Scalable NAS Room
Scale capacity and performance for business-critical data with HP Scalable NAS
Data storage historically has been thought of as a solid, super-important but not-very-exciting sector of IT. Well, "not-very-exciting" is a value judgment made strictly in the mind of the beholder, and storage certainly is not a newsless valley in the overall IT landscape.
New products with a connection to data storage, data disaster recovery, deduplication, thin-provisioning, capacity management and a slew of others are constantly coming into the market -- from established companies and newbies alike. Storage media, including spinning disk hard drives, solid-state NAND and NOR Flash, digital tape and optical disks continue to become more capacious and reliable as engineers and manufacturers improve upon improvements.
As we do at six- or 12-month intervals here at eWEEK, we offer a short list of key continuing trends in data storage, based upon daily conversations with storage vendors, analysts, data center managers, CIOs and CTOs -- even a few former industry executives now blissfully retired and simply watching this evolution with continued amazement.
Ever-increasing capaciousness in the hardware: Capacities in new-generation hard disks, NAND and NOR Flash, digital tape and optical disks continues to skyrocket, thanks to brilliant engineering. As millions more transistors are crammed onto silicon chips at Intel, AMD, Samsung and other processor-makers, increasing storage space is being created for all the forms that hold bits and bytes. There's a physical limit, but we're not anywhere near it yet, experts say.
For example, laptops with 1TB storage drives are only months away from general availability.
Virtualization of formerly siloed storage systems: This trend started with testing and quality assurance work back in the mid-2000s but is now trending very quickly up. Many of these siloed systems -- especially in larger enterprises -- are still in transition, but industry analysts now estimate that some sort of virtualization is now being used in production in nearly 90 percent of all enterprise IT systems. Only two years ago that percentage was in the 20s.
Standardization of deduplication in Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage: Where new-generation deduplication was a new and more-or-less experimental feature three years ago and being offered by only a handful of storage providers (two of them were Avamar, now property of EMC, and RockSoft, bought by ADIC, which was in turn bought by Quantum), it is pretty much a standard requirement now.
Data deduplication, one of the most important breakthroughs in IT in the last two decades, eliminates redundant data from a disk storage device in order to lower storage space requirements, which in turn lowers data center power and cooling costs and lessens the amount of carbon dioxide produced to generate power to run the hardware.
What's not to like about dedupe? If you said or thought "nothing," you're right.
Online backup storage: Small and medium-size businesses and departments of large enterprises alike are now signing on in increasing numbers to services such as Mozy.com, Carbonite, Box.net, Amazon S3, CommVault, Asigra, iDrive, Iron Mountain Digital, Seagate EVault, and others. It took a couple of years for trust to become established -- and trust is still by far the biggest issue -- but reports of serious data loss have been relatively few and far between.
It won't be long before every laptop and netbook sold will feature a pre-install that will include online backup and virus protection. EMC is already providing this with its Atmos service for its Iomega desktop storage drives.
Secure, private cloud storage: Don't confuse this with online backup. In the last eight months, EMC, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Symantec, CA and ParaScale joined the quickly expanding market for software that enables companies to build their own private cloud computing environments. Those vendors introduced separate do-it-yourself cloud-building platforms, sparking a trend that includes such businesses as 3tera and Citrix, in addition to lesser-known smaller companies such as Nirvanix, Bycast, and Cleversafe.
Scalable NAS Resources
- Storage Consolidation Without Performance Compromise
Given the current state of the economy, storage consolidation is now a high priority for every IT organization. But for IT organizations running performance-sensitive applications, storage consolidation can be a major challenge.
- Demystifying NAS Clustering
Data storage needs are on the rise. But beyond simply providing more raw capacity, today¿s storage solutions must also be easy to provision and manage, energy-efficient, and highly scalable in performance and capacity. Download this white paper to learn about HP NAS clustering solutions that help meet today¿s rapidly changing storage requirements.
