Sunday 20 February 2011

Making Sense Out of Data Storage

By Kelly Allen


One manner of seeing JBOD systems is that they're quite literally "Just a Bunch of Disks". Data administrators use this configuration in order to put to good use the aging hard drives at their disposal. When one is managing these kinds of setups, it is unavoidable to be faced with a ton of obsolete hardware after every two years if not a year. Hardware gets obsolete in a shorter span of time compared with other things. The drive in your desktop right now, could be obsolete now. Every day is a day when new storage devices with bigger capacities and cheaper prices get introduced in the market. But rather than just throwing your old drives away, you could opt to put them in one of these types of devices.

You shouldn't be afraid of words like NAS Storage, JBOD, Desktop RAID and their ilk. All of them are merely acronyms that pertain to a system of putting a bunch of disks together albeit in different configurations and purposes. For one, Network Access Storage is the distant cousin of the file server. JBOD's Just a Bunch of Disks. RAID is just a Redundant Array of Independent or Inexpensive Disks. See? That didn't hurt. All in all these are ways for your company save on costs by putting your hard disks to their optimal usages. Each system has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages.

And this is how we can say these are heading toward the "green". You can reuse and combine these systems and create a larger system. Which when you think about it, is much simpler than having them appear on their own.

You may say that this is the exact inverse of partitioning. Remember that in partitioning drives, you basically have a single drive which you slice up in many partitions. This is advantageous specially if you are thinking of having multiple operating systems at your disposal. Partitioning is useful and "spanning" is useful too. They have their own uses.

Simplicity is the core of these backup technologies. Though they really do get complicated when you take into consideration the vast variety of hardware and configuration that needs to be done, you just have to remember the core and the most basic requirement for having them - which is to create backups. For every system, there is a corresponding use. Some are better than others when it comes to access, and some are better than others when it comes to reliability.

Once you research further, you will encounter the terms "spanning" and "concatenation". They are practically just the technical terminology to describe the process when you combine two or more hard drives into a single drive.

In every system there are also disadvantages. JBODs become problematic when one of the physical drives conk out. Though RAID systems are very hardy when it comes to backup, they can be quite difficult to maintain and configure specially if you don't have a full time IT Manager. Since NAS are entirely network reliant, they tend to clog up the network connections. These are the down sides to each system, if you are in a position to decide which one your company needs, it's best that you consult with peers who have had experience with each so that you'll get a fuller picture of your data storage needs.

By now, you should have an idea on the different storage options that are available to you. Getting the right one just entails knowing your precise enterprise requirements and knowing the type of data that's going to be stored later on. Learning to classify data according to their priority, access and overall importance to the organization will assist you in your endeavor into understanding the best option for you.






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