Discussions

Every IT manager knows, if you can't monitor it, you can't measure it. Storage Management consists of storage networks and storage services such as virtualization, replication, mirroring, security, compression, traffic analysis, software and other services. How do you manage your data today? What are you looking at to help you manage your data in the future?

If your data storage environment is not correctly conflgured you may be wasting time and resources. Inefficient data storage can result in capital costs for hardware plus operating costs for electric power & human labor. What have you done to streamline your data storage and make it more efficient? Share your ideas with us.

With data protection and retention requirements growing 40 to 50 percent annually, organizations are struggling to comply with governance and compliance requirements, not to mention risk management responsibilities. The challenge of keeping and protecting all your organization's data, while at the same time ensuring access when needed, means that traditional approaches may fall short or simply cost too much. Data Protection means intelligent backup and archiving of systems, plus automation of regular data protection. Share your best practice and thoughts for Data Protection.

When does your organization need to refresh hardware to offset investments or realize savings in operating costs? How do you quantify "working smart" to keep costs low and keep your data center humming?

In many IT departments, increased user demand has led to disorganized storage growth, resulting in sprawling, heterogeneous storage environments. These environments make it difficult to achieve optimal utilization and to provision storage capacity for new users and applications. Storage virtualization can put an end to these problems. It enables companies to logically aggregate disk storage so capacity can be efficiently allocated across applications and users. But there is much debate about the use of virtualization. What do you think ? While storage virtualization helps automate tasks, it may also add another layer of complexity and management.

In the world of computing, the virtual desktop is one of the ways in which the size of a computer's environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen's real estate through the use of software and storage. How much of your server and desktop infrastructure has already been virtualized?

Cloud Storage has become a potential solution for data centers that are dealing with "big data." Using the Cloud, data can be stored off site at a low cost. The low cost is appealing, but there are potential security and data integrity risks. What do you think about storing your data in the Cloud? Are you doing this now. Share your views.

Unified Storage brings together diverse protocols like SAN and DAS.

What steps or best practices have your implemented to ensure 100% uptime, or at least virtually 100% up time, 24 X7?

Autonomic Storage is the ability to respond quickly to change, by keeping your data fluid. Does your company have a policy or task force to explore when data should be moved?