Storage

Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization on its own can boost utilization rates well above 50%. If you combine storage virtualization with server virtualization, utilization rates for storage assets can climb to 70% or more.

A key way to gain overall efficiencies and save costs throughout your IT environment is virtualization. Virtualization technologies help IT departments better manage the physical resources at their disposal while reducing the need for additional physical infrastructure. The reduction of physical assets helps lower management, operational, and energy costs while increasing efficiency and productivity.

Storage virtualization utilizes software to provide a consolidated, hardware independent, view of stored data to the servers. This pooled view of resources is easier to manage and less disruptive within IT environments. Virtualization allows administrators to be more flexible in responding to the needs of the organization and allocate storage resources more efficiently.

MSI's storage partners include IBM, HP, Brocade, Cisco, NetApp, and Symantec and offer host-, networked-, and device-based virtualization solutions based on your unique needs. Solutions are designed to meet business needs of today while positioning you for a competitive advantage in the future.

Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery

Having 24x7 access to your organization's data is imperative in today's business environment. Any downtime will more than likely result in upset customers and partners, decreased productivity and lost sales.

Storage continuity solutions from MSI allow storage administrators to restore and deliver data after system disruptions and/or outages. From remote storage facilities to redundant on-site systems, MSI can provide multiple solution offerings based on your company's view of unacceptable loss of data. If you are looking to develop a storage continuity roadmap, MSI's experienced consultants can assist in reviewing your company's data continuity recovery requirements.

View the Storage Continuity Brochure

Information Lifecycle Management

As data storage growth continues to rise, companies are looking for more effective ways to manage that data. Information lifecycle management (ILM) helps support initiatives through the implementation of automated procedures to move data to appropriate storage levels based on pre-set criteria.

ILM solutions from MSI help organizations of any size and in any industry solve these challenges. Businesses are able to prioritize data into separate tiers by aligning business needs with IT service levels. These tiers of data are associated with their level of importance, based on criteria set by you. Once implemented, an ILM solution automatically moves data between tiers, and more or less expensive storage, based on that criterion.

Storage Management

Within heterogeneous storage environments, utilization rates are generally lower than anticipated, the management of disparate platforms can be time consuming and difficult, and administrator productivity is hindered. Storage management solutions from MSI allow IT organizations to be proactive in maintaining ever-growing storage resources. Management software, tools and hardware can provide a simplified view of a storage infrastructure to help organize data more efficiently, maximize asset utilization, increase staff productivity and quickly meet on demand business requirements.

View the Storage Management Brochure

Data Migration Services

Important data needs to be backed-up or migrated to different or new storage. Today’s heterogeneous IT environments mean there are a number of networks, servers, management technologies, operating systems and other devices that make data migration a labor-intensive and intricate operation. These migrations involve several outages for downtime, which increase the possibility of data corruption and lost data. Scheduling downtime can even become a tedious undertaking.

Data migration services from MSI Systems Integrators help alleviate the stress and cost associated with moving data from one form of storage to another. Our data migration service provides a minimally intrusive, seamless data migration. The service is transparent to the host and incumbent storage while migrating information in the background. MSI also provides project management in terms of planning and execution to provide the smoothest possible transition to new storage subsystems.

View the Data Migration Brochure

Enterprise Search

The Challenge - Findability

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find·a-bil·i·ty /fīndəbílitee/ n. The ability to quickly find the right information inside the enterprise, across formats and repositories.

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The majority of organizations are made up of knowledge workers - those individuals who are charged with understanding and working with data. Knowledge workers include sales teams, financial analysts, IT programmers and marketing managers. Unfortunately, when knowledge workers are unable to find the information they need in a timely fashion, productivity and business performance suffer.

According to IDC:

• Only 25% of information searches are successful
• Nearly half (49%) of a knowledge worker's time is non-productive
• Lack of access to data means only 26% of a knowledge worker's time is spent on their core task - analysis of information

With an ever-increasing amount of data being stored electronically within organizations, findability is necessary now more than ever.

Unfortunately, until recently, most companies have had to either build their own, customized systems that integrate with each of their back-end repositories, or adopt "enterprise search" solutions. A vast amount of these solutions require highly complex architectures, especially as the volume of data grows.

MSI has partnered with Google to help organizations empower their knowledge workers. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) brings the power of Google to the enterprise.

Learn more about findability and the Google Search Appliance

• White Paper - Enterprise Findability without the Complexity
• Data Sheet - Google Search Appliance Data Sheet

Contact your local MSI Client Executive or request an appointment to have an MSI Client Executive speak with you on increasing your findability.