Technology Overview of Sun StorEdge™

To succeed in today's open and ultra-competitive marketplace, you need an agile, secure IT environment that enables you to quickly, efficiently, and securely respond to business opportunities. Sun StorEdge™ solutions are built on open standards to work with your existing infrastructure, and will help your company increase data's role as a strategic asset.

Benefits of Sun StorEdge™ Solutions

Growing companies, especially those opening new offices, can take advantage of Sun StorEdge™ Solutions that are highly secure, flexible, and built to be compatible with future technologies.

• One Device, Multiple Functions: An integrated services network router enables organizations to take advantage of numerous built-in technologies such as voice, wireless, and advanced security systems while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) prioritization their network applications demand. Because the network services are built in or can be easily added to the integrated services network router, companies can install one sophisticated device rather than purchase separate products to provide each individual function.
• Same Access at Headquarters and Remote Sites: An integrated services network router gives all workers—even those at branch offices or remote sites such as a home or hotel room—the same access to business applications, unified communications, and videoconferencing. Modular solutions allow you to install the features you need for a particular office, and upgrade equipment when needs change or an office expands.
• Centralized Management: An integrated services network router approach means technical staff at headquarters can manage the network from a central location. This allows technical departments to allocate resources to priority projects while providing reliable service to employees in all locations.
• Integrated Network Security: An integrated services network router, with its systems approach, allows companies to transfer responsibility for security and reliability from individual computers and users to the network itself. This helps protect companies from the influx of viruses, malicious code, and other infections that end users’ laptops might unknowingly acquire.

By installing a complete solution and managing it centrally, companies can protect valuable corporate data using multiple types of protection, such as encryption, firewall filtering, antivirus protection, and intrusion detection and prevention.

The Benefits of Sun StorEdge™

A new approach to archiving is needed to serve the business needs for use (and reuse/ repurposing) of archived data. Archives saved without significant attention to retrieval capabilities are often difficult to access. An approach that supports using the archived information to drive business value is needed. We call this “intelligent archiving” — archiving optimized for business value. The basic requirements of intelligent archiving include:

• Capture — The sheer amount of data being captured implies that capture operations must be managed cost-effectively.
• Manage — Data volumes and IT cost-containment efforts drive a focus on costeffective and automated management of archives.
• Use — Enabling access to archive data via content-based access is critical to achieving business value. It is in fact, the only real source of business value from archived data. Simply put, archive data has business value upon use (or reuse/ repurposing). Capturing it and managing it without using it are somewhat useless tasks and expenditures.

The Value of Used Sun StorEdge™

To succeed in today's open and ultra-competitive marketplace, you need an agile, secure IT environment that enables you to quickly, efficiently, and securely respond to business opportunities. Sun storage solutions are built on open standards to work with your existing infrastructure, and will help your company increase data's role as a strategic asset.

Archived data is a significant majority of the data stored by most organizations. Some estimates place archive data at five to eight times active working data (including the data protection copies of both data types).5 Several different assessments of “archived” data put the range of archive data from 20 to 30 exabytes, mostly depending on what’s being counted. In any event, the amount of archive data is huge and is growing fairly fast, in the range of 30% to 50% annually.

Certainly archives contain copies. It seems fairly safe to assume that the 20 to 30 exabytes of data represent no more than 10 to 20 exabytes of information and are probably on the lower range of those numbers. The interesting question is, “What portion of that has business value?”

Some organizations have a good handle on their archives, having built them with use in mind. Others have been keeping data without a clear vision of its importance or potential use.