By Shawn Cooney

Given that an enterprise’s data is considered to be one of the most important corporate assets, data backup and replication processes are critical functions for IT staffs. For business continuity and regulatory compliance purposes, IT staffs must ensure that corporate data can be completely restored within a short period of time in the event of a disaster. Otherwise, IT staffs are placing the enterprise at a huge risk.

Most staffs set up storage environments with little consideration of how a wide area network (WAN) can negatively impact backup or replication times. However, a little planning can pay big dividends in the value of the data saved and the associated build-out costs. What goal should IT staffs target with their data replication and backup processes? The short answer is that IT staffs need to reduce the risk of data loss and down time through more-frequent, high-performance backups at the lowest possible cost. The complete answer is that data replication and backup must be:

By Galvin Chang

With the adoption of server virtualization on the rise, awareness of the importance of storage virtualization is also growing. While large numbers of enterprises have already established SAN environments, changes in the basic storage architecture will also affect the majority of application systems. Therefore, CIOs have to carefully consider the potential impact of storage virtualization on the overall data storage architecture - well before they can begin to formulate relevant strategies. Traditionally, storage virtualization has mainly revolved around offering enterprises the ability to link storage equipment from different vendors together through an intermediary appliance solution. This type of solution is well known, and has been around for many years. That being said, where does a newer solution like scale-out storage technology fit in as a storage virtualization concept – and what are its benefits?