In todays competitive, fast paced business environment, your IT department must be able to support business growth and agility in a cost-effective manner. Storage and in particular the ability to back-up and retrieve efficiently is a continuing requirement for an IT department of any size. With numerous options available to the end user the ability to determine the correct solution can be a difficult process.
Powercube is a mult-vendor accredited partner working with the leading storage vendors including IBM, NetApp, Sun and HP. We provide customers with a no-nonsense approach to evaluating the leading storage technology ensuring that you, the customer are ideally placed to make those key IT decisions. Furthermore, Powercube provides a true end to end service including evaluation, configuration, pricing, delivery, installation and support.
Storage Area Network (SAN)
Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed subnetwork of shared storage devices. A storage device is a machine that contains nothing but a disk or disks for storing data.
A SAN's architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all servers on a LAN or WAN. As more storage devices are added to a SAN, they too will be accessible from any server in the larger network. In this case, the server merely acts as a pathway between the end user and the stored data.
Because stored data does not reside directly on any of a network`s servers, server power is utilized for business applications, and network capacity is released to the end user.
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
A network-attached storage (NAS) device is a server that is dedicated to nothing more than file sharing. NAS does not provide any of the activities that a server in a server-centric system typically provides, such as e-mail, authentication or file management. NAS allows more hard disk storage space to be added to a network that already utilizes servers without shutting them down for maintenance and upgrades. With a NAS device, storage is not an integral part of the server. Instead, in this storage-centric design, the server still handles all of the processing of data but a NAS device delivers the data to the user. A NAS device does not need to be located within the server but can exist anywhere in a LAN and can be made up of multiple networked NAS devices.
Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
In direct attached storage, the hardware is connected to an individual server. There may be more than one server but storage for each server is managed separately and cannot be shared.
The main protocols used for DAS connections are ATA, SATA, SCSI, SAS, and Fibre Channel.
Virtual Tape Library (VTL)
A VTL, or virtual tape library, is an archival backup solution that combines traditional tape backup methodology with low-cost disk technology to create an optimized backup and recovery solution. It is an intelligent disk-based library that emulates traditional tape devices and tape formats. Acting like a tape library with the performance of modern disk drives, data is deposited onto disk drives just as it would onto a tape library, only faster. Virtual tape backup solutions can be used as a secondary backup stage on the way to tape, or as their own stand-alone tape library solution. A VTL generally consists of a Virtual Tape appliance or server and software which emulates traditional tape devices and formats.
Tape Libraries
A tape library, sometimes called a tape silo, tape robot or tape jukebox, is a storage device which contains one or more tape drives, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges and an automated method for loading tapes (a robot).
These devices can store immense amounts of data, currently ranging from 20 terabytes up to more than 50 petabytes of data, or about one hundred thousand times the capacity of a typical hard drive and well in excess of capacities achievable with network attached storage.
For large data-storage, they are a cost-effective solution and they also provide systematic access to very large quantities of data.
Tape libraries are primarily used for backups and as the final stage of digital archiving. A typical application of the latter would be an organization's extensive transaction record for legal or auditing purposes. Another example is hierarchical storage management (HSM), in which tape library is used to hold rarely used files from file systems.
