File Virtualisation
Overview
The growth of unstructured data is becoming a major operational issue in the storage environment. The response for many organisations has been to throw cheap disk at the problem. A significant number of organisations continue to store inactive data on their high performance production disk subsystems. With data growth rates of 60% per annum or more, these approaches will increasingly impact on the cost, performance and management overhead of the storage environment.
File virtualisation is emerging as an alternative, cost effective and powerful way of managing file data. By managing the metadata and creating a global namespace, hundreds of thousands of client-resource mappings can be consolidated to a far more manageable number. Logical mappings are created that need never change, resulting in management tasks such as provisioning, consolidation and migration, being performed without client reconfiguration.
The key is abstraction. Data is no longer bound to physical storage resources. Data management policies can be established to automatically move data through
tiers of storage, without disruption whilst matching the cost of storage with the business value of the data. This immediately frees up expensive tier 1 disk and significantly reduces the management overhead.
Simplifies access to files:
The client no longer needs to have multiple mappings to access data located on different network drives. Instead the client simply needs to access the global namespace
The client retains the same logical drive mapping to the Global Namespace regardless of the physical location of a file.
This allows files to be moved between storage devices without affecting client drive mappings
Key Deliverables
Flexibility Is The Key Deliverable:
Automatically move data between different tiers of storage and transparently support service levels without disrupting access
Pools multiple file servers to appear as one, either permanently or temporarily as part of consolidations
Manage capacity by automatically identifying over-allocations at the file server, volume and directory level and taking corrective action
Manage performance by automatically identifying performance bottlenecks at the file server, volume, and directory level and optimise I/O
Improve disaster recovery with synchronous and asynchronous content distribution across multiple locations
Automates regulatory compliance data retention, retrieval and authentication
Vendor Alliances
