• Overview
• Backup & DR
• Remote Working
• Virtualisation
• Storage
• Telephony
• Hosting
• AV & Conferencing

Storage

Data Storage: It may be boring but it should be an essential part of your IT strategy
As networked storage becomes more ubiquitous, the need to manage where the data is stored and to ensure that it can be moved around within the storage environment becomes increasingly important.

However, as this process moves up the agenda for IT departments, the understanding of the differences between different techniques becomes ever more important.

Data migration, backup, disaster recovery and archiving may all seem to merge into the single discipline of data movement, but each has a different role to play.

What differentiates each of these are the business drivers behind them.

For instance, data migration is about the bulk movement of data from one data storage resource to another in order to achieve a particular outcome. This tends to be a data movement which is based on a ‘one off’, project-based requirement, rather than a regular feature of day to day Data Centre activity.

Disaster recovery on the other hand, is deployed as a form of risk mitigation, basically a form of insurance against a catastrophic event depriving an organisation of access to its data.

Where disaster recovery is concerned, data will be in an almost constant state of change as remote facilities are constantly updated.

By contrast, Backup is about restoring lost, deleted or corrupted data to a known good state.

In the real world, most cases are about restoring individual files rather than complete system volumes. Backup does not try to keep up with a constantly changing set of data, but relies on a ‘snapshot’ of a point in time which can vary from minutes (using virtualised disk techniques) to hours & days using more conventional tape backup.

Finally, archiving is about the long term retention of data which rarely, if ever, changes and any changes which do occur tend to be deletions of data no longer required. The characteristic which defines archiving is therefore the unchanging nature of the data.

However, while storage technology is a tool which provides part of a solution, users will still have to define & create the policies around:

• which data should be migrated,
• when it should be migrated,
• how it should be migrated and
• the criteria on which these decisions are based.