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Storage Pipeline: Special Report: Ultimate Enterprise Storage: Page 3 of 6

Local mirroring--one RAID array duplicating the data on another--is also
critical to successful storage, as is remote mirroring--duplicating the data on
the RAID array off-site. Typically, a FCIP (Fibre Channel-to-IP) bridge is used
to transmit data off the SAN and onto an IP network at the remote site.

Solid-state memory is another component of an ideal enterprise storage
solution. An SSD (solid-state storage device) contains no spinning disks, just a
lot of fast memory. An SSD can be connected directly to a server or installed in
a SAN as a shared file-caching facility, providing the kind of ultrafast data
retrieval regular hard drives could never match.

Today's high-end SANs are based on 2-Gbps Fibre Channel technology. But
because Fibre Channel is not IP-based, mapping to WANs is difficult. SANs are
usually implemented as separate islands, with FCIP bridges enabling SAN-to-SAN
connectivity. The emerging iSCSI standard will eliminate the need for FCIP
bridges. iSCSI converts a SCSI stream to IP packets, transmits those packets
over a TCP/IP network, then converts them back to a SCSI stream at the receiving
end. Moreover, you can install gateways to allow access to Fibre Channel fabrics
via iFCP or iSCSI (Get more on iSCSI SANs).

If for any reason you can't or don't want to set up and manage your own
remote storage facility, you can contract with a service company like LiveVault
that will do the job for you for a fee. LiveVault partners with Iron Mountain
data centers to offer online server backup, off-site electronic vaulting and
data recovery. The data centers, which are housed in concrete, single-story,
steel-reinforced, earthquake-resistant vaults protected by steel doors and
state-of-the-art security systems, are guaranteed to be within three miles of
police and fire stations and far away from flood zones, fault lines, airline
flight paths and high-crime areas; they're also guaranteed to be nowhere near
any area that has been flooded within the past 500 years.

Smaller companies that find online backup cost-prohibitive should consider
the ever-economical DAT tape drive. DDS-4, the latest incarnation of DAT tape,
offers 20 GB of native capacity and 40 GB compressed, with a compressed transfer
rate of 6 Mbps. DDS-4 drives can read and write to DDS-2 and DDS-3 media. DDS-2
has a native capacity of 4 GB and compressed capacity of 8 GB, while DDS-3 has a
native capacity of 12 GB and a compressed capacity of 24 GB.