Windows Server Storage

As organizations look to combine their processing workloads onto a smaller number of servers, they must not only consider the new servers’ ability to handle increased processing load and achieve higher levels of availability: individual servers must also be able to store larger amounts of data. Although there may be opportunities to eliminate some redundant data, it is likely that the new combined storage requirements will overwhelm architectures where storage is directly attached to individual servers. Organizations looking to consolidate should investigate the networked storage options presented by storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS) devices.

Limitations of Direct-Attached Storage

Current direct-attached storage (DAS) devices-that is, disk drives connected directly to and used exclusively by a single computer-simply cannot scale up to terabytes of storage, as is sometimes required for large databases, such as one that contains point-of-sale history data. With DAS, unused capacity cannot easily be shifted to other servers that need additional storage. When a storage volume needs to grow larger, it usually requires backing up the volume to tape, adding or replacing disk drives, reformatting the disks, and then restoring the data. This is labor-intensive and takes the server out of service for an extended period, and to compensate for the problem, there is a tendency to overallocate storage.