Storage of data is an ever-growing problem by its very nature. Cynosure Solutions's storage consulting team specialise in the design and build of complex storage solutions for organisations of all sizes, both using existing systems and where appropriate new technologies.
Each year, data loss costs businesses substantial amounts of revenue in terms of lost productivity, lost customers and lost business information. While you can protect your business information as much as is possible, at some stage data will be lost due to hardware, software or human error. A recent study found that up to 7% of consumer grade hard disk drives will fail each year, with the average lifespan of a hard drive estimated at approximately 5 years.
The importance of a reliable data storage infrastructure and data security policy cannot be over-emphasised. Ensuring that your data is stored on a reliable and fault tolerant storage infrastructure and backed up daily is of huge importance to business continuity. We also recommend implementing a data security policy and setting privilege levels for employees accessing data, using encryption where appropriate.
Centralised Storage Solutions
There are a variety of centralized storage solutions including Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). Storage Area Networks offer enterprise class high availability storage and are recommended as a centralized storage platform for multiple mission critical servers. Our engineers have experience with a range of SANs on both iSCSI and fibre channel fabrics. Utilising the latest iSCSI and fibre channel technologies, we can implement a redundant and high availability centralized storage solution for your mission critical business files and applications.
Network Attached Storage offers a centralised storage and file sharing platform for servers and workstations. NAS is usually significantly less expensive than a SAN and is especially suited for sharing files and applications to both servers and workstations.
Direct Attached Storage and Server Storage
There are many types of Direct Attached Storage (DAS) available designed to directly attach to your systems to increase storage capacity. DAS can be a very cost effective way of increasing storage capacity for your servers or workstations. When it comes to server storage, we strongly recommend implementing a redundant array of disks to ensure that your business can continue to function in the event of single disk failures. There are multiple levels of redundant disk arrays and we can recommend a solution based on the type of server, application and budget.
Our Backup Solutions
Our consultants can recommend the best backup solution for your business needs taking into account your business requirements and budget. In order to ensure that your data is safe, we recommend performing full daily backups of all data. Our engineers have a wide range of experience implementing a variety of backup solutions for businesses of all sizes and can recommend the best solution to fit your business.
Data Protection and Backup Guidelines
• Full daily backups, more than one media set, weekly, monthly backups.
• Off site replication where possible.
• Monthly data restore tests.
• Disaster recovery plan in place.
• Virtualisation where possible.
• Data encryption on laptops.
