Storage Management.
Consolidate.
With businesses purchasing more and more storage hardware and software to support exponential data growth, storage investments are growing rapidly as a percentage of the average IT budget. Still, many IT organisations have not yet pooled their storage resources or aligned their storage environments with their business needs. Such organisations tend to spend unnecessarily to acquire new assets while underutilising existing investments. Often they find themselves creating highly complex storage environments that make it difficult to respond quickly and efficiently to changing business requirements.
Backup & Recovery.
Most IT organisations continue to struggle with backup and recovery. Regardless of size, industry, or budget—information growth is the most common reason for yesterday’s backup and recovery procedures falling short of meeting today’s recovery requirements. Traditional approaches of multiple backup servers, multiple tape drives, adding capacity and reducing the frequency of backups are no longer viable, serving only to increase cost and complexity. The approach many customers are considering, (71 % according to a Goldman Sachs survey) is disk-based backup. Disk-based backup is the best solution to improve reliability and performance for backup and recovery.
Archive.
A new approach has emerged that effectively addresses today’s challenges in backup and recovery. This approach is backup, recovery, AND archiving.
This approach starts by asking one simple question, “How often has the same file or record been backed up, even though the content did not change?” When a digital asset in the production environment is not actively being updated or frequently accessed, it should be moved into an active, online archive that is accessible to the production applications. This frees up space in the production systems, which improves performance, reduces storage costs, and further accelerates backup and recovery processes.