RELDATA Storage Consolidation

Open, Unified IP Storage Infrastructure
Particularly medium and large businesses are today faced with strong growing data storage capacity requirements of their LAN or Ethernet infrastructures. Storage managers are challanged to find flexible, cost-efficient networked storage solutions for these infrastructures, which avoid investments in expensive, dedicated Fibre Channel SANs. An ideal networked storage scenario for these storage managers would be a infrastructure,

• where they don't have to decide anymore between a database-oriented iSCSI SAN or a shared file NAS storage solution
• where they can provision iSCSI SAN or NAS capacity on demand according to the need of the enduser applications
• where they won't be locked in a dedicated disk array or tape library vendor relationship
• where they are free to build a consolidated tiered multi-vendor disk and tape storage infrastructure
• where they are able to integrate existing disk and tape storage resources
• where they have data protection features included

RELDATA IP Storage infrastructures are all fulfilling these requirements. The RELDATA IP Storage Gateway 9200 interconnects with and consolidates all popular Fibre Channel, SCSI and iSCSI disk and tape storage resources into one single, virtualized storage volume pool. This pool can be offered to Ethernet clients & servers as block-level iSCSI SAN (IP SAN) targets and file-level NAS (NFS or CIFS) shares. Besides lower capital expenditures for storage, considerable cost savings are achieved through improved capacity utilization, increased application performance and reduced system administration effort. Once consolidated, data storage architecture is complete and scalable, and the business should expect to see lower costs both from a reduction in actual purchasing and from improved efficiency of their storage administration staff.

One typical example where a RELDATA 9200 IP Storage solution is able to create significant cost savings in enterprises is data storage of Microsoft Exchange applications. Every business and organization heavily depends on email services, today leading to a proliferation of email servers, particularly Microsoft Exchange servers, typically with internal or direct-attached storage. This, coupled with the government-imposed requirements to maintain email archives online for an extended period of time, has led to high overhead costs, poorly utilized server and storage assets, expensive email storage and archiving costs, complex and time-consuming backup and restore processes and poor system availability. RELDATA 9200 provides scalable block-level storage on demand, supporting the needs of a growing Exchange database; at the same time, RELDATA 9200 offers shared storage where users can deposit their archived e-mail (.pst files), attachments, etc. , The storage is pooled and managed as a common email storage resource to be used by a number of e-mail servers as well as many local and remote email client applications. To further comply with the new regulations, the email storage should be protected and replicated to a contingency location, which is again an embedded functionality of RELDATA 9200. This way, it is possible to solve many e-mail storage related problems with RELDATA 9200 devices.