simon ragg ICT
Audit, audit, audit
Simon Ragg, MD at S3, the value added integrator of data storage and storage management systems, gives his thoughts on the new technologies and new thinking that provide opportunities for the company and its customers to work together to implement effective, efficient IT solutions.
Q What technologies and opportunities excite you right now?
A After being in the industry for only 6 years and not really being a techno-phobe I’m not sure there are any technologies that really excite me! However, I do see a real opportunity for us all in the industry right now - this is not necessarily technology but more the ability for people to do almost anything from anywhere. True, technologies and developments do exist now that enable us all to work from anywhere, incurring less time travelling and perhaps even working from home – but there is more to come - this is exciting! Put simply, what is delivered and the changes it can bring to people’s lives I think is more important than the technology itself.
Q Specifically, there’s a new wave of storage start-ups with some interesting technologies and business models - how is S3
becoming involved with any of these?
A You are right there has been a new crop of storage start-ups trying to bring new approaches to the industry in recent months.
They are all attempting to commoditise storage in a box or to combine both server and storage in a single unit. The ones which have caught our eye include the likes of:
• Nimble Storage – storage, backup and DR all wrapped up in a single iSCSI solution with both SSD and HDD
Lloyds TSB Products & Markets
An existing site in Chatham already functioned as a contingency/ DR site, but limited bandwidth and variable data transmission rates indicated its potential inadequacy for matching Lloyds TSB Products & Market’s future business growth and expanding operations. Products & Markets clearly required a system that was both manageable and scalable. The prevailing system that involved ‘overnighting’ data by transporting it off-site incurred costs and was proving unfit for purpose, relying as it did on 120+ standalone DLT tape drives backing up individual servers in London. The installation of a tape-free back-up system for the London HQ was required, with the backup replicated to the Kent DR site, where data could also be archived to tape and stored off-site. The identification of a bespoke technological solution that would best fit the client’s needs coincided with their plans to relocate to new state-of-the-art offices. S3 reviewed potential solutions before settling on Data Domain’s de-duplicating and compression storage appliances for the HQ disk-based back-up (using eight DD430 restorers). The de-duplicated and compressed data is replicated to the DR site via a low bandwidth link where it is stored on a DD460 Disk Appliance and then on to an Quantum i2000 tape Library, managed by Symantec NetBackup.
October/November 2011 I
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