• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

HP StorageWorks Optical Storage A buyer’s guide to understanding and evaluating Optical Storage “Knowledge is power.” —Francis Bacon Storage 101: A beginning problem is especially acute in the service sector, imaging environments, customer service departments and other In the Information Age, information is like environments that maintain account information online. any other product. And while you continue to need more and more storage It’s bought and bartered every day. It differentiates space, you also need instant access to that data. In other successful companies from marginal ones. It forms the words, it’s not enough to find a place to put it; you have foundation of every successful enterprise. And when it’s to put it where you can get it back quickly. transformed from its raw state into intellectual property, Where to put it its value soars beyond calculation. There are four broad categories of data storage. Like any other strategic asset, information must be Depending on the sensitivity of data, number of data protected from loss, corruption and theft. But how? users, frequency of access and your storage budget, you might use one or all of these strategies in your company. This primer is an important first step in evaluating and understanding your options in storage, especially optical • Online storage storage. It explores the challenges of data proliferation, High performance, mid-range to high cost compares various approaches to data protection, and An image or document is considered online when you outlines specific optical technologies that help address the can access it instantly and automatically, without human challenges of data storage in the information age. intervention. Online storage consists primarily of hard disks, where most of today’s corporate information is No single document has all the answers. But with stored. Much of the information stored online is this primer, you can begin to evaluate your options reference data. It has significant value to your enterprise in optical storage, and understand how today’s even though it’s viewed only occasionally. Some technology can protect your company’s most valuable estimates suggest that about 20 percent of all data kept asset into the future. on hard disks is actively used; the other 80 percent is only occasionally used. Although much of this Dealing with data in the information could be moved to lower cost (and lower Information Age performance) storage alternatives, it’s left on hard disks because it’s hard to predict what you’ll need and when. Information overload Online storage can be expensive. New forms of disk Remember the one-gigabyte hard disk? A true storage are appearing with lower hardware costs, but breakthrough in its day, it’s now virtually obsolete. overall total solution costs can be high. These days, PCs need that much space just for a few e-mails and their attachments. • Nearline storage High performance, mid-range cost The fact is, storage requirements are expanding and the One step removed from online storage, nearline storage pace of data accumulation is speeding up. Increased is typically accessed quickly and automatically, in Internet use, data mining, database access, e-mail traffic seconds versus milliseconds, and without human and other everyday applications are contributing to intervention. Jukeboxes and autoloaders using optical information overload on networks worldwide. The 1 or magnetic tape media are considered nearline share corporate information. The reasons are clear: storage. Companies often use these devices as a data interchange isn’t an issue; they require little or no complement to online storage. Nearline storage is hardware; and you can access them well into the future. often found in enterprises with huge amounts of Unfortunately, retrieval is painfully slow, filing isn’t reference data that’s stored for long periods of time, always reliable, files are easily lost or misplaced, and and requires easy access. For example, companies data sharing gets more difficult as the world becomes needing infrequent and unpredictable access to CAD increasingly digital and work environments more drawings, invoices, title documents, insurance records, geographically dispersed. customer service records and transaction histories might choose nearline storage to economically extend online Three basics of storage storage. Nearline storage holds stored information No matter what combination of storage strategies you permanently and safely. choose, three basics must be met. • Offline storage • Industry standards Mid to low performance, low cost The data you store today must be readable in the future. As the name implies, offline storage refers to data That’s what industry standards are all about. If you store maintained offline, requiring human intervention data on optical disks or magnetic tape, make sure you whenever files are requested. Offline storage generally use formats that are supported by ECMA, ISO, IEC or refers to removable disks or tapes that can be shelved OSTA. These industry consortiums define standards for long-term storage or disaster recovery. This strategy for hardware, data interchange, media and write offers a partial solution to information overload. Data procedures. They help protect your data by making that’s not actively used, or data that’s so sensitive it sure that the data you store today is readable in the requires duplicate backup in a remote location can be future. They also help protect your budget by letting removed from the operating environment and stored you choose systems and media from a variety of offline, sometimes even off-site. Documents that must vendors, so you’re not locked into using a vendor meet regulatory, legal or audit requirements fit offline with proprietary technology. storage criteria, especially when there’s little value in • Accessibility storing the data online. Offline storage is extremely Few people calculate the cost of downtime. But minutes safe. But retrieving or sharing information involves a or hours of downtime add up to tens or hundreds of service request and a restore operation. These thousands of dollars per year in lost productivity, lost sometimes take hours or days. However, with proper revenue, and increased expenses. Plus, you have a right indexing, you can reliably locate data, and when disks to expect access. You expect to be able to store and or tapes are reinserted in the storage system, files are retrieve data quickly, and share and distribute it freely. restored fairly quickly. Any storage solution—especially a storage solution for • Human-readable document storage an increasingly digital and interconnected world—must Lowest performance, lowest cost store data within easy reach, and keep it online virtually Primarily paper and microfilm, human-readable around the clock. documents are still the most common ways to store and 2 • Data protection Recording methods If information is important enough to be stored, Many drives record data by putting marks on a disk’s then it’s important enough to be stored accurately. recording layer: CD, DVD and Ultra Density Optical If you’re a data user, you expect complete accuracy (UDO). A finished disk contains non-marked areas, and protection from loss. When the inevitable disaster indicated by marks and spaces. Each mark or space happens—facility damage, virus infection, system crash represents one bit of data. Marks are non-reflective, or operator error—you count on data being restored spaces are reflective. Since they reflect light differently, quickly. In fact, the only reason to back up important the laser reads the recording surface and translate data in the first place is so you can restore it accurately recorded data into 1s and 0s. when you need it. This means any storage solution Magneto-Optical (MO) technology takes a different you choose should include built-in utilities for data approach. Instead of reading the intensity of reflected protection, overwrite protection, error-checking, and light, an MO drive reads the direction of reflected light. disaster recovery. The recording surface of an MO disk is magnetic, much like a common hard disk. To record data, a laser heats a Your options in optical storage tiny spot on the disk directly above the recording layer. How it works When the spot on the disk’s recording layer reaches a Optical drives, in general, read data by bouncing a laser certain temperature, a magnet manipulates the data, beam off the recording layer of an optical disk and moving the recording material in one of two directions. registering differences in how the light is reflected. Each direction reflects light differently and allows a The read-write head contains a laser, mirrors, and lenses low-power laser to read the reflections, and then translate to send and receive the reflected light. As the head moves what it sees into 1s and 0s. Unlike other technologies, over the disk, it focuses its laser on the disk’s data layer the MO recording method and MO media support a and converts reflections into the 1s and 0s of digital data. limitless number of rewrites, with a media shelf life of at All optical drives read data in a similar way. But different least 100 years. technologies use different methods to record data. 3 The technologies 2. Rewritable optical Optical drives and jukeboxes aren’t used as widely as Rewritable optical drives not only read, but also write hard disks, microfilm readers or file cabinets. But data to optical disks. Unlike WORM disks, a rewritable computing environments around the world are using optical disk can be erased and rewritten many times, just them more and more, especially as the importance like a hard disk. Three common technologies comprise the and quantity of corporate information grows. Optical rewritable optical arena. storage is designed for our increasingly digital world. We • CD and DVD products represent a popular consumer need to safely store, globally share and instantly access application of rewritable optical technology.

Load more

  20

Copy Link