| Storage Consolidation
Overview
Organizations today want to implement storage consolidation due to the tremendous effort required to locate, backup, repair, and manage hundreds or even thousands of distributed servers and storage devices within their environment. However, storage consolidation introduces many new challenges such as corralling all the data, identifying which devices should be centralized, and minimizing disruption to the organization. High Point Networks can provide the support you need to help plan and implement a storage consolidation that will help you accomplish your goals.
What is Storage Consolidation?
Storage consolidation is the concept of centralizing and sharing storage resources among multiple application servers. Storage consolidation architectures are designed to address the limitations with direct-attached storage and solve the growing data demands of information rich business environments.
Why Invest in a Server & Storage Consolidation Solution?
 The primary reason for deploying a storage consolidation solution is to simplify and optimize the current storage infrastructure.
Huge data growth over the past several years has meant many businesses have had to rapidly expand storage sub-systems to accommodate the new capacity, performance and availability requirements demanded by business units.
This has often meant a situation where there are many separate servers and storage infrastructures in place, resulting in difficult management, inefficiency, high costs and an inability to meet the demands of the business environment.
Storage consolidation is generally achieved through 3 specific architectural methods:
The actual method by which the solution is implemented is largely down to your current infrastructure and your specific business environment.
Consolidation Benefits
- Simplified Environment
The whole environment becomes easier to manage. Therefore staff costs are reduced and less staff are required to manage larger amounts of storage and IT resources.
- High Availability
Reducing the numbers of servers and associated storage allows data to be simply replicated, in real-time, to a remote location ensuring immediate system availability in the event of a major failure disaster.
- Lower Annual Maintenance Costs
As the infrastructure is simplified allowing older, expensive to maintain equipment to be phased out or moved to a lower level support contract.
- Disaster Recovery
As the data is now stored on an enterprise-class storage device, normally difficult to manage, and expensive to purchase solutions such as snapshots of data become available. These can then be used to quickly and simply recover data.
- Consolidate UNIX and Windows Storage
In the majority of Datacentres the UNIX and Windows data is kept separate. This leads to poor utilization rates and spending budget on disk for one platform where the other has plenty of free space.
A High Point Networks storage consolidation solution will be tailored to meet your specific business requirements, designed to work with your existing infrastructure - and deliver the flexibility to leverage future technologies and meet future requirements. |
