* Vrtualized storage-area network does it all for a Florida veterinary school
Network World writer Julie Bort recently chronicled how the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine used storage virtualization to help piece together 7TB of affordable storage capacity in order to pickup nearline backup and primary storage services.
Bort explains the driving force for the new storage configuration was that the school was trying to cope with staggering volumes of advanced, multimedia diagnostic data. The pain point was backups: The window required for nightly backups to tape had begun to outstrip the time available to complete them.
To fix the problem, IT staff knew they wanted a nearline, disk-based SAN. But proprietary solutions were a total stretch for the school’s $100,000 budget. So the IT folks there pulled together less pricey storage gear and bought a virtualization appliance from StoreAge Networking Technologies (now owned by LSI) called Storage Virtualization Manager (SVM).
SVM sits between a company’s servers and the lower-cost SAN, takes low-volume snapshots of production data and sends them simultaneously to nearline backup disks and tape libraries.
SVM is one of the storage virtualization products featured in the Network World Storage Virtualization Buyer’s Guide. Tap into this buyer’s guide to see how the products compare in terms of management features, supported storage devices, price and performance.
