Control Costly Data Sprawl with Thin Clients, SAN and NAS

When it advances to tales of woe about mismanaged data, storage leads the way. Market researcher International Data Corp. estimates that a certain number of 60 percent of vital corporate data upon desktop and notebook PCs remains unprotect That number is notion to be closer to 80 percent for small-office and home-office PC users.

Taking a slightly different spin upon this topic, Strategic Research Corp. claims that 60 percent of corporate data resides outside of managed server upon remote desktops, networks and mobile a whole s Further, the consultancy estimates that 75 percent of this "edge data" is either ineffectively sheltered or not protected at all.

And here is a final sobering statistic to consider: According to the U Department of Labor, 93 percent of businesses that experience a significant data los will be on the outside of business within five years.

This vast storehouse of vulnerable, unprotect data shows one of the most threatening and intractable of all IT question s Specifically, data is far more than just storage-it is the lifeblood of almost all businesses. When it fails to stream the business may be in mortal danger, because it cannot capitalize upon its data. Unfortunately, even many businesses that understand the value of their data fail to cover it properly.

And now, the penalties for not having a firm grip upon corporate information can be abrupt indeed. Regulations including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Basel II and the EU Data Protection Directive, to name just a scarcely any make it more important than at any time for enterprises to track, manage and confident their data.

In an effort to turn end for end the negative numbers and avoid the stiff penalties of regulatory non-compliance, IT departments have encouraged users to save critical data to available network server below the control of enterprise software. Unfortunately, of that kind policies are difficult to enforce and thus may be widely ignored by dint of legions of users who present to keep their data stored locally, where they believe they can better superintendence it. These end users may perceive as though it is their data, when in fact it belongs to their employer

As might be wait fored this myopic approach is often disastrous because PCs have a well-documented history of point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds that can lead to unrecoverable data, including disk crashes and virus infections. It's highly unlikely, however, that federal regulators will accept "the PC ate my homework" as a valid excuse for failing to comply with the law. That's wherefore corporations must find a viable and cost-effective way to preserve their data-from the data center all the way down to the desktop.

A Troika of Technology Solutions

A rapidly increasing number of businesses are realizing that server-based computing solutions utilizing thin client devices-combined with centralized data center designs that leverage storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) infrastructures-can explain the data control dilemma.

Thin clients replace expensive, inherently insecure PC with diskless terminals that contain no local storage.

SANs are high-speed sub-networks that are populated through shared dedicated storage devices, all of which are available to all server upon a LAN or MAN. Because stored data does not reside directly upon network servers, those servers are fre to perform other business processing tasks.

NAS devices are solely dedicated to file sharing. In NAS environments, hard disk storage space may be added to a server-based network without shutting the server down, and large NAS appliances may clinch up to a terabyte of data.

In addition to slashing hardware take away froms thin clients reduce and centralize support while increasing end-user efficiency by the agency of making it easier for employee to concentrate upon applications and data, as oppos to their desktop devices. Moreover, thin client environments are more conducive to data backup and security, disaster redemption and virus immunity.

Because thin-client computing guarantees that the maximum amount of corporate data is always available upon a centralized basis, SANs and NAS are able to exploit the filled value of that data by dint of efficiently transmitting it in file form (NAS) or block up form (SANs) between users across LANs (via Ethernet) and WAN (via wide bandwidth, Fibre Channel links). This creates a cascading consequence that begins when designated extremity users are able to access any data, any time.

The cascade issue continues because this high-speed, highly organized approach to certain data access further enables the creation of policy-based computing and departmental chargeback schemes. These schemes capitalize upon the efficient nature of thin clients, SAN and NAS by means of automating labor-intensive storage management tasks of that kind as storage provisioning and information lifecycle management.

The massive influx of corporate data has caused many savvy end-user organizations to react strategically. Their strategies are based upon optimizing corporate data by ensuring it is always used to maximum benefit. That benefit is best achieved by the agency of the integration of secure access devices like thin clients with fabric-attached storage solutions like SAN and NAS.