Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
Access "School expels outsourced backup, enrolls CDP"
This article is part of the Vol. 5 No. 8 October 2006 issue of What you need to know about data storage provisioning
"I'll never use tape again," says Jonathan Ferrara, IT director at the Revere School District in Massachusetts. Ferrara has used a variety of backup packages, including Symantec Backup Exec and Microsoft NT Backup, but with processes failing to complete or tapes failing, "there was always some sort of problem," he says. That led Ferrara to try outsourcing backup by sending encrypted backup streams across the Internet to a local hosting center, which in turn mirrored the data to North Carolina. "It worked great," he recalls. But after only about a year of use, Ferrara received a bill that was $10,000 more than his initial budget. "I just couldn't justify the cost," he says. Complicating the task were the purchasing procedures Ferrara had to follow. As a state agency, the district can choose to work with any vendor certified by the state's Operational Services Division; if a vendor isn't on that list, it must try to procure a contract from the lowest bidder. Ferrara's outsourcing provider lost that state-approved vendor status because it failed to complete the... Access >>>
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What's Inside
Features
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- M&A stirs up standards
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Snapshot: Reducing tape use in backup
Is tape in your future?
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The right way to provision storage
Provisioning storage is still mostly a manual job, but solid planning, including the right interested parties and some improved tools, can help ease the chore. Follow these provisioning best practices to gain greater performance and higher disk utilization.
- Instant messaging shouldn't strain storage
- Virtual I/O aims to streamline network traffic
- Vendors debate different XAM strategies
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How to manage encryption keys
Encryption is an effective way to secure data. But managing encryption keys can be a major undertaking. While there are no encompassing key management tools available yet, some apps can help you keep track of proliferating encryption keys.
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- School expels outsourced backup, enrolls CDP
- Survey Says: Users name their 10GbE price
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Long-term archiving
With some legislative requirements mandating data be kept for as long as 70 years, your organization needs an archiving plan that defines what data needs to be kept and why. But don't overlook how you'll restore old data when it needs to be accessed.
- New Ethernet protocols could challenge iSCSI
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Case Study: Moving from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange
Hyperion Solutions Corp. decided it could no longer cope with having two separate e-mail apps. Storage considerations were among the many hurdles the firm had to overcome. Here's how they did it.
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What storage managers are buying and why
The second installment of the 2006 edition of Storage magazine's exclusive Purchasing Intentions Survey reveals key storage technology purchasing decisions by storage managers across all industries.
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Columns
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Untangling the encryption chain
by Stephen Foskett
In many companies, data that should be safeguarded against loss or theft isn't getting encrypted. The main reason why so many storage managers are shying away from encryption is that they don't understand how it functions within the storage infrastructure.
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Outsourcing email archiving: the pros and cons
Outsourcing your e-mail archiving is a good alternative if you want to avoid the hassle of implementing archiving yourself. But right now, service providers are falling short and need to expand their product portfolios to meet user demands.
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Users don't care about storage and data, they only care about their own applications
Storage Bin: Users don't care about storage and data, they only care about their own applications, so it's essential to deliver IT as a transparent service.
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A whole new ballgame?
A whole new ballgame?
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Untangling the encryption chain
by Stephen Foskett
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