36
Not Your Father’s Storage
OGY
Exploring the evolution of storage technology and the rise of
unified storage
By Denise Bryant, UK Managing Director, Magirus
TECHNOL
Over the years, the storage Storage needs to be solution, particularly for small
market has seen a dramatic centralised and provisioned. and medium sized businesses
GENCE
transformation as new Virtualisation is a key factor (SMBs), by dispensing with
technologies compete with behind the huge increase in the need for separate
the demand to store, archive demand for storage. specialised storage systems
and back-up ever increasing Virtualising one’s servers and such as NAS for file-based
CONVER
amounts of data. In the space at the same time maintaining access or a separate more
of a generation we have gone separate islands of storage is complicated block-based
from mechanical storage to simply not practical” said system, such as a RAID array.
magnetic and then to optical Choudry, “and not surprisingly “Put simply, unified storage
storage systems, which in it has left some in the gives customers choice and
turn has surrendered ground channel, those not used to so flexibility with the benefit of
to solid state technologies much centralisation, reducing the total cost of
such as flash memory and confused.” ownership by as much as 22
solid state disks. percent,” said David Lacey,
Today’s buzz words are EMC Partner Account Manager.
This rapid evolution has been “unified storage,” integrated But is a multi-protocol
accelerated by new laws and storage platforms – all in-one approach needed? Will the
practices governing data boxes that do not require much vaunted iSCSI
protection and disclosure – servers and the gateways that eventually triumph over the
such as Sarbanes Oxley – and are the hallmark of your Fibre Channel?
more recently by disruptive typical Storage Attached
game-changing developments Network (SAN). The Fibre Channel has been
such as virtualisation. The Unified storage, known as around since 1994 and has
latter is driving the adoption “multi-protocol storage or the advantage of a large
of converged or unified federated storage”, has risen installed base. Its serial data
storage systems that promise out of the demand for transfer architecture was
impressive cost savings. heterogeneous storage designed to communicate at
management. The attraction high speeds and consumes a
“Virtualisation has ushered in lies in running and managing relatively high bandwidth.
a sea-change for storage,” files and applications from a Typically, fibre customers have
said Faisal Choudry, Storage single device – consolidating requirements for high storage
Consultant at Magirus, file and block-based data on a performance and mission-
storage giant EMC’s largest unified platform that supports critical reliability. Fibre
European distributor. It has Fibre Channel, iSCSI and channel markets include
demanded a rethink of Networked Attached Storage credit card companies,
networked storage strategies (NAS). hospitals and financial
in favour of centralised institutions. Using the fibre
storage systems. “With This makes life easier for option, data transfer speeds
virtualisation you cannot have some customers and in some can be up to 4 Gb per second.
separate islands of storage. cases is a more elegant The main drawbacks to the
SEPT 09 WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40