Storage Solutions
In 2000, a 1 terabyte (TB) network storage solution was well over $100,000. Now, you can purchase 1 TB for a home PC for around $100.
Centralized storage solutions have been around for decades, but the cost of these solutions has fallen sharply in the last few years. This has led to a rapid increase in the deployment of virtualized server environments, which need failover, data sharing, server clustering, redundancy, backup and archiving capabilities. Data requirements for even a small organization can easily exceed 1TB. The need to archive, search and retrieve information electronically is driven by a combination of business needs, technical requirements, research and development and governmant regulations. The demands for such mass network storage devices will grow now that these solutions are cost effective, reliable, redundant and expandable.
Centralizing storage is only part of the picture. Archiving and data reductions are also important. The use of tape for archives is still widespread, but is expected to decline as more storage array networks (SANs) are deployed. SANs have many advantages over tape backups, including technology to prevent data duplication and shrink backup size, rapid data transfer for much faster backups, and making the data sets quickly searchable and recovery times very short with no need to go offsite.
SAN manufacturers have been deploying less expensive drives, and will increasingly use solid state drives as those drives become more competitive, resulting in lower costs to archive data for faster on-site retrieval. Special software features in operating systems and on disk controllers create shadow copies for instant recovery.
Failover sites use these technology advances to improve the rate and ease of recovery. Setting up a failover site requires careful planning to ensure adequate bandwidth, security and failover features are included in the deployment.