Storage Assessments

For most enterprises, the battle to discover, report, and manage unstructured data is growing at an accelerating rate.

Email, presentations, and other unstructured data is exploding. Storage of duplicate files is intensifying the problem. Storage managers will admit "they don't know what they don't know" about their file system environment. Yet, as much as they want to know, most enterprises lack the time, staff, and resources to * gain valuable insight into their file system environment so they can effectively understand, manage, and anticipate trends.

Axiom's Storage Assessment services provide comprehensive reporting and analysis across all [*heterogeneous file*] systems in the enterprise.

Storage administrators can learn how their file servers and file systems are performing over time by looking at metrics such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, and throughput.

In addition, data access patterns such as data of last access or frequency of access, as well as duplicate data, can be analyzed to optimize and efficiently manage file share resources.

 

Overtime, administrators can utilize assessment results to implement cost-effective and flexible storage tiers in order to get the highest and best use of **their system. Enterprises can then establish a well-balanced storage environment that matches data and usage with the appropriate devices, and implement any necessary policies and watch-dogs.

A storage assessment includes a variety of components.

Storage Infrastructure: Architecture, Utilization, availability, consolidation, time-to-access.
Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery (See definition below): Backups, Replication, Recovery: RTO / RPO
Information Security: data integrity, encryption, authorization
Management: maintenance, privileges, monitoring/optimization tools
Advanced Utilization and Integration: Virtualization, content retrieval, advanced technology considerations

What is business continuity?

Business Continuity is the ability to adapt and respond to risks, as well as opportunities, in order to maintain continuous business operations. There are three primary aspects of providing Business Continuity for key applications and processes:

High availability is the capability to and processes that provide access to applications regardless of local failures, whether these failures are in the business processes, in the physical facilities, or in the IT hardware or software.
Continuous operations is the capability to keep things running when everything is working properly; where you do not have to take applications down merely to do scheduled backups or planned maintenance.
Disaster Recovery is the capability to recover a data center at a different site if a disaster destroys the primary site or otherwise renders it inoperable. The characteristics of a disaster recovery solution are that processing resumes at a different site and on different hardware.