Today, data is the most important asset in a company. While a decade ago it was sufficient to keep data on PCs, the amount of data and its importance has increased enormously. From sales, production and warehousing to shipping, companies today are largely digitalized.
Modern storage systems act as central data storage devices, in which the entire company knowledge is kept in stock. In order to ensure that the constantly increasing data volumes are secure and available, you should pay the greatest possible attention to the design of such storage systems and carry out IT sizing in advance. The things that should be analyzed and defined in advance are explained below.
IT Sizing - we configure your IT system
The basis for almost every IT project and for an efficiently and securely functioning IT infrastructure is the implementation of an IT sizing.
We record your requirements and carry out an as-is analysis before the IT sizing. In this way, existing resources can continue to be used in the planning and configuration of the new IT infrastructure and can be optimally integrated into the new IT infrastructure, taking into account the planned service life.
According to the needs and requirements, the selection and configuration of the following things are part of an IT sizing:
- CPU (processor)
- RAM ( working memory )
- storage media ( HDD hard disks or SSD )
- graphics card
- virtual machine integration
- network connections and network speeds
- UPS to prevent data loss in case of power failure
- external storage systems ( NAS, tape library, tape drive )
- backup
- firewall
- …
The five most important requirements for the implementation of a storage system
Before a new storage system is implemented, the following five points should be analyzed in an IT sizing to optimize data security and data availability:
- I / O requirements of your business critical applications
Every application in the company produces a certain I / O load on your data storage and is therefore performance relevant. To ensure that all your important applications get the right power ( IOPS and response times ), one focus is on this performance. It is about the question, if and how many SSD hard disks are needed or if also classical SAS hard disks meet the requirements. Furthermore, automatic storage tiering can be used to automate the distribution through the storage system. In this way you maximize the performance of your storage system. - Current data volumes
Often there are no concrete figures in the companies about how much data is currently available without compression and deduplication. As a result, wrong decisions are made time and again when it comes to sizing storage. Here it is worth taking a closer look, because the current data stock can also be used to draw conclusions about the expected future growth of the data volume and thus dimension the storage system accordingly for the future. - Availability
Regardless of the fact that data is of enormous importance for every company today, gradations in availability must be considered. How available must or may my storage system really be? Within what time frame must the data be restored from backups? Is a defined time window sufficient for recovery or must data be available in real time without interruption? What happens in case of an accident? Should there be a second fire compartment? Answering these questions will help you to balance security aspects and budget. - SAN or hyper convergence?
Is the classic approach of a Storage Area Network ( SAN ) with disk array, server and tape library the right solution for you or is a hyper-convergent infrastructure the better alternative for your company from a business point of view? A common storage space on server basis is created, which extends over several storage media / data carriers. A central storage system can be dispensed with here. The failure of components is intercepted by the shared storage space. - Backup capacities ( quantity and performance )
When dimensioning a storage system, not only the current and expected data volumes in productive operation must be considered, but also the corresponding capacities for backup and recovery. But not only the quantitative capacity plays a role, but also the consideration of the performance of the storage system. Thus, rarely used data ( e.g. archive data ) can often be outsourced to slower storage media, whereas frequently used data must be delivered faster. In this way you maximize the performance of your storage.
Our IT specialists are available to answer all these questions. Just get in contact with us. The individual points are examined and defined in an IT sizing. On this basis, we then select and dimension your future storage system - tailored to your company and your requirements.
