XPress and Network Storage

IT storage requirements are doubling every year. Storage costs represent 3/4 of every dollar spent on IT. No longer is just the sheer exponential increase in data volume like email attachments and images that need storage, there will also be a corresponding amount of metadata that will similarly need to be stored and readily accessed across network boundaries.

Out of this growth scenario, specific needs emerge critical to the adoption and growth of storage networks:

  1. To find, add, delete, or update data objects quickly and transparently among storage devices across a network as if they were local
  2. To scale according to growth, as the number of data objects increases exponentially
  3. To provide a global view and instant object addressing across both Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks(SAN) as if they were converged into a single storage network.

This growth scenario also means regular backups to protect the ever-increasing gigabytes and terabytes of storage, thus further taxing today’s storage network’s backup performance, scalability, and recoverability.

Today, a typical backup implementation involves the use of indexes and index management tasks within a large, monolithic relational database for each backup client. This database grows and shrinks as storage data are added and deleted. Over time, space management within the database becomes less and less efficient, thus requiring index compression to streamline data management. Unfortunately, index compression is an expensive and a very time-consuming process.

Clearly, this kind of a backup architecture does not scale and cannot recover accordingly with the exponential growth in storage demand in tomorrow's storage networks.

XPress XSN Supports Tomorrow's Backend Database Requirements - Today

Such needs can be all reduced to a storage network's ability to locate network-wide objects with performance, transparency, scalability, and resiliency. XPress XSN can provide just such association management of object names to their storage location values. Users no longer need to remember complicated directory, sub-directory, and disk volume information in order to find a specific file in this storage network. Network and database administrators do not have to run time-consuming and disruptive index compression regularly.

When files are accessed frequently, they can be moved to closer network caches to optimize data transfer time. Given the throughput performance and fault-tolerance of XPress, the system of the storage network can be updated almost at wire speed to provide up-to-date storage location information: where to access files, from which caches.

See Product.