Introduction

The concept of shared storage is implied in an asset management system. The shared storage will comprise a number of devices: disks, tape and optical, and a management system to present a unified view to the high-level applications. Shared storage can be viewed in the physical or business domain. The former is about the disk and tape drives that has been covered in the last two chapters. The business view is concerned with return on investment and the total cost of ownership.

Storage management has to provide many facilities to the enterprise in addition to the basic role of a central file repository:

• Fast access

• High throughput

• Wide-area file distribution

• Backup

• Archive

• Disaster recovery.

Fast access is important to the user. If they want to view an asset, they should not have to wait. Few businesses can afford to store all their assets online, so access time has to be a compromise. High throughput may well be an issue if the asset management has to ingest high volumes of video content. A television broadcaster who proves news or sports content may have tens of simultaneous video feeds to be indexed and filed to the repository. This can be testing for the network architecture and storage device technology.

In the enterprise with multiple sites, the storage system will have to extend over wide-area networks (WANs). Issues of latency and cost will restrict what is possible when compared with a single local system.

Backup to cope with loss of files through...