Getting NetSmart - Storage: The crux of business continuity

Storage: The crux of business continuity

Network World, 05/09/02

Next week, Steve Duplessie, founder of Enterprise Storage Group, and I will be heading up an all-star team of storage vendors for Network World's six-city Storage Town Meeting. Our goal is to make sure that you have in place a solid business continuity plan or at least the tools to develop one.

This might seem like a lofty goal, but with so much riding on stored information within a company, the attention placed on this area could never be enough. In fact, IT executives across the country have told me that their corporate leaders now get the importance of building an appropriate storage network.

Now, the reason I say appropriate is that how big you build out your network should be a conscious decision. This is not a situation where you just add on and add on because you can. Instead, you should carefully calculate what you need to store and how readily it has to be available. Some companies need their information online within seconds after an outage. Others could wait a day without serious ramifications. You also need to prioritize within your network what information has to be available when. Does your e-mail storage system take priority over your financial data? Or is access to the sales team's tools more important? These decisions have to be made before a disaster hits.

Joining us on the tour to present their solutions for your business continuity issues will be Cisco, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Network Appliance, StorageTek and StorageNetworks. Each one will tackle an important part of the storage puzzle, from the relevance of iSCSI to the role of virtualization to the viability of network-attached storage. They will also let you in on their roadmaps for future products so you know what will make for a good investment down the road.

Duplessie starts off the day with a look at where the storage industry is now and where it's going. He'll tell you about the options you have for managing your storage resources. He'll also let you know what's hype and what's real in the market -- a great service to offer considering all the terminology being thrown around.

In the afternoon, Duplessie acts as your agent and tells the vendors what should be happening in the market. He explains what new technologies should be at the fore and which should be placed on the back burner. He also shares with you what makes for a good business continuity plan.

Throughout the day, we'll be taking your questions and putting them to the panel, making sure you get straight answers. We'll address the business case for building up your storage networks and how to choose the right strategy for your network needs.

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