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One of the biggest issues confronting many organisations today is the exponential growth in data generated by databases, mobile applications, smartphones and other client devices, as well as social media. Organisations, including SMBs, have to manage and secure more data than ever before. In addition, the data must be available 24/7 to maximise productivity and deliver real value. There are a number of technologies available today that can help SMBs achieve these goals without breaking the bank.

DATA PROTECTION
As data becomes increasingly significant to SMBs, the need to ensure it is adequately protected becomes more and more important. Many SMBs use DAS (direct attached storage) in their data centres because it is easy to implement and to manage. Compared to more complex solutions like NAS (network attached storage) and SAN (storage area networks), it is also a lot more affordable.

To scale up their storage, many rely on RAID, which enables organisations to choose the performance, data redundancy, availability, cost and storage capacity appropriate to the criticality of the data. Hardware RAID, based on a dedicated storage controller, can deliver superior storage performance. The return on investment (ROI) with hardware RAID can also be much higher since the host compute resources are free to conduct other lines of business tasks.

RAID storage controllers are designed to meet critical requirements for RAID data protection and server storage ROI. For example, RAID controllers can support a wide range of RAID levels including RAID 6, RAID 50 and RAID 60 to accommodate growing business needs of data protection.

HIGH AVAILABILITY
A modern data centre is the centrepiece of many organisations, housing all the data services and applications that employees need to be successful. It is crucial that everything can be kept up and running because ready, reliable access to growing volumes of critical data for business agility and competitive advantage has become a fundamental requirement for businesses of all sizes. This has driven the demand for fast, high-availability, easy-to-scale server storage.

But SMBs have struggled to achieve this objective because it has been very difficult, if not impossible, to deliver high availability in a DAS environment. Single-node servers and DAS are easy to scale because all SMBs have to do is add more servers and more storage. But because stored data is not shared, they fail to address high-availability (HA) access to data or deliver critical application uptime.

Upgrading to a more complex and costly SAN (storage area network) is prohibitively expensive for many SMBs. High-availability storage deployments based on SANs with high-end Fibre Channel connections require specialised IT staff and considerable budgets to procure and manage them.

Solutions are now available that change this dynamic by enabling SMB environments to have fully redundant server/storage configurations without requiring costly or complicated failover provision and SANs.

One cost-effective alternative to traditional clustered systems is to use a small form factor server cluster with failover and inexpensive, scalable storage. Such systems offer failover for planned and unplanned outages to help ensure high availability of critical applications. They also feature manual and automatic failover and modular, hot-swappable components to reduce support requirements while maximising uptime.

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