Click to enlargeThere are several ways to optimize disk capacity in Storage Area Networks (NAS). One of them is Data Deduplication. In the deduplication process, if storage contains several copies of the same file or file sections, server removes duplicate data, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored, along with references to it in state of redundant files.
The deduplication process is transparent to the user – user receives the current copy at request. Naturally, if user modifies a file, its identity is broken, and the system saves the changed duplicate as a separate file.
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Click to enlargeThere are several reasons making IT-directors think about implementation of SAN to the enterprise infrastructure. Obviously, expediency and effectiveness of such solution very much depends on the definite sphere of usage and business-processes. Never the less, several primary benefits of SAN may be pointed out:
- Decrease of business-risks. Probably, the main reason for SAN implementation is high safety from data loss in such kinds of storage. The SAN architecture allows creation of safe, fault-tolerant solution with multiple data replication. Such solution excludes the possibility of loss of critical data and automatically recovers in the event of failure of several nodes. The system downtime at that is minimized.
The SAN applications allow creating of backups and recovering of data on-the-fly, switching a user to work with the backup copy of data instead of the main copy in the event of disruption, and so on. It is possible to geographically separate the storage network components, so High Availability systems can be created even in the regions with risk of natural disasters.
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Click to enlargeIn today’s competitive business environment, virtually every industry and technology focus area is under intense pressure to deliver more performance at a lower cost and the storage technology world is no exception to this. For the SAN market, in particular, much of the focus is not only on reducing the overall cost of the systems but also in making more optimal use of disk space and reducing power and energy requirements of SAN systems. Optimal storage space utilization is being pursued on a number of fronts, beginning with an emphasis on reducing (or eliminating) duplicate data on a storage infrastructure, a process known as deduplication. Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate files or data blocks across storage volumes. Typically, deduplication approaches can be defined as either “inline” or “post-process”. An inline deduplication implementation identifies and eliminates duplicate data as it is moved between host and target. A post-process implementation works after the data has been initially written to disk by identifying and eliminating duplicate data after the initial write. Deduplication approaches offer to reduce duplicated data in the range of 50-95% so you can see that some significant cost savings can be achieved over time. Until recently, deduplication has been a feature offered solely by disk backup and virtual tape library (VTL) tools but vendors are beginning to add deduplication feature sets into their network-attached storage (NAS) systems as well. Sophisticated storage management and reporting tools are also being actively used to monitor and report on utilization of the storage infrastructure and to highlight opportunities for improvement.
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Click to enlargeStorage Area Networks (SANs) have revolutionized data storage options for large enterprise systems over the past decade and are a critical component of many transactional and data warehousing systems in use around the world today. While SANs offer many performance and capacity advantages, any well-designed infrastructure should take great care to avoid any performance bottlenecks. Such a bottleneck can have far-reaching implications across a wide variety of systems, as SANs today are used as the backbone for data storage and data access in many systems. In this article, we will take a look at how a focus on SAN performance and efficiency can lead to a better awareness around how data storage can affect an overall system.
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