All businesses face data storage growth challenges, often without the resources or expertise to effectively deploy a storage area network (SAN).
This is the opinion of Rajen Naicker, Overland product specialist at Drive Control Corporation (DCC). He says this becomes increasingly pronounced as companies deploy virtualised environments, as it becomes even more complex to manage data growth over the long term.
Naicker says Overland has released SnapServer SAN S2000, designed to be a resource efficient iSCSI SAN platform for businesses with growing data. He adds that DCC is the official distributor of the SAN-based technology.
The SAN S2000 is optimised for use in virtual server environments, integrating directly into VMware's management suite. Naicker says the features include simplified data store creation wizards for provisioning targets on the platform.
He adds that the SAN S2000 enables companies to take advantage of SAN capabilities that have traditionally been considered too complex to manage without specialised expertise, including snapshots, automated capacity expansion, centralised management and support for Microsoft Cluster Server.
With data growth and the storage requirements behind it, Naicker says companies need systems with automated capacity expansion - policy-based storage volume expansion that can be easily deployed in a just-in-time manner without intervention to eliminate guesswork and over-provisioning.
He highlights that disaster recovery is a concern for all companies, and that technologies like volume shadow copy services exist to ensure application consistency during the backup and replication of systems.
“Application uptime is maximised, as essential applications remain available at all times,” he explains. “This is achieved by active-active mirroring and failover as the system is fully compatible with the Windows Multi-Path I/O framework, adding support for Microsoft Cluster Server.”
The system uses simple storage management through the SnapServer Manager, where IT managers can monitor and manage all SnapServer SAN and NAS systems remotely or locally. He explains these systems are accessible from a Windows application, or using a Web browser.
“With auto-provisioning technology, companies can ensure their storage solution can support business growth without having to pre-determine storage requirements or running the risk of over-provisioning,” concludes Naicker.
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