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Enterprise
Storage ...............................................................................................................................
Businesses
today run at the speed of their information. Access to timely,
robust information is a powerful asset that can fuel new ideas,
boost revenues, build competitive advantage and enhance customer
service. Yet in order to derive maximum business value from
information, companies must first unlock it from behind specific
applications and processors across the enterprise. No one can
take full advantage of information that is isolated by different
operating systems and platform-specific data formats. To drive
better business results with technology, many companies are
now consolidating their information. Servers are being moved
into the data center. Mainframes are being blended into client/server
environments. Increasing number of IT Managers are acknowledging
the wasted resources, expense and negative business impact of
managing information across multiple operating environments
without a common management framework for the enterprise. To
realize an organizational vision of enterprise information,
more and more IT departments are rejecting the notion of storage
as an isolated CPU add-on or peripheral and searching for a
higher category of storage. They want storage that acts as a
strategic element of an IT infrastructure, bridging the gaps
between disparate platforms so they can use their information
in powerful new ways. Beyond simply holding information, this
storage must allow companies to manage, protect, provide access
to and efficiently plan the growth of enormous amounts of information
previously dispersed on multiple servers and mainframes.
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Storage
Consolidation ...............................................................................................................................
One
of the many benefits to be gained by implementing and Enterprise Storage
solution is often to consolidate many 'islands' of storage that may
have existed in a typical IT Data Centre. Over the years, many times
a new server or turnkey application solution has been installed, it
has come with it's own storage. Many Data Centres therefore find themselves
with many different types of storage, some old, some new, some full,
some hardly used from different vendors, so no benefit can be gained
from using available storage on one system
When file sharing, database, and messaging applications are critical
to successful enterprise operations. System downtime, unavailable
data, or hindered processes affect a company's success. To support
increasingly complex and distributed environments, many organizations
are challenged with managing a growing proliferation of servers and
dispersed data storage. Storage consolidation solutions simplify management,
increase availability, heighten productivity, and reduce costs in
collaborative environments.
Condo-Protego Storage Consolidation Solutions build upon enterprise
storage offerings either from Condo-Protego or others. Condo-Protego
offer cost appropriate solutions to address Storage Consolidation
needs, ranging from the most expensive critical systems in the environment
to the least expensive, but carrying equally as important data, where
the benefits afforded by Enterprise Storage solutions should not be
excluded.
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Disaster
Recovery & Business Continuance
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In a world where business is global, and data needs to be available
24 x 7 not only for competitive edge but increasingly to meet
regulatory requirements, the need for total protection of an
organizations data has never been more critical.
Although the majority of technology incidents are logical problems
or human error, rather than being caused by the full blown headline
generating physical disasters, the challenge for all organizations
is to have a well planned business continuity and/or proven
disaster recovery practices, to ensure that their business survives
any such threat.
Condo-Protego specialize in understanding and working with the
customer to explain the key relationship between RPO (Recovery
Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and how this
applies to their different systems, bearing in mind the key
fact that not all data is created equal.
RPO describes the point in time to where data must be restored
to resume with successful processing following an incident.
RTO describes the timeframe in which this must happen, how long
it must take to get applications online and accessible by the
users with the data intact.
Ideally all organizations would want to aim for zero data loss
and instantaneous recovery, even if this has to be in a remote
site. Condo-Protego's experience with numerous regional 'real-life'
environments ensures that customers will receive the highest
levels of advice and guidance.
Condo-Protego disaster recover and business continuity solutions
are not just based upon the supply of market leading, best of
breed products, but to assist the customer in thinking pro-actively
and guiding them to deploy best practices with continuous review
to ensure that all threats are fully addressed.
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Data
Protection...............................................................
Data
protection is an organization's strategy for preserving and
retrieving critical data residing in an array of distributed
storage systems, servers, desktops, and laptops.
