Organisations have traditionally viewed growing data storage requirements from a hardware perspective; simply adding additional storage servers as the number of applications and amount of data grows on a modular basis. However, even though the storage capacity of hardware has kept pace with demand, this modular or direct attached storage approach has led to server proliferation and spiralling management costs. The result is that businesses struggle with expanding data stores, as each application creates its own island of information, and the more data and servers each organisation has the more difficult this becomes to back-up and manage. These issues magnify when trying to scale or share data, issues which organisations increasingly face when trying to keep up with the raft of regulations being enforced regarding storage and management of data.
The proposed answer is often the implementation of a shared storage infrastructure, either via a SAN or a NAS. However, these networked storage environments are expensive and complex to set-up with high capital expenditure often exacerbated by the purchase of excess capacity to deal with potential data growth. New skills and operational processes are also required for organisations to implement and manage the new technologies, and this can be both costly and time consuming.
Advanced 365 offer managed storage capability to customers based on our world class storage infrastructure located within our data centres. The service provides secure physical storage capacity for customers at a fixed price per terabyte per month, charged monthly in arrears and based on the provisioned physical capacity at the end of the month.
The Advanced 365 storage infrastructure is highly resilient and can be configured for remote data replication, either to an alternate Advanced 365 data centre or the customer premises. Within the storage environment, Advanced 365 will configure RAID options based on customer requirement.
The managed storage offering is priced on two components: the number of ports occupied on the storage fabric and the amount of physical storage presented to the server(s). Assuming that devices attached to the storage are dual path for resilience, the number of ports is represented by the number of physical servers x 2. Physical storage capacity is offered in increments of 1 terabyte.
The managed storage offer includes monthly reporting on the number of switch fabric ports used and the volume of physical storage provisioned in increments of 1 terabyte or part thereof. A Managed Backup Service can be provided as an option to our customers.
Advanced 365 will provision, on demand, additional storage capacity in multiples of 1Tb.
The advantages of the Advanced 365 Managed Storage service include:
Advanced 365 take responsibility for the provisioning, maintenance and remediation of any issues relating to the storage environment, including hardware and firmware patching and upgrades
