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NAS Takes SMBs to Next Level
This article is part of the Storage issue of Vol. 3 No. 9 November 2004
Not all small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are created equal. Take NetFronts Inc., a Web hosting provider in Salt Lake City, UT. With about $1 million in annual revenue and seven employees, the company fits the description of an SMB. But when it comes to storage, its requirements are far afield of what vendors think a company of its size would need. Storage vendors "can tell you what they want, but they're not reaching us," says Chris Marks, NetFronts' president. He came to that conclusion this year, after the firm set out to move the thousands of small files that comprise its customers' Web sites off internal disk drives and onto networked storage. The problem NetFronts was having with direct-attached storage was no different than for any other company: poor utilization. Despite having a balanced number of customers hosted on each server, some had excess capacity, and others were full. The first thing NetFronts considered was a storage area network (SAN), but because multiple servers need to serve up the same files, that ...
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Features in this issue
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Fund Watch
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Synthetic Full Backup Catching On
Synthetic fulls slash backup time
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NAS Takes SMBs to Next Level
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How to design a core/edge SAN
Use the SPICE algorithm to simplify the process of designing a large core/edge SAN.
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First Look: Asigra Televaulting for Enterprises
Asigra's Televaulting for Enterprises is an agentless remote backup application that uses commodity servers at remote locations to ship pared-down data back to a centrally managed site.
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4Gb--ready or not, here it comes
You might not need them, but 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel products are coming. Comparably priced to 2Gb/sec and backward compatible, they might end up in your storage network whether you need them or not.
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The search for cost-effective disaster recovery
Creating an efficient DR strategy starts with determining the value of your company's applications and data. You can find the right mix of DR technologies to protect your data without breaking the bank.
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Accommodating arrays
Modern storage arrays offer disk types to meet any need -- costly Fibre Channel (FC) disks for high-end applications requiring superior performance and availability, and lower-priced SATA disks for less-critical data. The arrays also come with mixed RAID configurations. But selecting the right mix of disks and RAID levels requires understanding the impact of those decisions.
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Remote Replication Gets Out of the Array
Network-based replication challenges array apps
Columns in this issue
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Hot Spots: Bring disaster recovery home
Disaster recovery services offer convenience and economy, but they may not protect your company's data sufficiently--maybe it's time to bring DR back in-house.
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Best Practices: Backup operations redux
Readers comments on July's column on 10 steps for better backups raise some new issues.
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Editorial: Common sense triumphs
Common sense triumphs
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Snapshot: Network-based storage services
Do you run network-based storage services?