Welcome back! This week I want to talk to you about Enterprise Storage and the ways large corporations with countless terabytes (possibly even petabytes) of information record, store, maintain, and organize their data.
To start off, most large business use something called a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system that takes all of their data, stores it, maintains it and organizes it for them. It does this in a number of ways. It can take old files that aren’t used and put them into less expensive storage, freeing up the more expensive storage (which is usually faster) for information that is more readily needed for the day-to-day business transactions, it can backup important data so that it won’t be lost in the event of a crash, and it can, in the long-run, SAVE YOUR BUSINESS MONEY when used correctly and efficiently to reduce the costs involved with the loss of information.
Also, to add to this vast amount of data businesses can use Storage Area Networks (SANs) to share storage. These SANs are dedicated high-speed networks, detached from general network bandwidth, used to move information between the users and the storage resource. Information that was previously shared across conventional SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) connections, can now be shared across high-speed fiber channels instantaneously! While SANs are most likely not going to replace HSMs they will absolutely aid in the way your HSM works; and how proficiently it works at that. SANs can lower total storage management costs, provide greater data security and create a faster access to higher priority data.
In general it doesn’t matter how you look at it, you wouldn’t want to be in charge of running a large corporation’s data without first learning the basics of how HSM/SANs work and their direct correlation to the running of a successful business.
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