The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management

Based on extensive interviews with industry leaders, The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management provides a concise glimpse of the present state and future direction of enterprise databases. This authoritative and enthusiastically written text can benefit any IT professional working with databases at the department or enterprise level.

Best at displaying the current state of enterprise database implementation, including a diagnosis of the trend toward centrally managed data stores, this book focuses specifically on dedicated database networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. Additionally, this title is a veritable primer for virtually every database standard (old and new), including SCSI-2, Fibre Channel, new storage options, optical-magneto (including DVD) standards, and even tape backups.

A section on RAID offered here is truly an excellent introduction to the strengths (and limitations) of different RAID architectures. It also surveys new options for enterprise storage (both SANs and NAS's) and defines a management process for getting control of central data stores on the enterprise. The book is particularly good at pointing out the problem of sharing databases on heterogeneous environments that use both Unix and Windows NT. It closes with emerging vendor-specific standards for universal data storage (such as Sun's StoreX) that might solve the problem once and for all (though the author tends to see universal initiatives as a sort of holy grail).

Both a guide to the state of the art in enterprise databases and a roadmap for the future, The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management serves an invaluable need for any manager or administrator who works with enterprise databases. This book's intelligent presentation of old and new technologies, along with many valuable product listings, can be a useful asset as your organization brings its databases into the next century. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Enterprise storage management fundamentals and planning, risk management, locally and centrally managed models, history of hard disk technology, PRML, ATA/IDE, SCSI, Serial Storage Architecture (SSA), Fibre Channel, RAID, Storage Area Networks (SANs), Network Attached Storage (NAS), tape backup standards, optical technologies, Hierarchical Storage Management (HMS), Sun StoreX, Compaq ENSA, EMC Enterprise Storage Networks, and product surveys.