Data protection encompasses a number of the other topics covered
in this solution section, and Condo-Protego work with customers
to ensure that regardless of the size of their environment that
they consider all of the options for protecting their data,
and bearing in mind the customers business requirements and
budgets ensure that they maximize their use of resources to
implement the most beneficial solutions and practices, whether
this be the full gamut of options for total protection, or a
limited initial set of solutions to ensure that at least the
minimal cover is taken, positioning the customer to advance
his protection as budgets and business demands allow.
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.....................................................................................................................Email
Solution
Email
is now so deeply embedded in business infrastructure and culture
that its security has become fundamental to normal business
operations and a matter of Board-level importance.
Organisations increasingly rely on email as the primary medium
to communicate with customers, partners and suppliers. Yet
the growth of junk email, computer viruses and email abuse
are combining to reach levels that have become a real threat
to the continuity of email.
It is this growth, and the increasing sophistication and evolution
of these threats that are combining to stretch infrastructure,
resources and expertise to the limit. Investing in scalable
future-proof email security has major benefits for every organization.
"
- 60
- 70% of all email is junk; a figure that is growing monthly.
"
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Similar growth in the distribution of inappropriate or illegal
content is exposing businesses to legal liabilities and
commercial risk. "
- And
the radically increasing sophistication of email-borne computer
viruses means that despite having anti-virus protection
in place, over two-thirds of companies suffered an outbreak
in the last 12 months.
Condo-Protego
represent BlackSpider Technologies, who employ some of the
world's leading experts on email security and is completely
focused on solving all aspects of email security, their MailControl
services deliver the highest levels of protection available
at a predictable, cost effective price and their global delivery
networks scan millions of emails every day. It is scalable,
resilient and highly reliable and it has never failed. BlackSpider
provides a complete email security solution as a single, integrated
managed service.
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Data
Management ...............................................................................................................................
Data
is exploding in enterprise data centers worldwide. In the
Middle East although the environments are usually smaller
it is not uncommon to see 50%-100% growth per year, and this
creates unprecedented challenges for IT Executives responsible
for managing that data. Add to this the complication of the
need to meet new regulatory requirements, along with ever
changing corporate initiatives to control expenditures and
consolidate information technologies, and typically understaffing
of IT departments to the picture, and it's clear that IT management's
job is tough and getting tougher.
Storage Management Solutions from Condo-Protego help IT executives
control the effects of data growth in their organizations,
offering not only products but strategic insight and practical,
operational expertise to ensure that business data is manageable,
protected, predictably available and recoverable.
Condo-Protego Storage Management Solutions, that include Storage
Management and Utilization, Design and Implementation,
and Data Lifecycle Management solutions, benefit clients
by providing visibility into storage environments, and identifying
opportunities to align risk and cost by matching the value
of data stored to assets deployed.
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Data
Back Up & Recovery ...............................................................................................................................
It
remains a major surprise to those of us in the industry that
many organizations still do not have a backup solution, have
an ineffective backup solution or have a backup solution where
the recovery of data has never been tested.
Data Backup is the first line of defense for data, the minimal
requirement, but simply copying data from its source to tape
or disk does not constitute best practice or guarantee its recoverability.
Condo-Protego Data Backup and Recovery solutions are based upon
market leading, best of breed products, but more importantly
include guidance to the customer based upon many years of experience
to ensure that the most appropriate backup policy is implemented
and frequently fully tested recovery procedures are documented
and kept up to date.
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Data
Archiving ...............................................................................................................................
As the size of data grows in an organization, and more copies
of the same data is stored in many different places it becomes
increasing more important to build a flexible archiving
framework to enable the discovery of content held within
email, file system and collaborative environments, while
helping to reduce storage costs and simplifying management.
Condo-Protego can assist customers with solutions that not
only address cost reduction and ease of use but meet business
and global requirements for corporate governance, regulatory
compliances, risk management and legal protection.
