SearchStorage.co.UK has a variety of technical tips for resolving the issues surrounding data storage technology. These tips are designed for storage pros who want to learn more about effectively managing their own data storage resources. For your convenience, we've compiled our most recent tips on troubleshooting storage-area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS), ensuring effective backup and recovery operations, leveraging virtualisation in your storage environment and more.
Data
archiving: Three key elements
There are many ideas about what a consolidated or unified data archive should look like, and
preconceptions can clash when you're considering creating such a solution. Navigating the archiving
market starts with an evaluation of your company's objectives for its archive. But regardless of
whether you're using a consolidated or unified approach, archiving
software, storage hardware and management software should be part of any data archiving
system.
Network-attached
storage clusters for virtualised environments
While network-attached storage clusters have been around for years, they're gaining renewed
attention as companies increasingly turn to server virtualisation. NAS clusters can provide
reliable, flexible and highly scalable networked storage to virtualised environments and as a
result, the NAS market has seen considerable activity in the last year. Learn
about the network considerations for NAS clusters in a virtualised environment, and whether a
build or buy approach is right for your organisation.
Top
tips for Active Directory data restorations and data recovery
If you've ever had to perform a recovery of a domain controller or of an entire Active Directory
database, then you have no doubt discovered that restoring domain controllers is something of an
art form. With Active
Directory restorations, it is important that you understand how the restoration process works
and that you are aware of the various caveats to the process. Check
out the top tips for successfully restoring an Active Directory database, including backing up
at least two domain controllers, knowing the differences between an authoritative restore and a
non-authoritative restore, and more.
Formulating
a remote-office data backup and recovery plan
Protecting data locked inside data centres has always been a central focus for IT. An important
part of the "beyond the data center" challenge is remote-office or branch-office (ROBO) data
protection. In the past, companies either ignored remote-site backup or dealt with it
half-heartedly as effective and reasonably affordable solutions simply didn't exist. This approach
is no longer sufficient. Here's what you need to know to formulate
a data backup and recovery plan to for your remote and branch offices.
How to
determine a NAS system's scalability
By design, NAS is incredibly simple networked storage. NAS is easy to set up, effortless to operate
and provides easy data protection with snapshots and mirroring. However, because there are
limitations on the scalability of a single NAS array, there are some caveats related to managing
multiple NAS systems. Learn
about the scalability limitations of a NAS system and how you can avoid application outages
that occur when storage reaches these limits to more easily manage multiple NAS systems.
Best
practices for using server virtualisation in your storage environment
Server virtualisation can lower costs and increase capacity on physical servers by sharing them
among several virtual machines. However, there are a number of best practices to consider when
using or thinking about server virtualisation. Learn
about the best practices for using server virtualisation in your environment, including
monitoring virtual machine performance, eliminating single points of failure, ensuring the write
cache works properly and more.
This was first published in September 2009
