certified for VAAI. Combined with the Hitachi Command Suite storage management tool, the VSP is able to leverage an organization’s existing industry standard storage devices. This is one of the three levels of scaling referenced when you read about the platform’s 3-D scaling – the ability to scale deep with multivendor storage. The other two dimensions are “up” – taking advantage of consolidating host servers – and scaling out to increase capacity.

By making it possible to continue using existing data storage environments and improving the way in which data is accessed, it’s possible to improve performance and drastically reduce costs – even in fields like healthcare where needs change frequently.

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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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Beat the Heat: Optimize Cooling for Increased Server
Density

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Server and storage virtualization bring clear IT efficiency advantages to your datacenter. You can consolidate servers, reduce your equipment footprint and cut both new purchase and maintenance expenses. To make a virtualized environment effective, however, you need to be aware of the new set of risks you face and how you can overcome them.

Among the major challenges in a virtual server environment is the threat of heat – and the attendant importance of cooling – in your datacenter. Virtualized or not, this is a concern, but how you address it, and indeed the nature of the risk, is different when virtualization-driven efficiencies are at work in your company.

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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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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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