The Bottom Line About Bolt-Ons


The bottom line is that enhanced backup technologies like those described in the preceding pages may help storage designers to consider new approaches for data protection, including many that might not receive much presence against the backdrop of a holy war over tape versus disk mirroring. To adapt these enhanced backup solutions to meet the specific data protection requirements of their business applications, planners must 1) know of their existence, 2) become familiar with product capabilities and limitations, and 3) undertake critical testing and analysis of the products themselves .

Every technology surveyed in this chapter delivers data protection through replication. The technologies vary based on their approach to delivering replication and in how rapidly they restore data to productive use. Some strategies entail hardware lock-ins or require a Fibre Channel SAN fabric, while others have predominantly open architectures that enable the use of any storage platform and any topology. Finally, all of the technologies exact a cost, some mainly in terms of acquisition and deployment expenses, others in terms of cultural change.

Understanding the demands already taking their toll on the storage professional's time, it may be difficult to track all of the new data protection strategies and products that seem to be appearing, literally, on a daily basis. However, to find the right technology or combination of technologies to meet the data protection requirements of your shop, you will need to find some way to keep yourself informed. It is becoming imperative for storage technology consumers to begin sharing their experience in specialized user groups, consumer-focused industry initiatives (like EBSI), and in the trade press.

A final word of advice on that subject of data protection: Despite what vendor brochures may seem to suggest, you don't need to commit to a single solution to protect all of the data in your shop. In fact, doing so might be a bad move.

Every application manifests its own I/O characteristics and criticality varies from one application to another. Thus, different data protection schemes may be better suited to different applications. If there is a core mistake in all of the debates around tape backup and disk mirroring it is the idea that a single approach is suitable for all data. This wasn't true in the mainframe world, and it isn't true in the open systems world.



The Holy Grail of Network Storage Management
The Holy Grail of Network Storage Management
ISBN: 0130284165
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 96

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