Storage Consolidation using iSCSI

Storage Consolidation provides an easy way to centralise, manage and deploy disk storage.

Many corporations are looking at Storage Consolidation to:

The traditional storage method is known as direct attached storage (DAS), which refers to storage devices being directly attached to servers. This storage is localised to the attached server and is difficult to manage, scale, backup and deploy. Often a server with DAS is over specified and never fully utilised.

Storage Consolidation offers significant IT advantages over distributed storage systems.

- Increased Efficiency through centralised management. By consolidating storage in one place rather than scattering disks across many servers, should be able to realise better management with fewer IT staff. Once Storage Consolidation is achieved you'll wonder how you ever did without it. Consolidation provides greater benefits than just the reduced cost of ownership. In most instances it provides a business with an IT department that can become more efficient and effective with available resources. The inital savings start with the server hardware but then rapidly extend to the operating systems software, application software, management capabilities, business continuity, and, finally business agility.

Storage consolidation for many IT departments has a direct pull-through in improving the overall asset management. For many businesses, IT consolidation initiatives include much more than optimised hardware infrastructures. As a result, a consolidated hardware foundation represents a significant first step in a string of other well-conceived IT investments. Such strategies are often driven by the desire to free up resources that can be better focused on core business strategies.

- Greater uptime and data availability should be possible and consolidated storage solutions offer solutions around bottlenecks and other problems.

- Storage allocation results in less "dead space" on storage disks and allows for divisions within a company to use the exact amount of storage they need.

- The ability to add storage resources quickly. Consolidating storage makes better use of existing storage and network resources and allows far easier deployment of disk to servers.

- Fast backup and data migration can be built directly into storage networks, preventing data loss.

- Simplified application development. Storage Consolidation allows developers to focus on tailoring software to the business needs and processes rather than worrying about minimising storage use. As a result, applications can take advantage of faster storage and greater availability.

Business advantages include the following:

- Economies of scale. Quite simply, consolidating storage allows companies to manage more data for less money. It allows companies to access large amounts of information on consolidated, relatively inexpensive storage devices rather than rely on many distributed devices as may be the case with DAS. It also allows a single storage manager to oversee more data.

- Improved utilisation of storage resources. With centralised storage, the available storage capacity is shared and storage can be augmented or easily reallocated as needed. By contrast, when storage is directly attached to single servers, surplus storage accumulates over time and is stranded because it cannot be reallocated easily to other applications and servers.

- Range of performance options. Centralised storage systems can vary in their capacity, rotational speed, and connectivity speed, delivering a range of performance options to better match application requirements.

- Better business continuity planning. Consolidated storage places data in a common storage pool where copies can be made over high-speed networks and information can be migrated from disk to disk or disk to tape in a less disruptive and more efficient manner. It also enables server-less backup and easier data mirroring across different physical storage sites, improving continuity and disaster recovery.

iSCSI Appliance Solutions make Storage Consolidation easy. Our iSCSI based storage solutions integrate an advanced and comprehensive feature set with a fully-redundant and hot-swappable hardware architecture. iSCSI Appliance solutions deliver the benefits of networked IP storage in a modular, enterprise-class storage platform that is easy to manage, deploy and integrate.

Data consolidation fits the needs of many modern enterprises for better data storage performance at lower long-term cost.