Storage

Implementing a storage solution is cost effective and simple and has dramatic long term benefits for the whole organisation.  Moving from Direct Attached Storage (DAS) in servers to external storage in a SAN improves disc performance, simplifies backups and allows for rapid scalability.

Who needs Storage?

• Companies with more than 4 servers or a total of 1TB of discs in servers
• Any organisation where losing data would have a dramatically effect on their business
• Anyone who has servers that are running out of storage space
• Companies looking to shrink their backup windows from hours or days to minute
• Those looking for multi-site data replication
• Organisations with rapid data growth

Benefits of Storage

In general, there are a few basic areas where employing a SAN storage system can benefit a company significantly:

• Availability- SAN storage is in general more reliable than DAS attached disc. This can save your company money by avoiding application outages. The cost of an hour of application downtime varies from company to company but can exceed millions in some cases.
• Disc utilisation- When buying server-attached storage most people buy more than they currently need so they can "grow into" the storage. The space that is un-utilised is wasted until needed. In SANs, that space can be "assigned" to any server that needs more storage, thus deferring new storage purchases. Using DAS, a 40% utilisation rate is high whereas in a SAN, you can get to the ultimate 80/20 (used/unused) ratio without a problem.
• Management- Using DAS you need to manually install new discs to add storage. In a SAN you can remotely assign it to a server. No downtime and perhaps not even a reboot is required if the OS can handle it. You can manage all your storage globally from a single console.
• Backup- Using snapshots and data replication can save your backside when disasters happen and using a SAN for centralising data backup can improve recovery time dramatically while reducing overall costs by sharing tape resources and eliminating backup windows.

Why is Generation-e the right company to call?

SAN solutions can provide immediate and long-term business benefits from raw data storage to disaster recovery and replication solutions. Discover a positive ROI between administering your SAN solution and retrieving loss data and reducing downtime.

With the onset of the newest email and collaboration solutions, growing businesses use a growing amount of data. When analysing the cost of raw data storage, be sure to look deeper into the cost of just drives alone. Generation-e can help you analyse the true cost-of-ownership (TCO) of implementing a SAN in your network - including resource management, capacity use and business downtime. Implementing the most effective SAN solution will help you store your data most efficiently with proper disc utilisation, virtualization, and reduced storage costs.

Generation-e has partnered with NetApp to provide our enterprise customers with SAN solutions that reduce storage costs up to 74% and ensure continuous data availability.

Save costs and reduce downtime by implementing a SAN in your environment:

• Reduce disc expenditures up to 74% by increasing usable disc capacity
• Dramatically reduce administration labour costs — manage more data in less time
• Recover from disasters in minutes, not hours or days
• Minimise the environmental impact of power and cooling