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Economic Times Delhi, 05 January, 2009
Centralisation of servers will help emerging enterprises to protect their valuable information assets.
Information stored on laptops, personal computers and servers is a tangible asset that represents the unique value of a business. They appear to be small files but have a huge value attached to them since they are the 'intellectual property' of the organisation and they hold perhaps more important information than the transactional information such as database records. Sometimes, servers and disk drives are not appropriately placed and backup tapes are stowed in a locked drawer or cabinet. This puts the information of the enterprise at tremendous risk. Centralising the IT hardware is one of the best practices in IT administration, helping the company protect its information assets.
From the smallest to the largest enterprise, controlling access to data is important. A primary step to control is protecting the physical resources that hold sensitive information. If you can look into a window and see the computers, then someone else can as well. It is common for a business to lose a laptop, but imagine losing your servers not by wind, rain or fire, but by theft! Though it is an extremely unlikely scenario due to its size, this possibility should not be left to chance.
We are so busy thinking about complicated computer attacks, that we sometimes miss the obvious. A favourite story is of an office with big glass windows. Here, thieves broke in with a truck and stole the servers. In another case–a data centre with biometric access–thieves cut through the wall next to the door. Being in a hurry they cut through all of the cables, including the power cables (that must have been fun), tearing the equipment out quickly. In both cases, the equipment was never found, even though in the first case, the computers were police computers.
Protection is required beyond just the physical protection of hardware. The data that is lost is the actual asset. The cost of the lost hardware might be recoverable through the insurance agencies but what about the data which does not have a finite cost attached to it?
If you lost your equipment or data, you lose your critical information, what would happen to your business? Most businesses do not survive a disaster or a significant loss of data, because a business is not just people, process and product; it is information. A large number of companies never started again after the 9/11 disaster.
So, what is the way ahead? Centralise the information assets. The server technologies have grown enough to have blade servers consolidating your needs and drastically reducing your space. Power requirement is one of the finest solutions available. Virtualisation technologies further enhance the utilisation by allowing you to create and use multiple heterogeneous servers from the same single high performance hardware. To ensure high availability, clustering of virtual resources between two larger physical servers is very possible.
These servers can be accessed remotely from the desktops using a shared disk or through the application accessing the database. The servers can be accessed remotely for other management tasks as well.
Once you have picked a place to put the servers, you have to find the assets. You would think that to be easy, after all, a server is pretty big. After centralising the servers, the next big challenge is to centralise the disk resources: the actual place where the data resides. A common pool of disks, a large disk capacity server or a centralised storage based on the capacity and performance requirement would be ideal for this.
What may be less easily found are small network storage devices; but they are worth giving a thought. A small disk array directly connected to your server is an ideal choice for a small enterprise.
For a simple file server data, users can access a file server having a large number
of disks with their usage quotas (if required) and work on them. SMEs can plan their applications and databases from a single storage.
Implementing technologies like RAID and hot spare or redundant components further ensure that your applications and data are highly available and well protected.
In the current technological advancement, low cost network storages are available for centralisation. With the options of simultaneous low cost and good performance disks in the same box, SMEs have a wide range to choose from. SMEs can start with an entry level option and scale up as their business grows and matures to an enterprise level. Storage starting from 15 low cost, low performance disks have the capability of expanding up to hundreds of disks with a mix of low cost, low performance and high cost disks.
Centralisation of servers helps an SME achieve effective cost savings, power and space and management worries. The centralisation of applications, servers and data eases out numerous management tasks. Hence, backups become easier and smoother. To add to your safety, you might like to replicate your data to a secondary setup as well.
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