Industry Comment
Industry Comment
In the first of our new series, IDM seeks the inside opinion of major players. Graham Schultz talks candidly about the issues and solutions relating to remote branch offices.
The remote branch office has often been referred to as the “wild frontier” of IT organizations - an uncharted territory best left to the adventurous. Australia is no exception to this scenario and in many cases suffers even more, due to the vast geographical distances between cities. There are an estimated 4 million branch offices world wide and many thousands in Australia. Most of these branch offices have at least 1 file server with storage that needs to be managed and backed up, presenting a significant challenge. This problem is continuing to grow due to the estimated 100% annual growth of these remote servers and storage.
It is estimated that in many organizations, as much as 50% to 75% of their data may exist unprotected at the “edge” locations. Companies also know that their file servers and related storage management expenses at remote locations represent a significantly higher percentage of their overall IT budget than they do for their centralized data centre budget. Poor remote office utilisation rates and duplicate purchases for each remote location are key culprits in the hidden costs of decentralised storage.
Any communications over long distances between the edge and the data centre will be submitted to the laws of physics that dictate the time taken for electrical signals to travel from point to point. This delay is known as latency or more infamously the “tyranny of distance”! It has therefore been realised that by pulling these remote resources back to the data centre, a significant ROI gain is readily achievable.
Many organisations are caught in the middle of conflicting objectives, namely the increasingly real-time information sharing requirements of the business and the need to reduce burgeoning storage and server administration costs to improve profitability. Solutions that have previously attempted to address one of these goals inevitably compromise the other. Personal accountability and heavy penalties for business compliance is now driving executives to seriously examine where the company data resides and how it is protected. Current backup technologies and practices, such as procedural guidelines, replication, and deployment of standalone backup hardware, suffer from performance, scalability, and manageability limitations.
Close To The Edge
Technologies that can provide “LAN-like” access and performance over the WAN have been discussed for years, but to date has been unable to deliver on the expectations. However, with the introduction of Wide Area File Services (WAFS) technology, companies can now realise impressive direct cost savings through server and storage consolidation as well as indirect cost savings through administrative efficiencies, while providing real-time backup and data protection for remote sites.
This technology delivers supercharged global file sharing performance, so that users at remote sites become first-class citizens of the worldwide network, and are able to share information justas easily as if they were located at corporate headquarters. New data created by remote users will automatically reside in the datacenter when it is created, and a 20 year-old problem is solved without adding incremental management costs or disciplines.
Companies facing theses challenges will typically deploy a Core Appliance at the Data Centre and an Edge Appliance at the remote sites. This transparently creates a coherent, global file sharing environment that leverages existing storage and security infrastructures. From the local user’s perspective, the Edge Appliance appears as a file server, providing access to shared files using standard file sharing protocols like CIFS (for Windows) and NFS (for Unix).
No changes need to be made to the client computers on the LAN. After its initial configuration, the Edge Appliance requires no further administration, backup or management of any kind. It is completely managed, monitored, and provisioned remotely. At the central site the Core Appliance coordinates remote access to the enterprise’s consolidated storage resources and makes real-time global file sharing possible by providing multi-site coherency, enabling all locations to access the same, complete data set. As more and more Australian organisations become familiar with the financial, operational and compliance benefits of these solutions we expect to see a dramatic shift in the way file data is delivered to the “edge enterprise”.About Graham Schultz
Graham Schultz has more than 20 years experience in the IT industry including - including nine years in the storage market. This includes his role on the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) ANZ board. He holds an International Masters in Management in Marketing Management Damelin School of Business and Management in Southern Africa.
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