- Windows File Server Consolidation: Reference Architecture and Configurations
Organizations that deploy Microsoft Windows file servers receive many useful services. Traditional file servers, however, lack scalability, so organizations must add file servers as their data storage needs grow. This results in server sprawl, which leads to low utilization of the file servers and sub-optimal availability of storage. Learn how organizations benefit from consolidating their Windows file serving environments using HP Scalable NAS, a highly scalable, manageable and available storage solution.
- Data Mobility Group TCO Study on ExDS
Storage administrators are being challenged to manage enterprise data growth and maintain increasing service level commitments while keeping within budgets. This study examines the total cost of ownership of the new HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) and compares it to three competitive approaches. Learn how the HP ExDS9100 is well positioned to deliver massive scalability in both capacity and performance, yet offers considerable cost advantages to meet today¿s storage challenges.
- Managing Exponential Storage Growth
In this IT Link podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, Scott Campbell, HP manager of solutions architects, explains why HP is taking a different approach to managing storage using a new XDS architecture specifically designed to handle the requirements of rapidly growing unstructured data storage.
- Comprehending NAS Clusters
In this IT Link podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, Efren Molina, PolyServe technical specialist for HP, explains how NAS cluster technology is being used to help customers keep costs in line even as their storage requirements continue to balloon.
- Coming to Terms with Storage Management
In this IT Link podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, Logicalis vice president of consulting Eric Linxweiler explains why storage management software is becoming a strategic issue as the amount and types of data that needs to be managed continues to explode.
- Massively Scalable NAS: Pre-Empting Tomorrow’s Data Overload with Today’s Technology
NAS has always been simple, unless IT managers wanted to grow their NAS storage significantly. For the first time, storage administrators are thinking in terms of managing petabytes of storage, making massive storage build-outs a necessity. Learn how companies can affordably meet these demands with a simply managed, highly scalable NAS environment.
- Transparent Business Continuity and Availability through HP Scalable NAS
This solution brief explores HP’s next generation of Scalable NAS and how it caters to every business continuity need by being highly available and easy to deploy while adding levels of affordable, fault tolerant data protection and availability.
- Scalable NAS: Insights from customers, analysts and HP
When IT administrators are looking for networked storage solutions, they often look to NAS because they can use the Ethernet infrastructure they are familiar with to build pools of storage for significantly less money than SAN with equivalent capacity. Unfortunately, traditional NAS doesn't scale and administrators find themselves having to add NAS platforms to keep up with growing storage demands. As a result, many administrators have started looking for alternative solutions.
- Scalable, Always Available Solution for Digital Media
Learn how HP's Scalable NAS solution offers central management and administration, scalable capacity and improved utilization, with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Create an On-demand Streaming Media Storage Solution with HP Scalable NAS
Watch this demo and learn how HP's next generation of Scalable NAS is well suited for streaming media serving solutions.
- Roswell Park Cancer Institute Improves Scalability and Performance with HP Storage Solution
When Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) needed to remain on the front line of research and to continue providing high-quality care for patients, they chose a comprehensive HP storage solution and improved storage capacity, performance and scalability.
- HP Storage Removes Bottlenecks, Consolidates Storage and Increases Revenue for Crest Animation
When Crest Animation looked to take on an increased workload and handle High Definition and 2K film animations, the company chose a comprehensive HP storage solution that has given the company a unified, highly reliable storage infrastructure.
- Create a Scalable Infrastructure for Oracle
Oracle Database and the Oracle E-Business Suite are at the heart of most commercial data centers. HP's Scalable NAS solution Create a scalable infrastructure for Oracle consolidation and file serving.
- Streaming Media Content Reference Architecture
The new Web 2.0 business model, where the data is the business, utilizes the Internet to disseminate information in many different ways.
- Scalable NAS for Oracle Demo
NAS has been rapidly evolving as a storage alternative for Oracle databases, and for good reason: NAS is often the simplest, most cost-effective storage approach for Oracle.
- Consolidation for an Optimized Storage Environment
Windows File Server and Storage Consolidation using HP EVA File Services.
- Scalable, Fault-Tolerant NAS for Oracle: The Next Generation
For several years NAS has been evolving as a storage alternative for Oracle databases, and for good reason