Chapter List

Overview

What This Chapter Will Do For You

This chapter points out various threats that can impact the availability of data and the subsequent need for resilient, flexible, and scalable storage access infrastructures for enterprise and Small Medium Business (SMB) environments. Some of the items you will learn about in this chapter include:

• Critical understanding of threats that impact data availability

• Important applications that are contributing to the growth of storage

• Information life cycle management can help reduce storage management costs

• Distance and flexibility are critical to maintain data accessibility and resiliency

1.1 Overview

The following sayings might be familiar regarding how you handle data stored in computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and other technologies:

This is important so I better keep it in case I need it.

I know I put it somewhere; I just cannot seem to find where I put it.

I just got rid of that last week; I knew I should have kept it.

It takes too much time to perform spring cleaning; I will simply buy more storage.

These sayings also apply to how you handle traditional information documents, files, folders, and items of importance at home. This chapter looks at the importance of information today and why it needs to be kept available and accessible. There is no doubt the amount of information being created and stored continues to grow at increasing rates each year. This is a trend that is...