Clustering provides massive throughput because of an increased port count that comes from cobbling many storage servers together into a single pool of disks and processors, all working on a similar task and all able to share the same data. Management functions are distributed across the storage server farm. To an application server, the farm looks like a single, block-level storage system. Storage capacity can be added without disrupting applications running on the cluster.
"Back up to disk, archive to tape." That, says Michael Peterson, a senior analyst with Strategic Research Corp., has become the mantra for storage backup.
EMC Corp. launched a midrange Fibre Channel storage array Monday for departments and workgroups within enterprises, which starts at a price that is affordable by most customers.
Startup SANgate Systems Inc. has announced the first of its data migration products, which migrate open systems and mainframe storage data from one vendor