Many companies face the challenge
of protecting rapidly growing data dispersed throughout the organization
and multiple remote locations. This expansion, resulting from years
of server proliferation and decentralization has dramatically increased
IT spending. Improving and automating consolidation of data, backup,
and disaster recovery eliminates many of the hidden management and
administrative costs of delivering IT services to distributed users.
Steady improvements in hardware and software technologies and the
reduction in communication bandwidth costs has made data mirroring
and replication a very practical alternative to many of the backup
and recovery processes used in the past. Network Attached Storage
(NAS) has also become widely accepted as the lowest total cost of
ownership alternative for controlling storage costs. It's a natural
platform to use in enhancing the process of insuring data availability.
Developments in iSCSI over the past 18 months have brought this
relatively young technology to the forefront. iSCSI is an elegantly
simple standard protocol that allows the transfer of standard SCSI
storage device commands over a standard Ethernet infrastructure.
This allows systems with the appropriate software to transfer data
between them with SCSI block commands. By adding iSCSI software
to NAS systems, data in block form as well as file formats can be
managed.
MDI's iSCSI Enabled Express Stor NAS appliance was designed to provide
a high level of automation, cost savings, data redundancy and the
capability to minimize service disruptions caused by various outages.
MDI's iSCSI Enabled Express Stor NAS allows users to automatically
provide for multiple levels of data protection with the use of iSCSI
mirroring, file snapshots, real-time replication with fail over,
and traditional backup. The risk of data loss is virtually eliminated
and the requirement for expensive, labor intensive traditional backup
processes is minimized.
