Focus on... Storage

Features
By Miya Knights, Jennifer Scott
published

What do IT decision makers need to consider when it comes to choosing the right type of storage for business?

The department's IT service division decided to replace the ageing Unix system. Cost was also a significant driver in the selection process with strict budgetary restrictions in place, along with reliability and ease of deployment. The business stability of the supplier and ability to adhere to installation deadlines were important considerations.

It evaluated a number of suppliers, including EMC, BlueArc, NetApp, and Isilon. In the end, it opted for a solution from providers ONStor and Infortrend to provide increased data integrity and reliability, improved performance and manageability, scalable capacity and improved data recovery.

The department invested in two Bobcat 2440 clustered NAS gateway servers, each with 12 Terabytes of Infortrend storage, located at disparate sites, with file systems mirrored between sites.

Benefits

The new Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution, now allows the university's engineering department to provide all of its users with appropriate amounts of home directory storage, with much greater resilience than before, using both NFS and Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocols.

Miya Knights
Miya Knights

A 25-year veteran enterprise technology expert, Miya Knights applies her deep understanding of technology gained through her journalism career to both her role as a consultant and as director at Retail Technology Magazine, which she helped shape over the past 17 years. Miya was educated at Oxford University, earning a master’s degree in English.

Her role as a journalist has seen her write for many of the leading technology publishers in the UK such as ITPro, TechWeekEurope, CIO UK, Computer Weekly, and also a number of national newspapers including The Times, Independent, and Financial Times.