The SNW Europe takes place on November 2 - 3, 2011 at the Congress, in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. PoINT - as a silver sponsor - can be found at booth 108.
Cloud storage as part of a storage concept offers companies an opportunity to meet today's demands of daily increasing data volumes. Cost savings in IT are opponent to expenditures for data and information security. Such problems can be solved by intelligent storage management solutions that support management of increasing data volumes and, in parallel, meet the numerous compliance demands. Basis of an intelligent storage management solution is a multi-tier storage architecture, a hierarchically structured form of data storage. It allows organizations to meet compliance requirements even if IT budgets are stagnating or decreasing.
The well-established software solution PoINT Storage Manager, that combines different local storage technologies (RAID, Tape, Optical) to a unique tiered storage architecture, now also integrates cloud storage services sensibly into the already existing storage infrastructure. For this reason, cloud integration benefits from the functionalities of PoINT Storage Manager. In particular, data is stored encrypted and is therefore also in the cloud protected against unauthorized access.
The PoINT Storage Manager realizes a three tier concept, comprising of performance tier, capacity tier and archive tier. Data is migrated automatically by individually defined policies, so that data is always stored where sensible and necessary.
To enable such processing, first of all, the life cycle of a company's data needs should be analyzed. Such analysis usually shows that data accesses in the beginning are very high and decrease strongly with increasing data age and finally remain at an irrelevant level. Concurrently with decreasing data accesses the relevant data volume increases. This leads to the requirement of migrating data during their life cycle to different physical storage places, as a general storage on high performant storage systems (e.g. SAS RAID or SSD) is far too expensive. Depending on the data storage location, they need to be shifted to a suitable storage device within the multi-tier storage architecture. Such task is performed by the PoINT Storage Manager by migrating data under consideration of its status automatically into the adequate storage tier. In doing so, the storage cloud is homogeneously integrated and extends the existing storage infrastructure.