Storage Techniques for SMBs to sustain recession‏

With the dotcom boom, the data involved is alsowhere tasks like storage provisioning, backup,
booming. The amount of data that needs computingarchiving and disaster recovery are easier and faster
or the data that needs utmost security is increasingas compare to the traditional physical storage.
at a faster rate. To control IT spending on storageAlthough the cost and complexity of SANs are
of such digital content, organizations, SMBs or SMEsdropping, but they are uncommon outside larger
are looking for new storage technologies.enterprises.
According to research report from IDC, the amountMost storage vendors have SAN virtualization
of data added annually will be 988 exabytes (anofferings such as Microsoft, IBM, EMC, HP and Sun.
exabyte is a billion gigabytes) by next year, thanks3. Thin Provisioning
to Web 2.0 and rich media. At present, individual orIt optimizes capacity utilization for applications and
corporate, people are increasingly using rich media forhelps system administrators to maintain free space
communication, which led to surge in the demand offor future storage needs. It offers energy and
additional storage.storage cost savings.
The feature here discusses the types of the storageThe technique was pioneered by a company called
technologies that enterprises must implement in the3PARdata (now 3PAR). But now, Hitachi Data
current economic scenario.Systems, EMC, HP also offers thin provisioning
1. Open Storage Platformplatform.
Sun Microsystems (Oracle) coined the term4. Cloud Optimized Storage
‘Open Storage’, but other vendors mayTo satisfy the computing needs of the users, the
soon offer such solutions. Open storage is morecloud computing concept incorporates Software as a
economical than closed systems as it uses openService (SaaS), from whereby a provider licenses an
source software, which does not require anyapplication to customers for use as a service on
software licensing fees and upgrade costs. Also,demand and disabling it after use or after contract
users are not committed to a single vendor for theexpires.
software.The services are highly scalable, so there is always
According to the research firm IDC, the Opencapacity for your growing data. Also, the firm will pay
Storage Platform will have a market share of 12% byonly for what they use, as the platform works on a
2011 and therefore Sun is encashing the opportunity.pay-per-use basis. The companies who offer cloud
The company pairs its offering with its OpenSolarisstorage are Amazon’s S3, HP’s Upline, and
operating system and with hardware such as the SunMicrosoft’s Skydrive.
Storage 7000 series unified storage systems, Sun5. Data Deduplication
Storage J4000 series arrays and Sun Fire x4000It refers to the elimination of redundant data
storage servers.therefore called as Single Instance Storage.
2. Storage VirtualizationDeduplication, also called as ‘intelligent
This is the process of abstracting logical storage fromcompression,’ where the data object are
physical storage through Storage Area Networksreplaced with pointers to that unique instance of
(SANs). SAN Virtualization attaches remote computerdata. It is a CPU intensive task and works well for
storage devices for example disk arrays, tapeblocks of data.
libraries etc to servers in such a way that theAccording to NetApp, who offers Data ONTAP
devices appear as locally attached to the operatingoperating system, the average UNIX or Windows
system.disk volume contains thousands or even millions of
Virtualized storage is simplified storage managementduplicate data objects.