Most company's data set is on the increase and unlikely to reduce in the future. It's fair to say that IT professionals in most organisations, large or small, have at some point suffered from the continual act of balancing their systems available storage between application servers. This usually involves the high risk time consuming task of adding disk and possibly a RAID set expansion, if physical server limitations permit.
ISN Solutions approach
The result is still an inefficient use of available server storage that a compounding problem of having to backup an increasing distributed dataset.
ISN Solutions approach to address all these issues is to adopt a centralised data storage strategy.
Dedicated high performance network filers, allow additional storage to be added on the fly, whilst the system is running making any new storage available to the network immediately. Host connectivity is achieved using gigabit Ethernet, in the form of CIFS and iSCSI, or can be directly attached using traditional fibre channel host adaptors.
Utilising iSCSI connectivity allows the filer appliance to appear as local storage to a host server and therefore it becomes transparent to server based applications. This makes the appliance ideal for database applications such as SQL and Exchange which are optimised for block level storage.
Support for iSCSI is native in Windows Server 2003/2008, XP and Vista.
Backing up the appliance is achieved by attaching a traditional SCSI tape device directly to the unit (which has the benefit of keeping data backup traffic off the network), or you can utilise built in replication features embedded within the filers operating system.
These appliances can best be described as a cross between a NAS and a SAN, without the traditional SAN complexity and cost.
ISN recommends any organisation with a data set approaching 1 terabyte to consider the advantages of centralised storage model. One of the most attractive features of these products is surprisingly their cost effectiveness.
ISN Solutions have been implementing these solutions with great success. By virtue of our in-depth technical expertise and experience in system and network architecture, we hold all the credentials required for successful implementation of these solutions.