Archiving solutions additionally assists customers by reducing
their business and IT risks surrounding a number of key
problems, high on any IT departments agenda, including:-
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Application
Storage Management
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Compliance
Retention & Discovery
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Operational
Excellence
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Knowledge
Utilization
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Upgrade,
Migration & Consolidation.
Condo-Protego Data Archiving Solutions range from market
leading, best of breed hardware solutions, including Content
Addressable Storage, to software solutions that address
the key points above and more besides.
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Storage
Area Networks ...............................................................................................................................
The Storage Area Network provides a common link between multiple servers
and storage, allowing administrators to scale only the storage or
sever processing power as requirements demand. This also allows multiple
servers to access the same data so that duplication of information
can be reduced, and facilitates storage back-up directly over the
storage channels without adding the bottleneck of the relatively slow
Local Area Network (LAN).
Fibre Channel technology is providing numerous advantages which make
the Storage Area Network possible. Cable distances can span from 30
meters per link using copper cabling, to 10Km per link using single-mode
fibre optics. A Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop can support 126 devices
and a Fibre Channel Switched Fabric up to 16 million. Parallel SCSI
technology supports only 15 devices and up to 12 total meters parallel
cable. In addition Fibre Channel was designed from the start to support
multi-host environments, and recent enhancements are allowing integrators
to build dynamic environments which allow hot insertion of both storage
devices and hosts.
The move to Storage Area Networks over the next few years will provide
a new level of scalability to system administrators allowing a much
greater degree of freedom than the traditional attached storage paradigm.
Fibre Channel technology provides the basic foundation of this shift,
allowing enterprises to start implementing a solid foundation today
to support the environments of the future.
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Scalability
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Availability
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Flexibility
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Performance
Condo-Protego
offer a range of Storage Area Network Solutions ensuring full interoperability
and expansion options, to ensure that a customer is never tied in
to a proprietary environment without room to grow.
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Network
Attached Storage ...............................................................................................................................
A
Network Attached Storage (NAS) device is a server that is
dedicated to nothing more than file sharing. NAS does not
provide any of the activities that a server in a server-centric
system typically provides, such as e-mail, authentication
or file management. NAS allows more hard disk storage space
to be added to a network that already utilizes servers without
shutting them down for maintenance and upgrades. With a
NAS device, storage is not an integral part of the server.
Instead, in this storage-centric design, the server still
handles all of the processing of data but a NAS device delivers
the data to the user. A NAS device does not need to be located
within the server but can exist anywhere in a LAN and can
be made up of multiple networked NAS devices.
Condo-Protego work with customers to determine their exact
needs, and offer the most appropriate solution, whether
this be NAS or SAN or a mixed environment if this is the
best solution.
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Content
Addressable Storage ...............................................................................................................................
The
latest storage challenge is the unique requirements of storing
and managing "fixed content", unchanging digital assets. "Fixed
content" data, that includes X-rays, voice archives, electronic
documents, e-mail archives, check images, and CAD/CAM designs,
also require simple, scalable, secure storage solutions for
cost-effective retention, protection, and disposition of a the
data. Furthermore with a need to meet ever increasing governance
and regulatory compliances,
Condo-Protego Content Addressable Storage Solutions are based
upon the market leading, best of breed products, that
not only address the key points above but also position the
customer to be address many of the other categories, specifically
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.
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Information
Lifecycle Management ..................................................................................
Information Lifecycle Management ILM or as some others call
it DLM (Data Lifecycle Management) is the methodology to
look at the value of data in your environment, considering
that "not all data is created equal" and "as data ages its
value and speed of access changes".
ILM considers and addresses governance and regulatory compliances,
whilst also looking at "cost appropriate" solutions for
the relevant data in an organisations environment, to ensure
the organisation has the right data stored on the right
platform, delivering the necessary access, performance and
protection for the value of the data, and moving it across
platforms as it's value changes.
Condo-Protego assist customers in addressing their ILM needs
with full solution offerings, or on a step by step basis,
regardless of what solutions may already be installed.
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