Jamie Gruener's datastore Q&A

Jamie Gruener Senior Analyst of Enterprise Computing and Networking at Yankee Group In his role at Yankee Group, Jamie covers the storage market and is responsible for delivering expert insight on storage networking standards and emerging storage technologies. His areas of expertise include SAN management and virtualization. His research also covers carrier integration of storage technology, content distribution, server technologies and the storage service provider market.

QUESTION: We have far too many FTPs occurring between our mainframe and open systems environment. Considering the different file types such as OS390, NFS or CIFS, what recommendations can you make to help us approach a resolution?

ANSWER: How about doing a mirrored datastore that would use a fan-out approach? In this case, you'd put together a series of server clusters focused on NFS or CIFS that would handle the user queries instead of having the mainframe pinged each time there is a query. It's not a perfect approach but the more you distribute the load, the less likely your mainframe and open systems are stressed.