"    Enhancing data protection and disaster recovery

 

Simplifying Storage Management

As the amount of NAS storage under management has grown, enterprise IT groups

have been continually challenged by the complexity of managing a large number of

discrete file systems and by the on-going cycle of adds, moves and changes across

these systems. Further this basic storage administration typically requires user

downtime and manual client reconfigurations.

 

The NAS virtualization switches allow enterprises to dramatically simplify storage

management by enabling online storage administration. The file virtualization

technology separates the logical from the physical location of the data. This allows

IT managers to perform online storage administration, with out disrupting user

access to data. As a result, storage provisioning, capacity balancing and

decommissioning can be done online, during regular business hours. In addition,

because the mount points are now virtual mount points, no application

reconfiguration is required.

 

Transparent Data Migration:

For most IT organizations storage growth and the normal cycle of hardware and

software upgrades creates ongoing need to move data and consolidate storage

devices. However, data migration is typically a very painful process. Most

migrations require manual intervention, cause application downtime, and often

require cumbersome client reconfigurations.

 

NAS virtualization switches are able to move data with affecting user access.

Administrators can use powerful polices in these devices for a range of data

migration tasks such as moving data off legacy file servers to new NAS devices,

balancing storage capacity, or performing software upgrades. Most importantly the

data migration tasks can be automated and occur with out any user downtime or

client reconfigurations. The result is a rapid non-disruptive data migration that

significant reduces the pain and operational overhead associated with moving data.

 

Increasing Capacity Utilization:

In many IT environments it is difficult to add storage capacity to existing file systems

with out user disruption. This often results in storage capacity being over

provisioned to meet demand. As a result, enterprises have low NAS utilization rates

(30-50% average) and have no simple way of optimizing resource allocation.

 

NAS virtualization switches provide the ability to dynamically balance capacity

utilization across back end file systems. This is done transparently to clients and

applications. This allows storage managers to maximize storage utilization and

eliminate stranded capacity. In addition, the switches enable IT mangers to do thin

provisioning of storage, because additional capacity can be added with out downtime

or disruption to user access.

 

Tiered Storage:

In an effort to reduce capital expenditure, many enterprises are seeking to move

non-critical business data off of expensive storage resources to lower cost

alternatives. Unfortunately, migrating data between systems and managing the data

lifecycle over time is a complex process with high operational overhead.