Imagine if you were the CTO or the head of IT infrastructure of a company. There may have been instances when you would have approached the CEO or CFO for budgetary allocation for purchasing data storage.

It is but natural that if you were asked about the present utilisation of disk storage, having done your homework, you would have replied that your utilisation is around 40-50 per cent and substantiated it with data.

Herein lays the catch. The CFO promptly tells you to try to optimise data storage usage to around 75-80 per cent and then return for funds. You would have returned thinking what you should do or have done.

Now, let us try to analyse plausible scenarios to demonstrate the basic reasons behind low storage utilisation, and the possible means for improving the same.

Scenario 1:

You have multiple, heterogeneous storage systems (SAN/NAS) of different make, model and age. They do not talk to each other. Each one has a good amount of stranded space which cannot be made use of.

Solution:

Today there are tools and appliances available to integrate and consolidate the SAN and NAS boxes and then deploy virtualisation managed by a single console. This will help you reallocate the total available space and reclaim the stranded space for use.

Scenario 2:

You have a large number of servers running Windows, Solaris and different flavours of Unix. Each server has a large amount of DAS (Direct attached storage) which are not accessible by any other server. The disks are of heterogeneous interfaces e.g. SCSI, SAS, SATA etc. cannot be consolidated together in one array or box.

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Solution:

We first need to know what spare capacity we have and where we have that. You may try mapping some shared drives or NFS mount across Unix platforms, but that’s not always productive. Today we have software available which will integrate new generation blade servers with FC SAN to old generation servers with DAS to give you a private cloud computing platform.

Scenario 3:

A project team owns the asset and is not agreeing to share the same. Initially they have allocated a certain amount of storage for the application/database, perhaps to take care of the business growth in five years. They have perhaps forgotten or never looked back, reviewed the usage, nor are they ready to share the disk space with any other application on the pretext of data security.

Solution:

You perhaps do not have a central support team having a storage resource monitoring tool to discover, manage and control the usage of storage .Perhaps your team has been a part of deliberate over provisioning of storage at the beginning of the project to avoid mid-term upgrades and Capex.

Here it is advisable to deploy an SRM management tool (open source tools available) and discourage over provisioning of disk space – use thin provisioning technology, which allows you to grow as you need. Charging back the project for disk space allotted will discourage over provisioning.

Scenario 4:

The storage may contain multiple copies of the same data (e.g. end user back-up for their mail files may have duplicate copies of attachments). This will result in in-effective use of storage.

Solution:

You may deploy de-duplication software (both at source and target level) to achieve efficiencies up-to 55 per cent in certain cases. This will also reduce back-up storage requirements, backup time, and operational costs for WAN replication. For back-up incremental backup instead of regular full backup will reduce storage requirements.

Scenario 5:

The projects do not have the discipline to cleanup storage space by:

(i) removing old unused files

(ii) archiving useful but old data appropriately

Solution:

Define a process for data clean-up on a regular basis. Identify useful data to be archived and use an archiving software to archive the data in lower tiered storage like NAS and Just a Box of Disks (JBODs).

Scenario 6:

In case you have the state–of-the-art storage boxes with FC and FCOE interfaces, and you want to further increase the utilisation, then a mix and match of thin provisioning, storage area virtualization, de-duplication can be deployed to enhance utilisation of the existing storage.

However, a word of caution! One should not go overboard with thin provisioning, as increase in thin provisioned storage may not be as smooth as it is claimed to be.

Shyamal Bhattacharya is the chief technology officer of PwC India. Currently he heads the Global Technology Solutions and Managed Services delivery team.Shyamal has three decades of diversified experience in system administration, architecture and design, infrastructure implementation, pre-sales support, security/IT disaster recovery, network monitoring and management (data, voice and video), infra security audit, ISO27000 implementation, and helpdesk/facility management projects.In the past, Shyamal has held varied positions in several IT companies, such as HCL Technologies, Tata Technologies and Tata Motors etc.He has contributed in helping organisations achieve their objectives through the strategic management of their technical infrastructure, launching and driving new IT initiatives and re-designing corporate infrastructures. He has also spearheaded ISO27001 responsibilities, managing teams on 230-250 performance metrics across 47 facilities.He is a recipient of several awards including the CIO 100 and Storage Giant awards. He is also a certified Information Security Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) and BS 7799/ISO27001 trained auditor (MIEL).He holds a bachelors degree in Technology from Jadavpur University.
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While computers help speed up the pace of work, they’re not completely without having difficulties. These machines have been identified to crash every now after which, and any unsaved company information could be erased in a blink of an eye. It’s important that you back up confidential information frequently. Make sure these are saved on possibly a disc or some sort of portable storage system as opposed to a hard drive. A much far better solution would be to keep every thing at an offsite document storage company. In the event your personal computer techniques go awry, any saved business information will not be deleted.

Sometimes human error will be the trigger for personal computer associated accidents in an office setting. Staff might forget to save documents or forget to duplicate their work. These people might also unintentionally open an unknown source e-mail letting loose virus that may wreak havoc on the entire network system. While coaching staff to save their tasks frequently is good, you need to also inform them about any company policy relating to anti-virus software program. A data protection Australia firm can come in and assist your business by maintaining important files at an offsite location.

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Having virus infected computers could be a hassle. You may need a specialist to enter and do a systems check, and that process solely can eat up useful company time. Not only that, lost information are difficult to recover so improving  your defences towards all sorts of viruses and malware is important. Choosing a data protection Australia company will probably be your greatest move. Data that have been saved for backup functions are useful in the event a virus gets into your pc and messes up everything.

