Velocis Systems

Growing Importance of Servers & Storage

Capacity Growth

Capacity of the web is growing exponentially

Cost to business

Downtime and loss of data can cost up to US $ 27,000 per hour.

Budget spent on storage

Corporate IT expects to spent over 75% of its Server budget on primary storage in 2002

Centralization

34% of all networked sites are now centralized Trends in Storage

Higher capacity and performance

Disk, tape and optical technologies

High availability moving to secondary storage devices

Redundant and /or shared devices

Networked storage

Networked attached storage (NAS), Storage area networks (SAN)


New technologiesand solutions
Linear tape-open, Fiber channels. Network attached storage, Direct Attached Storage (DAS), DAS is the acronym for "Direct Attached Storage." It means that a server or servers are physically connected to the external RAID on non-shared ports. These ports can be any flavor of SCSI or Fiber Channel. Each port is only accessible by one server.
A key point to remember is that DAS does not necessarily mean non-shared external RAID. It really means non-shared ports on the external RAID

Network Attached Storage (NAS)
A NAS device is a self contained, intelligent storage device that attaches directly to the LAN, and transfers data using Network Protocols (TCP/IP or IPX) using industry standard file sharing protocols, (SMB, CIFS.NCP, AFP, NFS, HTTP). Network clients communicate directly with the server.

Storage Area Network (SAN)
A SAN is a discrete network of Devices, Servers and storage, Workstations, Tape Libraries etc, which are connected via a high-speed connection, such as Fiber Channel. Data is transferred via Serial I/O rather than network Protocols, and raw data requests are made directly to disk and not over the LAN. SAN's can either be deployed to provide high-speed network links, or provide Storage Consolidation. All Storage Transactions are processed on a separate network with dedicated bandwidth for Data. Management Software is available to make the SAN as efficient and as easy to manage as possible.

SAN & NAS - Some differences:

SAN and NAS are Complimentary Technologies. They can be viewed as competing in some situations, but more often than not, there are aspects of their technologies, which complement each other, providing flexible data storage solutions. This co-existence along with new software protocols ensures that the solutions are both Affordable and Expandable - ensuring that your data is available, with the minimum amount of data management required.

Velocis Systems as Server & Storage integrator:

These are the people who'll actually set up the gear on your premises. You can consult them to get a relatively unbiased opinion about the best-fitting storage solutions. A good idea is to look at some of the company's implementation case studies to get a clearer picture of how your storage strategy will be shaped. More than often, integrators can advise you a good mix and match solution that brings out the best in different vendors' products. Silicon provides solutions in areas of simple DAS, NAS, and SAN solutions. It also designs automated back-up solutions and disaster management solutions. It has partnered with companies like Sun, IBM, Netapps, Veritas, Quantum, Brocade, and Legato to provide hardware and software solutions.

Silicon's core competence is network integration; it has tremendous success in systems integration for the last couple of years. It offers consultancy in SAN solutions design and services in system integration and application migration plus the complete hardware needed for these implementations. Not only does it provide the hardware needed in these implementations, it also provides servers and other hardware needed to suit your applications. In the past it has provided customized solutions to various organizations, like Mobile phone service providers or software development companies, to name just two verticals, it has got experts who have hands on experience on SUN servers for the last couple of years, as they are actively involved in corporate trainings also.