Storage Area Networks

Snapfish is the world's No. 1 online photo service, with more than 60 million members in 20 countries and more than 5 billion unique photos stored online. Its previous storage infrastructure was not able to meet Snapfish's existing and future needs. The company was looking for a storage solution that would offer extreme scalability, flexibility, reliability, improve performance, balance performance and capacity with affordability, and meet its business needs for partnering. Read this case study to learn how Snapfish built and has maintained a highly scalable, affordable, high-performance storage architecture that has kept up with customer demand.

Read about the benefits, prerequisites, and impact of successful business process management (BPM) initiatives, with a closer look at the United States.

Learn what companies can do in economic downturns to position themselves for later success.

"Time is money. You can't do business if you can't access your applications. I won't settle for anything less than 99.99% application availability." Steven Sommer, veteran CIO/CTO There is no aspect more critical to a business than the ability of its end users, customers, business partners and suppliers to have high availability access the corporate applications. If applications are unavailable, business ceases. And corporations know it.

NetApp® SnapManager® for Oracle (SMO) is designed to significantly simplify all these tasks and more. In this article, we examine how you can deploy SMO to simplify and even automate data protection, recovery, and cloning across both primary and secondary storage. Learn more today!

This paper focuses generally on optimal storage and storage management for SharePoint and specifically evaluates NetApp's approach, detailing how the capabilities in NetApp's DataONTAP and SnapManager for SharePoint Server offerings help to drive storage efficiency, reduce cost, and exclude complexity in a comprehensive SharePoint implementation. It is not so much a "how to" guide, but rather a "why to" explanation. Learn more today!

This white paper demonstrates how power, cooling, and real estate requirements are finally combining-to form a perfect storm for expensive, locked-in, proprietary hardware. Is there a way out?

Even with increased start-up costs, higher-end processors can offer a lower TCO thanks to better performance. This white paper shows detailed comparisons between higher- and lower-end servers with surprising results—including a 42% lower TCO and 87% faster performance for the higher-end processor.

The experts at IDC predict that external disk storage capacity will grow 50% through 2010. In this free white paper, they'll show you how to simplify managing all that extra data while lowering costs, by implementing unified storage.

This free white paper from the experts at IDC posits solutions to the key problems posed by data center crowding: geometrically growing power and cooling costs; the spiraling cost of management; and the sheer number of server footprints.

CA ARCserve® Backup, CA XOsoft™ Replication, and CA XOsoft™ High Availability provide several key features that enable you to both protect virtualized servers and benefit from server virtualization in your overall recovery management strategy

Storage costs are exploding. The culprits, according to this white paper: new Web-based applications that demand more I/O throughput and higher performance than ever. So how can you handle this onslaught while keeping your cost per GB (and cost per user) reasonable?

This white paper highlights two new additions to the Cisco® Small Business Network Storage System (NSS) line of products. The Cisco NSS2000 Series is a 2-bay network attached storage (NAS) system, and the Cisco NSS3000 Series is a 4-bay system.

Storage area networks (SAN) deliver consolidated storage and advanced storage management features. One advanced SAN configuration involves booting servers directly from the SAN, eliminating all locally attached storage, and improving server operations. Several server boot options are available. To select the right boot option for your environment, you should weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each.

Most storage devices support multiple SAN connections for performance and reliability, but in many configurations servers use only a single storage connection. This creates a single point of failure and potential performance bottleneck for I/O. Multipath Input/Output (MPIO) is server software that extends redundancy to the entire I/O pathway in a SAN, delivering fault tolerance, high availability, and better performance.

System reliability is a vital component in Storage Area Network (SAN) design that keeps your production environment operating and avoids data loss and downtime. But since SANs are built using both mechanical and electronic parts, component failures due to usage, environmental factors, or manufacturing defects are not uncommon. Even in completely redundant systems, controllers can fail, fans can stop operating, power supplies can burn out, and disk drives can degrade or fail.

Call it growth, scaling, or expansion – whatever you call it, increasing your storage resources often strikes fear and loathing in the heart of the IT administrator. It conjures up visions of downtime, extra management tasks, frustrated users, and working nights and weekends. In addition, since capacity and performance are intimately connected, increasing storage resources can require balancing changes that affects the entire the SAN.

Storage consolidation was a launching point for various new technologies delivering advanced functionality. The next generational shift that is in process will free storage administrators from handling storage provisioning for applications – instead, applications will be able to request and provision storage for themselves. While today multiple tools are required to add storage to your database, soon the database will be able to take care of that itself.

On-Demand Managed Hosting ranges from simple Managed Servers with one or two processors to the design of complex computing environments, which typically include multiple servers, storage, networking, security, backup, load balancing, and more.

Dickinson Wright PLLC has a long history of success – founded in 1878, the law firm has been serving clients for more than a century. From offices in Michigan and Washington D.C., Dickinson Wright’s 450+ employees deliver comprehensive legal services to organizations of all sizes – from individuals and new ventures to small and large companies to government units.

EqualLogic provides storage virtualization features with its award-winning PS Series arrays, offering higher storage utilization rates than alternative solutions. By combining PS Series arrays with VMware, IT administrators achieve virtualized environments with fewer servers and less wasted space.

To ensure the full potential of your virtual platform solution, you need to make sure your application and storage network is prepared to handle the added stresses of a virtual machine (VM) infrastructure. F5® technology enables your network to adapt to virtualization needs, ensure high availability (HA), maximize resources, and improve performance so you can get the most out of your investment.

This free white paper reveals how businesses are benefiting from latest generation of open storage systems. Years ago, all servers were closed and proprietary; then open systems hit the market, combining rapid technological innovation with market-driven choice. In the white paper, you'll explore how open architectures are helping some of today's best-known enterprise names stay flexible and profitable.

The importance of data processing in today’s business environment is increasing and it is clear that business operations must be secured against every possible contingency to provide continuous uptime. Business continuity is not just concerned with IT infrastructure and data processing, it also includes manual and automatic IT systems with the human involvement. This white paper explains how HP StorageWorks XP for Business Continuity Manager (BCM) Software makes sure that all processes within the data-handling procedures are automated in such a way that in the event of a failure or unplanned disruption, business operations can continue with minimal interruption.

This free white paper from the experts at IDC posits solutions to the key problems posed by data center crowding: geometrically growing power and cooling costs; the spiraling cost of management; and the sheer number of server footprints.