Considerations For Secondary Storage Consolidation By Dan Oister, Digi-Data
Contributing Editor for Data Storage Connection

Every file or email your company creates starts aging the moment its completed. This helps to explain the 80/20 rule of static data to active data. This proliferation of data tends to amass at a faster than desired rate causing IT professionals worldwide to ask the same questions:

• How do I protect such a large amount of data?
• How do I effi ciently move the data to higher capacity systems as they become available?
• What provisions do I need now, and in the future to assure I can "mine" this data if required?
• How do I minimize the cost of capacity and power consumption over time?

All secondary storage applications are not created equal...
Consider three of the more common secondary storage applications:

• Disk-to-disk backup
• Image Storage
• Fixed Content / Archiving

Disk-to-disk backup has gained rapid market momentum by improving the percentage of completed nightly backups, accelerating recovery times, and improving overall system manageability. In looking at the "storage signature" of this application, it requires very rapid ingestion (upload) as data is copied into the system from various backup servers. It may also require rapid data transfers (downloads) out of the system for restores, (although not quite as fast, as restoring file systems takes about three times longer than the backup operation).