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Home : NTP Software Best Practices Newsletter – January 2009
NTP Software Best Practices Newsletter – January 2009
 
Tiered Storage -All Storage is Not Equal
 
 
 
 NTP Software News & Events
 
  NTP Software has been hard at work developing new solutions to further reduce storage management costs for our customers. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements in February.  
 
 Industry News
 
  Symantec announced the latest version of their archiving solution Enterprise Vault™ 8.0.
Click here for the article.		  
 
 Tech Tidbits
 
  The SearchStorage website has an interesting article on the top 5 NAS tips for 2008. The tips cover topics such as planning for NAS, protocals for NAS, etc.
Click here to view the article
 
 
 
Patrick Hynds
Patrick Hynds
Sr. Storage Architect, NTP Software
As your network ages, you end up having old infrastructure still running with the new infrastructure. Often organizations treat these older systems less tenderly than the newer, typically higher capacity, systems. The problem is that often the treatment is not consistent and is also not well thought out in advance.

This is where tiered storage takes the stage, whether formally or informally. If you have a lower class of storage you should define what that means. Does this storage get less maintenance? Does it get backed up as securely as the newest SAN or NAS in the enterprise?

By answering these questions formally you are much more likely to put the proper data on these systems rather than just keeping what happens to be there at the moment. Formal tiering of storage also lets you allocate storage in larger quantities to purposes that might not be granted large blocks of storage on the latest and greatest system. Tiering lets you target not only your archiving solutions, but also your chargeback operations.

In discussions with our customers we are seeing an increased need for them to chargeback for storage and to do it by tier. NTP Software Storage Financials™ includes the ability to assign servers and volumes to user definable tiers and then to assign each tier a price per GB. This solution can even support custom prices per GB for departments defined in the system. This functionality allows organizations to use prices to guide the usage of enterprise storage assets and helps ensure that utilization is well aligned with regard to the cost of the underlying storage versus importance of the data.

Tiering of storage is a critical component of an overall storage strategy. Thus, an organization's approach to managing those tiers needs to be well thought out, including how costs are assigned.

Suggest a topic for future editions of this newsletter. Email us at newsletter@ntpsoftware.com and let us know.
 
 
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