Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
Access "Question of the Month"
This article is part of the Vol. 7 No. 8 October 2008 issue of CDP 2.0: Finding success with the latest continuous data protection tools
Question of the Month: How often do you think your DR plan should be tested? "Once a year, to make sure all involved personnel are up to speed with the procedures in place." --Ginny Galletta, IT systems engineer III, Kronos Inc., Chelmsford, MA "Your DR plan is only as good as the last time you performed it. In a rapidly changing critical services environment where services and administration change daily, then a DR testing plan should be the same, tested daily or weekly. On the other hand, if testing a plan means you have to take applications down in order to fail over, then either updating your DR environment to alleviate this or testing less frequently would probably be considered." --Mark T. Petersen, enterprise storage team lead, University of Iowa Healthcare, Iowa City, IA "I expect a test completed quarterly; yearly, we do a complete application test." --Paul Roth, backup/restore systems specialist, OhioHealth, Columbus, OH Access >>>
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What's Inside
Features
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- Compression puts the squeeze on dedupe
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Snapshot: SAS use soars
SAS use soars
- Green spin cycle
- Solid-state distinctions emerge
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The green storage gap
by Ellen O'Brien
Storage departments are trying energy-saving technologies, but measuring ROI is still a challenge. Some storage administrators are plugging vendor-supplied product power consumption numbers into so-called green calculators, but it's no easy task as there are inconsistencies in how each vendor presents its product's power requirements.
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Question of the Month
How often do you think your DR plan should be tested?
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Storage for high-performance computing
by Deni Connor
The storage and server cluster installed at The University of Texas at Austin is a lesson in how to do high-performance computing (HPC). Storage requirements for HPC go beyond massive capacity and include the use of high-performance file systems.
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- Dial "D" for disaster
- Are solid-state disks ready for the enterprise?
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Second-generation CDP
Continuous data protection (CDP) received lots of attention but garnered few takers as a standalone product. Since then, the technology has been incorporated into data protection products and its role is now likely to expand. In addition, rapid data growth and shrinking backup windows are two of the trends that support the increased adoption of CDP.
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Economy and capacity at odds
With fewer bucks in the budget, storage managers are facing some constraints in dealing with growing storage capacities. But, according to Storage magazine's Purchasing Intentions survey, they're responding by earmarking some of those dollars to newer technologies like data deduplication that will help them cope with burgeoning data stores.
- Thin (or chubby) provisioning catching on
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Director-class switches win top spot
Survey says: Director-class switches win top spot
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Ask the Experts
Where and when should we use data dedupe for remote-office backups?
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Columns
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Hot Spots: Don't let SaaS costs sneak up on you
by Lauren Whitehouse
There are plenty of good reasons to opt for backup storage as a service, but there are also plenty of questions you should ask before green lighting any move to online backup.
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Storage Bin 2.0 The color of money
If your actions will help meet the company's overall green objectives of making more money faster, you'll probably find your status growing along with your budget.
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End in sight for Fibre Channel?
End in sight for Fibre Channel?
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Best Practices: Why you can't go it alone
by Ashish Nadkarni
Most IT departments are split into islands of expertise, like storage, servers and networks. But the time is coming when those disparate groups will have to learn to work together. Network consolidation is just one of the technologies forcing storage pros to build stronger interdisciplinary IT teams.
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Hot Spots: Don't let SaaS costs sneak up on you
by Lauren Whitehouse
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