Here’s a disconnect. I just saw this piece about Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, implementing a virtualized, tiered storage pool to manage its information and content.
Behind the woodwork, a virtualized storage pool
Yes, behind the blacksmithing and glass-blowing and butter-churning you see as part of the 18th-century technology on display, there is an infrastructure capable of supporting up to 100 TBs of raw storage, mainly rich media files.
David Vallente explains that the historical site — which has 3,500 employees — was overloading its tier 1 storage devices, creating disruptions in the ability of employees to store and access image files and documents. In fact, Colonial WIlliamsburg’s 70 departments each had their own storage solutions.
The organization addressed this issue through a file virtualization approach, which created a centralized pooled storage for use by all departments. Colonial Williamsburg is also planning to deploy storage to cloud resources. Vallente urges the creation of global resource pools and automated data migration to meet growing data demands. And, he adds, “including the cloud in plans is timely and sensible, especially for mid-sized and small organizations that lack advanced recovery capabilities.”
Patrick Henry and George Washington probably would have approved of the sensibility of managing information this way.
(Photo: Wikipedia.)
Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant and speaker specializing in trends and developments shaping the technology industry.
Disclosure
Joe McKendrick
Joe McKendrick is an independent consultant, editor and speaker.
Joe has performed project work (white papers, articles, blogs, research and presentations) for the following companies in the IT marketspace:
- CBS Interactive/CNET/ZDNet (this blog)
- ebizQ
- Evans Data
- Gartner
- IBM
- Informatica
- IDC
- Microsoft
- Systinet/HP
- Teradata
- Unisphere Reseach, a division of Information Today, Inc.
- WebLayers
Joe has also performed research work for the following sponsoring organizations in partnership with Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc.
- IBM
- Luminex
- Noetix
- Oracle Corp.
- Teradata
- Informatica
- International Oracle Users Group
- Oracle Applications Users Group
- Professional Association for SQL Server
- International DB2 Users Group
- International Sybase Users Group
- SHARE (IBM large systems users group)
Biography
Joe McKendrick
Joe McKendrick is an author and independent analyst who tracks the impact of information technology on management and markets. Joe is co-author, along with 16 leading industry leaders and thinkers, of the SOA Manifesto, which outlines the values and guiding principles of service orientation. He also speaks frequently on Enterprise 2.0 and SOA topics at industry events and Webcasts, and serves on the program committee for this year's SOA & Cloud Symposium in London. As an independent analyst, he has also authored numerous research reports in partnership with Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc. for user groups such as SHARE, Oracle Applications Users Group, and International DB2 Users Group. In a previous life, Joe served as director of the Administrative Management Society (AMS), an international professional association dedicated to advancing knowledge within the IT and business management fields. He is a graduate of Temple University.
