what I teach -- EMC Symmetrix Business Continuity...
I wrote this for my business website, www.seashell-software.com.
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When it comes to storage systems, we've created Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Your average home computer has between 100 and 300 Gigabytes of storage. In enterprise-level data centers (the kind of operation a large bank, health care company, etc., would have), they measure the size of storage in Terabytes and Petabytes. It's easy to assemble enough hard drives to make these massive storage arrays, but what happens when something goes wrong?
That's where the concept of "Business Continuity" comes in. When a company makes the decision to buy an enterprise-level storage array from EMC, that means they're purchasing a "Symmetrix" model. These are huge racks of disk drives--we're talking about racks the size of your refrigerator, and up to five of then next to each other.
You just can't back all the data these storage arrays can hold to tapes because it just takes too long. One terrabyte (one trillion bytes) of data will take 10-12 hours to back up. That's way too long of a window of vulnerability for many businesses, so they'll buy double the drive storage they need and copy their data from the working copy to a backup set in the disk system. If something goes wrong, they can just push the data back onto the production drives. In the EMC world, the product that does this is called TimeFinder.
Backing up hard drives in a data center is just one component of Business Continuity. Companies also have to protect their data from major disasters, the kinds of things that wipe out offices (fires, tornados, etc.), or sometimes even cities (hurricanes). A company with offices downtown might set up a "bunker" site in the suburbs, link the two sites together with fiber-optic communications equipment, and copy their data from the main office to the bunker. Some companies go a step further and will set up a remote site hundreds of miles away. EMC users implement SRDF - Symmetrix Remote Data Facility - to do this.
The Symmetrix Business Continuity class consists of two days of working with TimeFinder and three days of SRDF. The course runs through the theory behind the products and breaks down the operations to the command line. The students for classes like this are usually very experienced storage networking professionals--it's not a class for amateurs!
.
When it comes to storage systems, we've created Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Your average home computer has between 100 and 300 Gigabytes of storage. In enterprise-level data centers (the kind of operation a large bank, health care company, etc., would have), they measure the size of storage in Terabytes and Petabytes. It's easy to assemble enough hard drives to make these massive storage arrays, but what happens when something goes wrong?
That's where the concept of "Business Continuity" comes in. When a company makes the decision to buy an enterprise-level storage array from EMC, that means they're purchasing a "Symmetrix" model. These are huge racks of disk drives--we're talking about racks the size of your refrigerator, and up to five of then next to each other.
You just can't back all the data these storage arrays can hold to tapes because it just takes too long. One terrabyte (one trillion bytes) of data will take 10-12 hours to back up. That's way too long of a window of vulnerability for many businesses, so they'll buy double the drive storage they need and copy their data from the working copy to a backup set in the disk system. If something goes wrong, they can just push the data back onto the production drives. In the EMC world, the product that does this is called TimeFinder.
Backing up hard drives in a data center is just one component of Business Continuity. Companies also have to protect their data from major disasters, the kinds of things that wipe out offices (fires, tornados, etc.), or sometimes even cities (hurricanes). A company with offices downtown might set up a "bunker" site in the suburbs, link the two sites together with fiber-optic communications equipment, and copy their data from the main office to the bunker. Some companies go a step further and will set up a remote site hundreds of miles away. EMC users implement SRDF - Symmetrix Remote Data Facility - to do this.
The Symmetrix Business Continuity class consists of two days of working with TimeFinder and three days of SRDF. The course runs through the theory behind the products and breaks down the operations to the command line. The students for classes like this are usually very experienced storage networking professionals--it's not a class for amateurs!