Enterprise storage

In computing, an enterprise storage is the computer storage designed for large-scale, high-technology environments of the modern enterprises. When comparing to the consumer storage, it has higher scalability, higher reliability, better fault tolerance, and much higher initial price.

From the salesperson's point of view, the four main enterprise storage markets are:

• Online storage - large disk array solutions, minimizing access time to the data, and maximizing reliability;
• Backup - off-line storage for data protection, with a smaller price per byte than online storage, but at a cost of higher average access time; often uses sequential access storage, such as tape libraries;
• Archiving - technically similar to backup, but its purpose is long-term retention, management, and discovery of fixed-content data to meet regulatory compliance, litigation protection, and storage cost optimization objectives;
• Disaster recovery solutions, used to protect the data from localized disasters, usually being a vital part of broader business continuity plan.

The enterprise storage industry includes conferences (Storage Decisions, Storage Networking World, etc.), publications (Storage Magazine, InfoStor, etc.), and companies (Iron Mountain, EMC, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Symantec/Veritas Software, etc).

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