OK, so this is a little off the beaten track for IT Blog, but many of us work for small to medium sized businesses and we wall know that our systems get slow because of things like backup. What if there was a really clever tool that would archive any data that wasn't being used regularly automatically and free up your machine and the others on your network so that they could work faster? And what if that means that when the dreaded Friday night / 5 pm backup kicks in it whizzes through the small amount of active data left over rather than grinding both your system and the rest of te network to a halt whilst all data - whether in use or not is copied away? If you agree that's obviously a good thing read on...
When you archive data off from your fast local hard drive to another drive, it doesn't usually need to be as fast or therefore as expensive. This hierachy of storage is what the industry call
tiered storage management. What the IT industry also does is supply all kinds of wierd and wonderful solutions to manage your tiered storage, for example using servers and client software on each machine. These are often complex and use a database to record the location(s) and attributes (who owns it, read/write, dates etc) of data past and present and compression software to reduce the size of the data.
Clever clogs Enigma Data Solutions have an application called
SmartMove that works across Windows and Unix / Linux platforms to manage tiered storage. It enables storage administrators to regain control of spiralling data growth by providing tools to classify unstructured data and migration policies that can be tailored to the environment.
However, unlike competing products SmartMove does not try to take over your environment or get between your users and their data. Instead, it migrates your data to cheaper disk using open protocols and keeps the data accessible by using standard OS links (that's a shortcut in Windows or a Symlink in Linux) and retaining file & directory structures.
When these migrations are complete SmartMove is out of the data path, ie. it doesn't have to be running for your PC to access the archived data. SmartMove is a batch process, so once it has done its job for the week / day/ Month you and your programs can just access a file by following standard shortcuts.
Now that's better.
