Enterprise Storage
SAN Recovery - Enterprise Storage
Enterprise storage refers to a computer storage system designed for larger IT environments of the modern enterprises. Enterprise storage systems are characterized by high reliability and redundancy and better fault tolerance.
Types of Enterprise Storage Systems
Important enterprise storage systems comprise online storage, backup, archiving and disaster recovery.
Online storage systems include large disk array solutions. This method minimizes access time to the data and increases reliability.
Backup systems are offline storage methods that ensure data protection. They are less expensive compared to online storage methods. However, they require higher average access time, especially while using sequential access methods. Examples of offline storage systems are tape libraries.
Archiving differs from backup in many ways. While backup is done primarily to ensure data safety, archiving aims at long-term retention, management, and discovery of fixed-content data to meet regulatory compliance, litigation protection, and storage cost optimization objectives.
Disaster recovery solutions are integral to enterprise storage methods. This strategy ensures data protection from natural or man-made disasters.
Enterprise storage industry consists of several companies such as EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and several others that are dealing with enterprise storage devices. They also conduct periodical conferences. Important publications in the industry are Storage Magazine and InfoStor.
