
Symmetric Active/Active Controller
Optimizing Dynamic Workloads
Application Brief
By Patrick Allaire and Mark Adams
Introduction
Today, organizations of all sizes must manage, store and protect exponentially increasing amounts of data.
Preservation requirements grow ever more stringent as data continues to be generated at this unprecedented
rate, and this explosion of data has left businesses across the globe struggling with ways to economically store
and protect data while staying within budget and maintaining acceptable levels of service.
The continued expansion of data storage requirements is critical to the success of many organizations. To
meet current and future needs, IT departments must look to new approaches for storing, protecting and
managing corporate, customer and partner data. But first they must overcome the complexity and management
issues associated with the current storage landscape.
Storage Landscape: Complexity and Management
Challenges with No Easy Solution
Growing data requirements have, understandably, brought certain pressures on IT management to improve
productivity and maintain performance levels. The fact that other segments of the business now regard IT as a
strategic asset as well as an operational necessity means that other parties — namely, CEOs and senior
management — are looking to IT departments for both more strategic value and more ideas about where and
how to improve business operational efficiencies. In many cases, they have not yet found what they are looking
for. According to one survey, only 45 percent of businesses are satisfied with their current level of storage
administration staff and skills. About one-tenth reported a “problematic shortage” in staff or skills.
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In other
words, this is a strategic problem for the business, and one that current arrangements all too often fail to
address.
Organizations face not just strategic but also technical challenges. They must keep their data searchable,
available and accessible while enforcing data protection requirements. They have to find ways to efficiently
store and archive data, back up applications and recover quickly from disasters. They must meet increasingly
stringent government regulations in the areas of storage, reporting and archiving. And they must find solutions
to all these problems that not only meet today’s requirements, but also have the flexibility and scalability to
meet tomorrow’s. To truly build operational efficiencies into the infrastructure, organizations must acquire a
platform or portfolio of technologies that is future proof and leverages the latest innovations.
And because budgets are never unlimited, every business faces cost considerations. IT departments must
accommodate data growth by adding storage capacity while minimizing storage costs. They must strive to
reduce backup windows in order to avoid downtime, which could prove costly to the business, minimize storage
management tasks so that they can apply a minimal amount of personnel resources and keep power
consumption as low as possible in the face of rising energy costs. These cost control measures often come into
conflict with two other imperatives: protecting the organization’s storage investment through regular
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“Medium-Size Business Server and Storage Priorities,” Mary Johnston Turner and John McKnight. Enterprise Strategy Group, June 2008, p. 8.
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