Enterprise storage is a centralized repository for business-critical information that provides data sharing, data management and data protection across multiple (and often dissimilar) computer systems. Whether cloud-based, on premises, or as a hybrid cloud solution, enterprise storage can handle large volumes of data and large numbers of users. It offers better performance, availability and scalability than traditional storage options.
Enterprise storage may include a storage area network (SAN), network-attached storage (NAS) devices, or software defined storage (SDS). Redundant paths are created to all data, ensuring access to critical information in the event of a disaster or hardware failure. Large businesses rely on enterprise storage for high availability, disaster recovery, cross-platform data sharing, and backup-and-restore functions. Some enterprise storage solutions divide data into primary, backup and archived storage. Primary storage holds actively or frequently accessed data; backup storage holds copies of primary storage data for use in disaster recovery; and archived storage holds outdated or seldom-used data that must be saved for compliance, business continuity or other purposes.
Software-defined storage solutions leverage open source technology to lower storage costs with off-the-shelf servers and disk drives. Designed as a distributed storage cluster, SUSE Enterprise Storage provides unlimited scalability from terabytes to petabytes. It allows data access to other Linux, Unix and Windows servers in the cluster, enabling worker collaboration in heterogeneous server environments. With SUSE Enterprise Storage, additional storage can be quickly provisioned and delivered as business needs change, and data placement is automatically rebalanced without human intervention.