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 (3PAR, Atempo, Iron Mountain, Isilon, EMC, DELL, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Open-E, Pillar Data Systems, Sun Microsystems, Syneto Storage, Symantec/Veritas Software, WhipTail, etc.).
Famous quotes containing the words enterprise and/or storage:
“In enterprise of martial kind,
When there was any fighting,
He led his regiment from behind—
He found it less exciting.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)