Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Jan 29, 2010 @ 07:00 AM
Whether you run a small or medium sized business, or whether you are involved in a larger company, storage capacity management is at the heart of your business’ IT concerns. The days when a business could get by with storing files on individual desktops (or on a single server, for that matter,) are long gone. In our time of PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents and large image and video files, keeping tabs on your storage capacity is a never ending challenge.
Further complicating this problem is the fact that the demand for digital storage is actually rising faster than the capacity for storage itself. The demand for digital storage is rising as much as 50 percent every year. And, while capacity is growing, performance is lagging way behind, growing just at a tenth of the pace that capacity is.
Fortunately, there are solutions. There are ways that a business can get a handle on its storage capacity management. It depends, at least in part, on the size and type of business. The challenge is to implement an effective solution within budget and without overbuying.
Storage Capacity Management for Small Businesses
Small businesses can’t afford to hire an IT professional just to handle their storage capacity management. In fact, many smaller companies don’t even have an IT professional at all. Fortunately, there are a number of relatively inexpensive and easy to use products available for smaller businesses.
One example is a single storage server device that you attach to your network. This is, in the most basic sense, a barebones computer with a large hard drive installed. The storage device is a central repository for a small business on a network. These devices can range anywhere from $500 to more than $2000, depending on the capacity you desire. Some have wireless networking capabilities built in, while others require a hard connection to your network. These devices are, for the most part, plug-and-play and will automatically identify themselves in a Windows network.
This sort of model fits best in an environment where you don’t have a full-time IT staff person, and where you probably don’t already have any servers.
Storage Capacity Management for Medium Businesses
When you hit around 50 employees, or when you have a smaller number of employees who routinely all work with large files, you may need something a little bit bigger. At this stage, you’re a good candidate for Network Attached Storage (NAS). NAS lets you provide a single repository for multiple servers to access data. So, you might have three or four different servers, at least one of which has critical data. A NAS device provides you greater reliability, scalability and flexibility than a simple locally attached hard drive.
This kind of solution is best in companies who have their own IT person, or who have a service provider contract and routinely have an IT person on site.
Utimately, the storage capacity management solution you choose will depend on the specific size, needs and processes of your business.
HP Storage Essentials
• Simplifies end users’ ability to analyze and share information
• Enables unified end-to-end storage and infrastructure reporting of assets for faster informed decisions
• Facilitates the creation of customized reports to suit business needs
• Reduces report generation cycles from weeks to minutes
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Posted by Crystal Nichols on Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 11:12 AM
HP Storage Essentials is the ultimate storage and resource management (SRM) software package available, especially if you rely on HP storage products in your company. It is versatile, scalable and will benefit your company in a number of ways. It is an integral part of any storage management infrastructure plan, and can greatly improve the efficiency of your storage solutions while contributing to a lower Total Cost of Ownership.
How exactly does HP Storage Essentials fit into your storage management infrastructure? Take a look for yourself. Here are some of the basic features and benefits of HP Storage Essentials:
Integration
HP Storage Essentials integrates several of your IT management tasks. Storage Essentials touches several areas, from things like provisioning and reporting to operations and charge back. This tool handles your storage management needs, from end to end.
Automatic Discovery
This software gives you access to your entire data network automatically. HP Storage Essentials can create a visual map of your entire storage network, including DAS, SAN and NAS. This map includes not only the objects in the network, but the paths and zones between applications as well as LUN information.
Easy Configuration and Customization
Storage Essentials uses tools like its SRM Host Cluster Builder Wizard to map your unique HA configurations. In addition, it seamlessly integrates all of this data into the overall big picture map, putting everything you need right at your fingertips in just a matter of minutes.
Increased Availability
Applications like Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase and even Microsoft Exchange require a high degree of availability in the enterprise. HP Storage Essentials gives that to you by monitoring and reporting on performance. Everything from applications to disk subsystems to HBA is examined, and bottlenecks can be quickly detected.
Standards-Based Architecture
HP Storage Essentials relies on SMI-S, the industry standard in storage network management. It utilizes CIM and WBEM, and also supports a multi-vendor storage infrastructure.
Customizability
You can create your own set of reports from the standard templates. You can customize the reports to measure performance management, capacity management, asset management, and a host of other items. Best of all, you can access these reports in a number of ways, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Excel, HTML or XML.
Unified Tools
Your IT staff can use HP Storage essentials to manage many different areas, such as XP arrays, infrastructure and servers, all from a single user interface. In addition, HP Storage Essentials provides you with the ability to integrate your NAS backup with your infrastructure backup. It will analyze how configuration changes or file sharing activities will affect all of these areas, as well.
If you’re running HP storage devices as part of your storage solution, you can’t do without HP Storage Essentials. When you combine the power of HP Storage essentials with other tools offered by HP, such as HP Insight, you have everything you need to fully manage your storage infrastructure and maintain the kind of service levels that your business needs to have to keep functioning.
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Optimize your business intelligence outcomes with an easy-to-use
interface that provides powerful query, analysis, and custom reporting
of heterogenous storage and infrastructure assets.
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