Getting Down to Business Continuity

It wouldn't be tough to group most current storage news under one heading: business continuity.

Indeed, it's arguable that nearly every category of storage product or service these days addresses the need to keep an organization's data going in spite of all kinds of threats and interference.

Let's take one example: capacity planning. Having sufficient storage to maintain a growing volume of data without reducing performance is a big factor in business continuity. After all, how can you ensure uptime and availability if you don't have the infrastructure to support it?

There's enormous effort around giving business storage customers the capacity they require to keep data up and running -- without getting booted from their budgets. Techniques like thin provisioning are getting lots of airplay -- even though the definition thereof encompasses a growing roster of approaches, from 3PAR's original take to replication by NetApp and HP's Dynamic Capacity Management. (See HP's Storage & Security Blitz, Sunlight Service Group, NetApp Respins Topio Lineup, The Skinny on Thin Provisioning, EqualLogic: Thin Is In, and Hitachi Intros Thin Provisioning.)

Storage managers also are concerned that adding larger drives, particularly SATA ones, to existing arrays will slow or stymie performance -- a no-no in the business continuity framework. It's also important that larger drives don't make rebuild times unmanageably long after an outage. (See Coping With SATA Growth.)Matching capacity and performance in a scalable fashion forces a fresh look at the fundamental way storage is delivered. Enter the startups, such as Pivot3, which purports to eliminate reliance on one NAS head. (See Startup Pivot3 Eyes Video.) And that's just one example.

Other roads lead to business continuity as well: Take remote replication and disaster recovery.

Replication has become a key function of any storage array, making EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP, and HDS top sellers in the market. But host-based replication, particularly in heterogeneous storage environments, is also a popular option -- hence NetApp's latest announcement of ReplicatorX. Host-based replicators from Bakbone, CommVault, Double-Take, and Symantec have also grown, particularly as customers look to distribute copies across multiple sites or campuses.

Which brings us to disaster recovery. In order to ensure a firm's ability to restore data off site, there's a growing emphasis on making the most of WAN bandwidth, as well as ensuring that remote sites are adequately backed up and kept in the storage loop.

In this vein, WAN optimization has become a factor for all IT pros, fueling a run of supplier activity and startups -- despite the ongoing traction of established players. (See LifeLink Streamlines With Riverbed, FastSoft, and Secretive Storspeed Sights $13M.) And when it comes to bandwidth, Ethernet service providers are finding a boom in demand, since their circuits are usually cheaper than building a DWDM or fiber network, which are also alternatives. (See Carrier Ethernet Tackles Storage.)If, after considering all these examples, you're still in doubt about the importance of business continuity to today's storage pros, try this exercise: Close your eyes, point to any story on the recent Byte and Switch news lineup, open your eyes, and read. Then contact us if you don't find some tie-in.

You know where to reach us: [email protected].

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch