Article

Storage arrays: Practical guide to buying and implementing

Stephen J. Bigelow
Storage arrays can bring huge storage capacities to a data center. Critical corporate data is protected by allocating some array disks for RAID tasks, and tiered

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storage matches drive cost, reliability and performance against the value of corporate data. But choosing a storage array is not easy. Capacity and performance are still the most obvious considerations, but lower-end systems are rapidly expanding to include high-end features. "You now have [mid-tier] arrays with over 400 disk drives on them, so you can gave raw capacities in the hundreds of TB," says Greg Schulz, senior analyst at Evaluator Group. "Almost every mid-range array now supports controller-based copy, snapshots, and remote mirroring and replication (just like the big mainframe storage devices)." If it's time to upgrade an array or add another system to the data center, this article offers some tips to help you make the right purchasing decisions, covers the most important guidelines for a successful implementation and shows you the most popular storage array product (as voted by actual storage users).

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  • Introduction
  • Storage arrays: Preparing for the purchase
  • Storage arrays: Avoiding integration problems
  • Storage arrays: What is the best storage array?
    Related Topics: Disk arrays, VIEW ALL TOPICS

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