Virtualization
Enterprise Storage Integration
- Increased Storage Capacity & Function Requirements Demand Agile Solutions learn more » »
- Storage Virtualization Technologies Simplify Scale and Complexity in the Datacenter learn more » »
- Balancing Data Integration with Business Needs for Immediate, Tactical Solutions learn more » »
- Integration of Server and Storage Virtualization Technologies learn more » »
- Business Continuity and Key Benefits of an Agile Datacenter learn more » »
Increased Storage Capacity & Function Requirements Demand Agile Solutions
Dealing with rapid data growth is one of the most pressing issues facing IT organizations today. Whether it’s at the corporate datacenter, branch office facilities, or disaster recovery sites, the Storage Area Networks (SANs) that support business-critical applications are growing.
Digital content growth creates big challenges. Between complex software applications and powerful capture devices, the average file size at most companies keeps increasing. This makes the need for more storage increasingly urgent.
Adding more discrete file storage systems adds complexity, management and maintenance demands—often creating as many problems as it solves.
As businesses plan storage upgrades, there are four basic key requirements considered:
- Non-disruptive scalability
- Flexibility
- Cost-savings
- Confidence
The solution lies in the design of an agile datacenter with integrated server and storage virtualization technologies, key building blocks for cloud-computing architectures. This integrated agility is leveraged for non-disruptive load balancing across multiple resource layers including servers, switches, and storage.
Storage Virtualization Technologies Simplify Scale and Complexity in the Datacenter
With the increasing scale and complexity of modern enterprise datacenters, virtual technologies play an important role in the development of an agile datacenter. The traditional approach of application computation and application data tied to specific servers and storage subsystems, often over-provisioned to deal with workload surges and unexpected failures, are expensive to maintain with wasted energy and floor space, low resource utilization, and significant management overhead.
In the modern agile datacenter, applications are loosely coupled to the underlying infrastructure and can easily share resources among themselves. There is also the ability to migrate an application from one set of resources to another in a non-disruptive manner.
Storage virtualization technologies virtualize physical storage in the enterprise storage area network (SAN) into virtual disks that can then be used by applications.
This layer of abstraction between applications and physical storage allows storage consolidation across heterogeneous vendors and protocols, thus enabling applications to easily share heterogeneous storage resources.
Storage virtualization supports live migration of data in which a virtual disk can be migrated from one physical storage subsystem to another without any downtime.
Storage virtualization benefits dynamic growth or shrinking of storage (thin provisioning) and SAN performance optimizations.
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Balancing Data Integration with Business Needs for Immediate, Tactical Solutions
When a large organization implements an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), major challenges are confronted including which data to integrate and how to implement the data integration. Data integration involves searching through data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of that data. The process includes:
- Defining common entities and attributes around subject areas of importance to the business
- Sourcing, mapping, and loading that data into common structures
The integration process must provide a balance between the need to collect and integrate data for the EDW and the need for the LOBs to have immediate, tactical solutions.
Typically, an enterprise is comprised of several Lines of Business (LOB), each with overlapping and distinct information needs. This requires analyzing and establishing common definitions and the integration of data and business rules.
ENS-Inc Engineers and Developers are experts in the arena of Enterprise Storage Integration and know how to provide a balance between the need to collect and integrate data along with the need to have immediate, tactical solutions. They create for your organization a powerful framework for a single commonly supported infrastructure with high data quality and flexibility…an agile datacenter.
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Integration of Server and Storage Virtualization Technologies
When server and storage virtualization technologies are integrated in function and management, applications can share both server and storage resources, consolidating and increasing utilizations across the datacenter. Integrated management of the two improves efficiency by ensuring the right combination of server and storage resources are always chosen for each application. It also facilitates datacenter optimizations like load balancing.
With industry-leading expertise in both server virtualization and storage virtualization technologies, ENS-Inc Engineers, Developers, and Project Managers approach each Enterprise Storage Integration project with comprehensive and tailored solutions. The result for your organization is
- Reduced risk with proven reliable and scalable technology solutions
- Improved uptime and availability
- Wide range of solutions that address your scope and your budget
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Business Continuity and Key Benefits of an Agile Datacenter
ENS-Inc Engineers and Developers approach your Enterprise Storage Integration project with emphasis on business continuity to ensure your applications and data are available during planned and unplanned outages.
- Tiered storage platforms, software, and services ensure high availability and robust data protection.
- Industry-leading Best Practices combined with creative, flexible solutions create Enterprise Storage with business-driven results increasing your business resiliency.
ENS-Inc eliminates the boundaries of your Enterprise Data Warehouse and develops your agile datacenter with the following benefits:
- Seamless growth capacity
- Simplified management
- Bandwidth scalability and breakthrough application performance
- Superior performance for all file workloads
- Concurrent support for major file protocols
- Elimination of hotspots through optimized storage balancing
- Accommodation of new and evolving technologies
- Central management interface
- Site-level protection for disaster recovery
- High data availability
- Storage efficiency
- Scalable architecture
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