| How to Handle Exponential Growth of Data Storage? |
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| August 2007 | |
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How to Handle Exponential Growth of Data Storage?
The immediate answer is Storage Area Networks (SAN). Wrong! SAN does suit many organisations but we have to question the fitness for purpose for schools. SAN is a separate network from the network that connects all servers and workstations together. SAN connects only servers together and provides low latency data transmission to servers. It is based on a different technology than Ethernet although a recent development of iSCSI has brought Ethernet back into the picture. What about Network Attached Storage (NAS)? NAS is suitable for data archiving and is very low cost to implement. It does not need a separate network and can be readily installed at any point of the existing Ethernet network. Performance in terms of responsiveness and speed of data transfer is not high. It is suitable for saving files and data which are not needed frequently or urgently. What about Direct Attached Storage (DAS)? It has been the most used but most taken for granted. It is most used because every server and PC has DAS. It is most taken for granted due to previous technology limitations. We rely on SCSI for Server DAS. SCSI is an elegant technology in terms of data storage across multiple drives. It is not too expensive but we seldom install more than 8 drives per server for reasons of stability. Now the technology has improved and SCSI is evolving into Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). We have already supplied Compucon servers that hold 16 low cost SATA drives each with 750GB. Both servers have built in redundancy and hot spare. Also they are not expensive. See the attached file for further information on the background and development of the new technology. |