What defines storage?
Storage means maintaining, storing electronic information, data. Within a network, data is generated by users or systems that either cannot or choose not to save data locally.
By choosing to store data on a central location, e.g. on a harddisk, a profitable infrastructure can be created.
Why apply storage policies?
Today's focus on virtualization of servers is clearly noticeable in technology for storage, backup and archiving. Virtualization as well as decentralizing of servers urges us to let go of local storage on these servers. Storing data centrally offers many advantages:
-
Sharing information becomes less complicated
-
Data may be centrally managed
-
It offers means for fall-back arrangements and replication
-
The physical server is no longer a single point of failure but is merely an entranceway to data
-
Data are to be reached flexibly
Different types of storage
There are several different groups of storage solutions. The most important ones are Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). Also a (virtual) tape library or a fibre channel network are part of your storage environment.
Qi ict helps you to efficiently integrate these technologies. Back upping, restoring, archiving and de-duplicating are easily mixed via one storage project. At Qi ict, all storage, virtualization, backup and fall-back techniques as well as additional techniques never are considered separately. Techniques for reliable and fast networking infrastructures, WAN optimization and fiber optic multiplexing are always taken into account.