Many companies face the challenge
of protecting rapidly growing data dispersed throughout the organization
and multiple remote locations. This expansion is a result of an
increase in such applications as document imaging, the requirement
for online access to this information, and government regulations
regarding the retention of this data. Improving and automating the
consolidation of data, backup, and disaster recovery eliminates
many of the hidden management and administrative costs of delivering
IT services to users.
Steady improvements in hardware and software technologies and the
reduction in communication bandwidth costs have made data mirroring
and replication a very practical alternative to many of the backup
and recovery processes that have been used in the past. Network
Attached Storage (NAS) has also become widely accepted as the lowest
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) alternative for controlling storage
costs. It has been a natural platform to use in enhancing the process
of insuring data availability.
The developments in iSCSI in recent years has brought this promising
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. Adding iSCSI software to NAS systems allows
data in block form as well as file formats to be managed.
MDI's iSCSI enabled Express Stor NAS allows the user 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.
