Data Center and IT Services
SCI provides IT services focusing on data storage and associated areas of business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR), data protection/backup and virtualization services for data centers and service providers. Specifically,
Network attached storage (NAS) appliance, storage area network (SAN) storage, and direct accessed storage (DAS) planning, design, and selection: assists data centers acquire block and file storage, supports iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN and/or NAS RFP or RPQ processes; facilitates the planing, design and selection of all external storage/storage network infrastructure, NAS systems and iSCSI or FC SAN storage subsystems for your data center.
NAS, SAN, and/or DAS storage consolidation: helping you combine isolated NAS file systems, iSCSI or FC SAN storage subsystems and/or SAS and SATA accesed DAS storage into fewer and more manageable storage appliances. For additional information on this service please see our Storage Magazine article on NAS Consolidation Options. Also for an in depth briefing and tutorial on using NAS and/or SAN storage software and technology as well as full NAS and SAN storage performance rankings please see our NAS or SAN Storage StorIntTM briefings.
Data protection i.e, backup, restore and recovery planning, selection and tuning: assisting in data backup system acquisition, RFP and RPQ processes; helping IT design, choose and tune data protection and/or backup architectures, online backup software, cloud backup, backup systems, backup server, disk and/or tape backup storage devices, offsite backup storage to meet your data center’s recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).
BC/DR plan, design, assessment and testing: helping you define IT’s business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities needed to support data center recovery point and recovery time objectives, helping to classify your data/applications by criticality, to choose offsite storage for data replication and/or mirroring services, to audit IT BC/DR planning for your data center, and to test/validate data center BC/DR activities. For ideas on planning for DR, please see our Successful DR Testing and Virtual DR presentations and/or other articles in our document archive. For more on the topics listen to our RPO and RTO and Data classification podcasts.
iSCSI/FC SAN storage and NAS system performance tuning, tutorial and benchmarking: helping you select storage features/functions that can help optimize data center performance, how to configure your storage for the best performance, and to maintain storage performance over asset life. For a complete briefing on storage array performance and performance ranking please review our iSCSI and FC SAN Storage StorIntTM briefing. Also please see our article Pump Up Array Performance article, presentation, or podcast series for your review. Finally, we report on a number of standard online storage performance benchmarks such as block or iSCSI/FC SAN, NFS and CIFS and Exchange storage performance in our dispatch directory.
Storage virtualization planning, design and selection: helping IT plan for, design and choose storage virtualization solutions that fit your data center storage needs. For a view on user experience with storage virtualization products read our Storage magazine cover article on Storage Virtualization – Tales from the Trenches.
For IT service customers we provide storage strategic consulting services and for coverage of major storage announcements and new benchmark results highlights in our StorIntTM Dispatches also available in our free monthly newsletter. To subscribe send us an email.
For more information check out our blog at RayOnStorage.com or follow us on Twitter @RayLucchesi
Some popular blog posts for data centers:
- Cloud storage gateways surface
- Database appliances!?
- Storage throughput vs. IO response time and why it matters
