Server platforms Toolkit

Time to set storage strategy

Tags:
HP,
Linux,
Disk,
IBM

Tim Landgrave Tech Republic

Published: 12 Sep 2002 09:12 BST

Competition for your storage needs is about to get fierce. EMC, a longtime leader in corporate storage, is being hammered on all sides from competitors, and the pressure is only going to get worse. Unless your organisation has a compelling need to make additional storage purchases today, your best bet is to wait and see how the storage market shakes out over the next six months.

To be prepared for the new storage market, it's time to consider how new developments in storage technologies will affect your organisation. I'll examine corporate storage strategies and take a look at the new players and new technologies in this rapidly changing market.

The need for a strategy
All corporations need a formal strategy for the distribution and management of storage assets. The cost of desktop storage has dropped from dollars per megabyte in the 1980s to pennies per gigabyte today. However, for many organisations, the first question to answer is whether they need all that storage space.

Even after loading up a desktop with all the bells and whistles of the latest Microsoft OS and productivity applications, there's usually half of a 20-GB hard drive left over. And since many newer applications are deployed as Web applications, the need for local storage further decreases. However, the rise in Web-based applications does stimulate the need for more staged or centralised storage. But unless they're doing advanced data analysis or video editing, most corporate users will never need 80-GB hard drives.

Many companies use a hard drive's excess space to store a mirror image of the base configuration to regenerate a user's desktop configuration remotely in the case of a virus attack or a software installation gone awry. PCs with important data can be mirrored easily and cheaply with existing hardware. Advanced desktop operating systems like Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP support mirrored hard drives without using specialised hardware, which makes it simple to create systems that will survive hardware problems.

Putting cheaper storage to good use
The real strategic benefit of cheaper storage is in departmental or data center storage, especially as new technologies come to market. Companies and departments of all sizes can benefit from the advances in Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions. NAS devices allow users to share storage without having to manage the complexity of a local server. Recognising the trend toward unmanaged departmental storage, Microsoft has provided a software-based solution called Windows Powered NAS.

Windows Powered NAS lets companies consolidate multiple file servers into a single solution, resulting in significant cost reductions. It also increases manageability by enabling policy-based management of storage resources. As OEMs begin rolling out solutions based on this technology, departmental NAS devices can become part of an organisation's overall managed storage strategy.

Microsoft isn't the only company interested in this space. Several manufacturers are developing Linux-based shared storage solutions based on either NFS or the SAMBA file system (making them compatible with Windows-based networks). Small businesses and remote offices will also benefit from the inevitable bundling of storage as well as wireless connectivity, router and switch technology, and Internet communication standards like PPTP and IPSec. By the end of the year, several companies will be offering remotely manageable hardware solutions that integrate firewall, router, wireless access point, Web server, and NAS.

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