Storage/Data Consolidation

Consolidate your isolated pools of SAN and NAS storage and improve your storage capacity utilization and data management, while reducing operating expenditures (OPEX).

SAN
Traditionally, organizations have paired storage resources with specific servers, primarily because of technical restrictions. This implementation results in poor utilization of storage resources because the storage is dedicated to each server and not shared among servers. For example, free disk space on one server's disk subsystem cannot be used by other storage-constrained servers.

This paired server-device model has proven to be especially inflexible during periods of expansion. Simply adding more resources as requirements grow typically results in a very difficult environment to manage and poor utilization of resources. In addition, because organizations have to buy a greater number of servers and storage devices, they tend to choose less expensive, slower, and less reliable ones.

To help avoid disruption and cost, SANs provide the advantages of flexible connectivity, more efficient use of storage resources, enhanced scalability, and increased manageability. In fact, SANs provide unprecedented flexibility for storage environments changing the way storage resources can be purchased and managed. By enabling any-to-any server and storage connectivity via switches, SANs decouple dedicated devices and enable storage resource sharing. This cost-effective open systems approach enables the selection of best-of-breed heterogeneous equipment.

SANs can help organizations grow their storage environments much more quickly because storage capacity can grow independent of server usage. This approach provides a high degree of efficiency in utilizing resources while simultaneously enabling growth without system.

NAS
Network-attached storage (NAS) is hard disk storage that is set up with its own network address rather than being attached to the department computer that is serving applications to a network's workstation users. By removing storage access and its management from the department server, both application programming and files can be served faster because they are not competing for the same processor resources. The network-attached storage device is attached to a local area network (typically, an Ethernet network) and assigned an IP address. File requests are mapped by the main server to the NAS file server.

Network-attached storage consists of hard disk storage, including multi-disk RAID systems, and software for configuring and mapping file locations to the network-attached device. Network-attached storage can be a step toward and included as part of a more sophisticated storage system known as a storage area network (SAN).

iSysTek can help you simplify enterprise-wide file management by eliminating islands of storage. NAS Gateways "pool" the storage and processing resources, which allows capacity and performance to grow independently in response to changing requirements.

Disaster Recovery

Natural or man-made disasters, sabotage, hackers, viruses; Threats continue to mount for IT organizations responsible for protecting their business’ data. The impact of lost data and inaccessible data can financially compromise an organization and, in some cases, leave no room for recovery. iSysTek’s data protection services are an integral part of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Our fast, cost-effective data protection and restore services help you get your mission-critical data back fast – to any facility – whether it be your primary or secondary facility. Using the latest in SAN, NAS, replication, mirroring, disk and tape-based protection technologies, our local and remote storage management services can centralize, manage and protect your company-wide data and provide on-line tools that give you complete control, even when things are at their worst. In short, Arsenal reduces the cost and complexity of establishing truly reliable business continuity, while providing the most flexible retention and archiving solutions available today.

Research suggests that only 6% of companies suffering a catastrophic data loss will survive beyond two years. However, despite the best efforts of IT teams everywhere, data loss and downtime occur. As a result, employee productivity can come to a standstill while the impact of downtime—including financial and legal liability, lost revenue and irreparable customer and investor confidence—increase exponentially. This is why over 900 customers worldwide rely on Arsenal as one of the industry’s largest and most trusted providers of data protection services for disaster recovery. More importantly, with a 100% recoverability record, we share your expectations for service quality and back our services with guaranteed levels of accessibility.

Heterogenous Content Distribution and File Level Archival

Delivering data to widely dispersed customers, branch locations and partners is frequently a high cost, manual process. To deliver this workflow integration, companies have frequently cobbled together technologies and manual processes such as FTP, custom scripting, and physical media distribution such as CD-ROM and tape. However, these often fall short of providing reliable and secure delivery, and can have large recurring operating and maintenance costs.

Signiant's highly secure and reliable data movement technology makes it ideal for moving sensitive data to multiple locations. Multi-streaming and bandwidth controls make moving large files possible even when limited network bandwidth is available.

Distributed Web Server Updates - Signiant simplifies the problem of keeping multiple web servers updated.

Example: To ensure that daily web site updates are available on all 15 company web servers, Signiant is configured to automatically push incremental change data on a nightly basis to a staging area on all web servers, and then automatically invoke a process to move these new files from staging into production.

Large File Distribution - Securely move multi-gigabyte files without costly VPN or private network costs.

Example: A satellite imaging company periodically distributes multi-gigabyte image files to a number of customers. Signiant is configured to automatically authenticate links over the Internet with each customer and send these large files using compression and bandwidth controls to ensure efficient use of customer network resources. After delivery has been certified, Signiant executes a program on the local server that initiates the billing cycle for that customer.

Replace Physical Data Shipments - Signiant can eliminate the need for manual, physical shipment of data on CD or tape by replacing it with a secure, automated distribution over the Internet.

Example: Rather than send weekly new parts catalog data on CD to each of its 2000 dealers, a company uses Signiant to automatically send the data over the Internet, significantly lowering cost and greatly improving quality. Since delivery is immediate and certified, all dealers receive the new information at the same time, and the errors and cost from lost or misplaced CD's is eliminated. Dealers greatly prefer this new system as it saves effort on their part each week.

Non-Disruptive Data Migration

The need to move data both locally and remotely is growing as IT organizations respond to ever-increasing demands for information. From bringing new operational sites on-line to meeting regulatory compliance requirements, enterprise data is often on the move. One of the most significant challenges with data migration is maintaining ongoing operations throughout the process at both sites. This issue applies to the initial implementation and testing phase as much as during the actual migration of data. Throughout each stage, the production system must be kept safe and online.

iSysTek provides an extremely cost-effective and non-disruptive approach for both local and remote data migration. Our solution provides snapshot, mirroring, and replication capabilities in a highly integrated fabric-based solution which is high performance and simple to install.

Disk-To-Disk-To-Tape

Sometimes, tape automation by itself doesn’t do the trick. Using tape for backup and archive management has its drawbacks. Restoring data from tape is time-consuming. Backups to tape are difficult too. However, tape remains a cost-effective alternative for long-term storage (archiving). Because it's portable, tape is often used for off-site backup and restoration after a disaster.

In recent years disk has come to the forefront as a viable means to manage long-term data. Unlike tape, disk is relatively fast when trying to restore lost files. There is no searching through tapes to find the data, making disk the fastest way to restore. Still, disk is not perfect. Disk is more expensive and less reliable than tape. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to get the best of disk and tape without the drawbacks? iSysTek offers a variety of D2D2T solutions. Our platform is the first enterprise-class disk-based data protection solution that enables customers to effectively increase the capacity of disk systems by 25 times or more.