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Managing data at the edge: taming the 'wild frontier' of remote or branch office data.

Article Excerpt
One of the last things an IT administrator wants to hear is that "the network" is running slow. Seen as a barometer of the overall quality of IT services, fast access to application and file data has become such a user requirement in most enterprise organizations that even a few seconds' delay in opening a file or application can be enough to generate new calls into support.

Thankfully, high-speed, high-availability networks and fast-moving networked storage architectures tend to minimize the risk of excessive user access delays for today's corporate data center. Likewise, initiatives to consolidate and centralize server and storage resources have resulted in not just better access to files and applications, but also a better way for IT to centrally control, monitor, secure and protect the data under its care.

The evolution of networked storage architectures capable of transmitting data quickly in a core/edge topology has done much to hasten speed of application data delivery out to even the far corners of the corporate network.

As data centers continue to mature in their adoption of best practices for centralized, controlled data delivery within the walls of their corporate headquarters, their efforts have begun to turn to the problem child of many IT environments: The growing league of remote, geographically dispersed offices that now represent the data center's ever-widening "edge."

Problems at the Wild Frontier

In a recent Storage World Conference session on remote branch office challenges, Taneja Group founder Arun Taneja gave some indication of the scope of the problem now facing IT. U.S. businesses currently boast as many as 2,000 remote offices, he said, with 75...

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