Enterprise Storage ? an Overview
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When you think about your home computer, and all the information you store on it, you have the beginning of an understanding about computer storage. At home you store your tax documents, your other personal documents, your photographs, your favorite music, and more on your personal computer. To protect this information from system crashes you do things like back up your files, purchase external hard drives, and install security programs. At a company?s enterprise level, it is a bit more complicated.
The least permanent type of enterprise storage is online storage, also called the “cloud”. This refers to the data and information that the company?s employees and consultants have to access on a day-to-day basis. Ideally, online storage is reliable in that it allows users to access the information when they need it. Additionally, online storage can be costly, so an enterprise storage solution that is smart about how and for how long a user accesses data is best. Online storage utilizes a disk storage system called a disk array that minimizes power outages and maximizes the availability of access.
Companies back up their files and data, but on a much larger scale. It is similar to backing up personal files in that it makes copies of data so that if there is a surge or a system crash (or any other data disaster) it is possible to restore the data in its full integrity and completeness. In an enterprise storage situation, the data is protected in an offline storage location. The data is usually stored in tape libraries, and the company is charged a per byte fee for storage. This cost is usually more than the cost of regular internet access, but less than the cost of regular online storage. This is usually done for short-term data retention.
For long-term data retention, companies will archive the data. Archiving is like backing up the data, but it is more than just copying and storing the data for later use. The data that is archived is usually very important to the company in terms of regulatory compliance and protection from litigation, and specialists analyze the data to figure out the best way to store future data of the same category, and how to handle ongoing enterprise storage expansion problems and future enterprise storage policies and procedures. If you view backups as a series of post office boxes, you could consider archives to be the bank vault itself.
A good enterprise storage solution will also provide protection against a total system failure when massive network attacks, system outages, viruses, worms, and hardware malfunction occur. These events ? be they hackers, natural disasters, or otherwise can wreak havoc on a company?s operations. That is why most companies have (and all companies should have) a Business Continuity Plan, which uses the enterprise storage solutions in place to develop a disaster recovery plan that will enable the company to function when its resources are compromised. This is why backups, archiving, and other enterprise storage strategies are so important.
Lawrence Reaves works for PLANIT Technology Group, a leading provider of Richmond Enterprise Storage and Virginia Beach Network Security Services. PLANIT can be found online at: PLANITTech.com .