Theft, on the other hand, is one thing that doesn’t cross one’s thoughts when it pertains to information storage. However, this could take place and it is most effective to be prepared. Thieves are usually on the prowl for high-tech office equipment and this is specifically what they target. It’s not so much the computers themselves, as most of these could be easily replaced, but the information saved within. One immediate solution would be to have an external hard drive or thumb drive on hand. Or you may just have a data protection Australia company take care of everything.

Last on the checklist are natural disasters and while these tend to be few and far between, global climate behaviour in the past couple of years have negated all that. The latest floods in Australia have shown that Mother Nature is indeed a force to be reckoned with. When disasters for example floods, earthquakes, cyclones, and fire occur, your office hardware and software will probably be at their mercy. It’s best to keep your information in a document storage facility that can guarantee its safety.

Lois Brown is looking for a reliable data protection Australia company that focuses on document storage.
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The web programmer has to be very careful while making a selection of the language. The framework should be such that it suits the financial capacity of the client, the ability of the language technically and also considering the overall requirement of the application to be developed. Certain things which should be considered while choosing a language by a web developer are what new things he/she needs to learn about the language and how to plan the learning, what toolset, libraries and frameworks support the programming language, and what are the plans for building the application.

ASP.NET and PHP are the two most extensively used programming languages for web designing and web development. Though nowadays websites can be designed and developed using various scripting languages in addition to these two such as Cold Fusion, Perl, JSP, etc. These web development languages can be specifically divided into two kinds of categories – open source languages and proprietary languages. Some details about some important and best programming languages have been discussed below to make it easier while taking this decision:

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1] PHP Programming Language: PHP language which is developed by some international community of users is an open source web development language. It offers many benefits like it is free open source software; it runs on various platforms such as Linux, UNIX, Windows and Apache; and many others. PHP is considered to be matured language compared to others though it is a younger language than Perl. Some cons involved with this open source language are it lacks event based error handling which means that the workflow of yours can be interrupted if suddenly you jump to a special error handling section and it lacks case sensitivity for the function names.

2] ASP.NET Development Language: ASP.NET is more flexible language comparatively and works properly with both scripting languages like VBScript, Jscript, etc and the compiled ones like VBScript, C, COBOL, etc. Some disadvantages about ASP.NET are it is comparatively slow than the other languages in certain actions and execution of certain operations and secondly it is little complicated in its nature. The framework .NET supports major number of programming languages such as ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, C++, etc and it also also good support from Microsoft.

3] Perl: It is an open source language which is both powerful as well as matured. Perl has a quality of offering web developers every necessary tool which is needed for the purpose of creating dynamic web pages for a website. Like every other open source language it offers all benefits and it is considered particularly nice option for building single websites quickly, cleanly and elegantly. The drawback with this is it can be complicated unnecessarily with its wide variety of syntaxes.

4] JSP: JAVA Server Pages is an open source scripting language too which is supported by Oracle and so web developers can use JDeveloper to build web pages. This can be accomplished without much knowledge of Java language, it is also extensible and has integrated the Java Server Pages Standard Tag Library [JSTL] expression language and supports all its functions. The only disadvantage with it is there is no XML-complaint version of JSP comments which enforce developers to use client side, HTML/XML style comments.

Open source Web Development is a developing company which provides services of web development, web designing and open source developments with a team of highly qualified and experienced web developers.
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Website development was never an easy task but now with the availability of CMS solutions, it has now become much easier. Open source is giving a push to CMS into the hands of developers and organizations that were previously unable or used to feel unwilling to use CMS.

Open source CMS software like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are easy to use as we don’t need much programming skills to make general updates or changes. Some benefits and usefulness offered by these open source CMS are being discussed below:

1] There is no proprietary licensing fee which doesn’t mean that the open source will be free. You will be definitely be paying for the development fees of your website but the licensing fees required to use your CMS will not be paid on top of the programming charges.

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2] With open source software it is possible to customize page titles, META descriptions, SEO friendly URLs, and permalinks to support your SEO goals.

3] Open source CMS can easily accommodate the additional new content, additional services offered with the growth of the business or if additional features are to be added in the website with the growth of the firm or organization. Moreover, open source CMS has proved themselves as the most secured and safe platform for the online storage, display and distribution of websites.

4] You can add text or you can even upload media files directly from your browser. So if you working from your home or using your laptop, the browser-based administration makes it simple to be updated.

5] Open source CMS are customizable that is it offers a variety of modules for everything from the custom social networking sites and document management to forums and ecommerce to provide you unlimited functionalities. It also provide free and unlimited access to the source code and also free license to control and alter that code only if the end result is also available for free.

6] Any proprietary open source CMS when developed it is developed by limited number of programmers as no company has much resources to match the developer community that supports open source so the software is of high quality. Also, numerous developers constantly try to improve the software which makes the code of open sources more stable.

7] Open sources are supported by the vast, passionate and experienced group of developers community. So if anything goes wrong with your website it will be easy for you to find a developer who can help you to resolve the problem.

8] The popular Content Management systems offer free online support in the form of technical support forums and extensive tutorials.

Because of these above discussed benefits and functionalities offered by open source content management systems most of the people prefer it to develop their websites, blogs or ecommerce sites.

Open source Web Development is a developing company which provides services of web development, web designing and open source developments with a team of highly qualified and experienced web developers.
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