Overview of data and storage demand

Rob Nieboer, Storage Strategist, StorageTek

Storage is growing faster than the deployment of its management capabilities, but laying the foundation for a long-term solution requires significant effort. With a continuing shortage of knowledgeable trained storage administrators, software and technology must ultimately combine for this gap to close. This session will reveal the latest developments underway to ultimately achieve that goal and enable storage management to get to the next level.

In the best of all worlds, IT managers and architects would consolidate all data and services to a central location and offer branch office user access via the Wide Area Network (WAN). WAN latency and unreliability have made this nearly impossible, however, leaving IT professionals to search out technologies that address WAN roadblocks and allow them to consolidate and centralize branch office storage and servers while offering real-time worldwide access to the data and services that will reside at these central locations.

This presentation will offer an in-depth look at the new, wide area distributed file and service access technologies that are solving this IT dilemma, and will include:

• An overview of the WAN latency and data coherency/consistency issues that have hindered the construction of consolidated Wide Area IT Networks
• A side-by-side comparison of the pros and cons of replication, WAN optimization and wide area file services (WAFS) technologies
• A discussion of real-world scenarios, solutions and information that participants can turn into action-oriented plans that will help them build an effective, consolidated IT infrastructure without sacrificing branch office access.