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In order to deal with these seemingly conflicting requirements, IT departments need to look to alternative storage devices that can work in harmony with their network and servers.
Structured v
unstructured data In order to ascertain which device would best suit its network and servers, an enterprise needs to identify the type of data involved. Data itself can fall largely into two categories; structured and unstructured. Structured data implies exactly that, the data exists inside ‘container’ files in identifiable ‘chunks’. There are implicit or explicit relationships maintained between those chunks. Most people recognise this type of data as that managed by a database or data-driven applications.
Unstructured data refers to data which we would normally associate with word processing documents, PDF files, photos and image data, and Web pages.
A huge amount of company information is now unstructured data, and it is fast becoming the reigning storage source for enterprise data centres. According to IDC(2), unstructured data is set to eclipse the growth of structured data.
Although structured data is still expanding at an annual growth rate of 21.8%, unstructured data is rapidly outpacing it with an annual
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Network attached storage
The NAS device is a storage subsystem with an embedded, optimised operating system that exists with its own network identities.
Instead of attaching directly to a departmental computer that is serving applications to a network’s workstation users, the NAS device attaches directly to a local area network (LAN) backbone, typically an Ethernet network, and is assigned one or more IP addresses.
Enterprise-class NAS will offer the ability to virtualise existing File Servers to simplify consolidation with no client re-configuration, or simply to quickly provision new file sharing capabilities within a different security domain.
From this, any type of device on the LAN, ranging from a user’s workstation to other servers, can then access the NAS device to share files utilising existing industry standards.
Enterprise-class NAS must be able to scale independently both file storage and compute power, thus removing the
growth rate of 61.7%. With this relentless increase in unstructured data, enterprises need to be sure that they have a storage system in place, and NAS solutions are in a prime position to support this.
over-provisioning seen in the past, whereby the file server could easily run out of the ability to connect further storage before compute was exhausted, or the opposite whereby compute power was exhausted while spare storage capacity remained.
NAS and the existing network
NAS is seen as a viable solution in networking environments because it allows for easy expansion of information access, complementing existing general-purpose servers. NAS allows network administrators to attach file storage to a network easily and cost- effectively without disrupting existing general-purpose server operations.
Another key factor is that NAS can be used to store all types of applications including; software development, medical imaging, streaming video and engineering design.
NAS and the existing server NAS is designed to separate storage resources from the network and application servers in order to simplify management and improve reliability, performance and simplicity of the network. NAS can be located centrally, alongside general-purpose servers or even distributed throughout the network for performance and disaster recovery.
As file sharing is moved off existing general purpose servers they are freed up to
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