Enterprise Storage Initiative Lyndon R. Oleson Lead, DOI Storage Technical Evaluation Team U.S. Geological Survey Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science Sioux Falls, SD

1 Bureaus of Interior

2 The Chief Technology Officer Council (CTOC) is composed of CTO’s from all bureaus of the Department and chaired by the Department CTO. The CTOC charters Technical Evaluation Teams (TETs) to explore specific technical topics and make recommendations where desired. The CTOC has formed a Storage TET to provide recommendations on two topics: –Guidelines for appropriate use of DAS, NAS, and SAN –Potential for cross-bureau storage contracts Enterprise Storage Initiative

3 Key Points of DAS, NAS and SAN draft guidelines : –DAS is recommended for projects requiring dedicated storage with high performance, and can tolerate loss of data access due to a failure on the server. –NAS is recommended for office automation and for software application servers. Only applications that do not require high performance should use NAS. –SAN solutions have been successful for larger projects that need to share data among multiple servers using a clustered file system, or ability to share a large storage device among multiple servers. SAN can be used by applications that require high performance of a local file system. –While network solutions such as NAS or SAN will and should increase in application over time, DAS will continue to be a viable solution for certain applications, geographic locations, or business models.

4 Enterprise Storage Initiative Many factors to consider in decisions regarding best storage solution for the application/situation. –Types of Applications (e.g. database transactions, file share, data processing, GIS) –Access Type (i.e. block, file) –Retrieval Performance Level –Storage Capacity (e.g. GB, TB, multiple TB) –Growth Rate (e.g. rate of anticipated yearly growth of data volume being stored ) –Update Frequency (e.g. static, dynamic) –Access Frequency (think relative I/Os per second) –Data Recovery Time(Relative elapsed time since failure/disaster) –Data Recovery Point(Relative currency at time of failure/disaster) –Latency (Delay between data request and delivery from storage system)

5 Disk Storage Taxonomy

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7 Tape Storage Taxonomy