WeRecoverData.com - Disaster recovery
Disaster recovery involves a series of policies and procedures intended to help the recovery or continuation of a technological process after it had been affected by a natural or man-made disaster. IT disaster recovery is all about planning for resumption of applications, data, hardware, communications and related infrastructure.
Typically, large organizations spend about 2-4 percent of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning. This would help them avoid major business loss in the event of a disaster. In the past, very few instances were reported wherein a company survived after it had suffered a major loss of business data.
Types of disasters
Natural calamities like earthquake, hurricane, flood and fire can lead to major data loss. However, the impact of this can be reduced by taking precautionary measures such as replication of data, implementation of high-availability systems, and effective disaster management policies.
Man-made disasters are major concerns for IT organizations. Human intervention - intentional or unintentional – can cause massive damage to IT resources. Examples of such instances are sabotage, burglary, virus, intrusion, and the like.
Security holes are one of the main causes of man-made disasters in an IT system. Security holes arise due to vulnerabilities in computing hardware or software. Such systems are prone to hackers and other malicious attacks. The result of these attacks can be disastrous to the organization.
By adopting precautionary measures and implementing effective anti-virus software, organizations can ensure safety to their IT infrastructure. Most important precautionary measures include use of disk protection technologies such as RAID, surge protectors, and provision for uninterrupted power supply.
WeRecoverData.com - Storage Management Initiative - Specification
Storage Management Initiative – Specification (SMI-S) is a storage standard developed by Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to “develop and foster the adoption of a highly-functional open interface for the management of storage networks.” SMI-S enables interoperability among heterogeneous storage vendor systems.
SMI-S defines Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) management profiles for storage systems. It is based on the Common Information Model and the Web-Based Enterprise Management standard defined by DMTF, Management via TCP/IP.
Profiles and Sub-profiles
The SMI specification includes profiles and sub-profiles. While a profile details the behavioral attributes of an autonomous management domain, a sub-profile describes part of the domain. SMI-S includes profiles for Arrays, Switches, Storage Virtualizer, Volume Management and many others.
Clients and Servers
SMI-S entities belong to two categories: clients and servers. Clients are management software applications that can reside anywhere on the network. Clients can be host-based applications, enterprise applications or SAN-based applications such as virtualization engines. Servers are the devices under management within the storage architecture. Examples are disk arrays, host bus adapters, switches, and tape drives.
SMI-S has been accredited by INCITS ANSI fast track program. The name of the formal standard was ANSI INCITS 388-2004, American National Standard for Information Technology – Storage. The currently available standard is SMI-S V1.2.1. More than 280 products from 18 SNIA member companies are certified as conformant to the latest standard.
WeRecoverData.com - Tape library
A tape library or a tape silo refers to a collection of tape drives and related components. The earliest form of tape library was the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS), released in 1974.
Apart from the tape drives, a tape library consists of a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader, and a robot for loading tapes. The tape library can scan barcode labels and locate the correct tape from the tape slots. A tape drive can store data ranging from 20 terabytes to more than 50 petabytes, about one hundred thousand times the capacity of a typical hard disk.
While tape libraries offer much higher storage than other storage methods, including the network attached storage (NAS), they provide slow random access. This is due to the mechanical manipulation of tapes. It may take several seconds to several minutes to access a specific piece of information. Because of this, tape libraries are mostly used in data backup and digital archiving applications. Another important application is hierarchical storage management (HSM), in which tape library is used to hold rarely used files from file systems.
Several library-management packages are available commercially. They are also supported by open-source initiatives such as AMANDA, Bacula, and the minimal mtx program.
Tape libraries are the cost-effective solution for large data storage. With such a system in place, the storage cost per gigabyte comes as low as 10 cents USD. Tape drives also enable a systematic access to large amount of unorganized data.
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