Welcome to our quarterly newsletter which this time focuses on data storage. The data centre is the main-stay of modern business. Carefully managed, the data centre powers millions of business critical applications and vast quantities of data on a 24x7 basis.

But like everything in business, and in particular in IT, nothing stays the same. Businesses demand ever-increasing results from IT while storing ever-more data.

Innovations in technology are aimed at helping organisations meet these requirements while keeping costs under control. But keeping up with all the new developments - and assessing their relevance - is a complex and time-consuming task. Just some technologies under discussion in the industry at the moment include:

• Infrastructure simplification
• Storage Virtualisation
• Do I need a SAN?
• Business continuity

Here at Trustco our job is to keep up to date with new technologies from the key vendors. We enable our clients to focus on the business of running their businesses. We can do this because we assess new technologies and products as they become available, then use this knowledge to advise clients on the most appropriate choices for their business.

We look forward to helping you grow your business.

Introducing Trustco's VIP Pass Programme, enabling organisations to experience the benefits of working with Trustco without the pressure to make any immediate purchases.

We're keen to make sure that all of our clients are getting the best advice, prices and availability of IT products and services, so we launched our VIP Pass to enable you to see what's on offer. This includes:

• Guaranteed price match or better on quotes of over £500
• Free deliveries
• Free server build & test
• Free consultancy
• Annual rebates

We at Trustco want you to know we appreciate the opportunity to earn your business and are eager to create an enduring relationship well into the future.

To find out more download this brochure or contact your account manager.

Trustco InView, the next generation e-commerce for high level procurement, provides Trustco customers all the benefits of e-commerce but without the disadvantages. Latest updates include:

• Renewals Manager: Get notified about all your IT renewals before licences run out, enabling you to re-evaluate the market and get the best deals.
• Meetings Manager: Keep up to date with Trustco meetings.

To find out more about InView download this brochure or contact your account manager.

Trustco's New Sales Director
Trevor Kennard is Trustco's new Sales Director. He will be responsible for providing leadership to the team and together with their support, will build and expand the business throughout the UK.

Trevor has 15 years of experience in the IT sector with grounded knowledge in HP servers & storage, Cisco, NetApp and IBM amongst others. He has extensive experience of delivering high quality, appropriate IT product and service solutions to UK organisations.

Click here to read more about this announcement.

Storage Growth
New research by analyst IDC suggests digital information will occupy a staggering 988 billion gigabytes of storage space in 2010 - more than six times its current quantity.

According to the report, the digital universe measured 161 billion gigabytes (or 161 exabytes) in 2006. This is approximately more than three million times the information in all the books ever written - a staggering amount of detail to accumulate in a such short space of time.

Although almost 70 per cent of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010, the study found organisations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 per cent of it, through data centres, telephone and hosting switches, or data back-up depositories.

IBM has announced new tape storage offerings based on the Linear Tape Open™ (LTO™) Generation 4 standard, offering new levels of capacity, performance, and function, with an ideal pricing structure for mid-size companies.

With significant growth in business data, fixed content, and replicated data, businesses need to secure their critical information with technologies like encryption, while reducing operation costs, controlling energy costs and lowering TCO. IBM's enterprise-class tape encryption functionality is now incorporated into several LTO 4 tape storage products to meet these requirements.

Click here for the full story

The case for simplifying your storage infrastructure The signs of complexity are everywhere in the modern data centre - firewalls, routers, servers and multiple operating systems are just the beginning. Server environments, networks and storage are typically silos of resources dedicated per application and grow with only a loose connection to one another - and usually with no regard for overall system complexity.

Infrastructure simplification is a method of looking at the whole environment end-to-end, and finding ways to eliminate the complexity that can inhibit the free flow of information necessary in today’s fast-paced business world. The storage environment offers numerous opportunities for simplification that can help unlock the value of information to your business. The ability to simply and easily share and manage information is a key requirement for integrating business processes end-to-end, and is a key requirement for an on demand business.

Click here to read the rest of this article, including the three proven methods for simplification.

Systems management is complicated... With ever-increasing reliance on IT infrastructure, scale and complexity grows while deploying and controlling it gets no simpler. Storage is particularly prone to this: you can never fit and forget a storage device - it will get full, need backing up and kept in a reliable condition. This problem gets more complicated with every different piece of storage attached to your system, and live data is particularly unforgiving.

Storage virtualisation is designed to fix this. It works by gathering together disparate storage devices and presenting them to a server as a single logical entity, with one point of management and greater ease of attaching and detaching extra storage.

This technology has matured to the point where it now offers a scaleable environment that enables the management of pooled resources across the enterprise, allowing IT managers to be more responsive to dynamic organisational needs and to better leverage infrastructure investments.

Click here to read the rest of this article, including the top 8 benefits of virtualisation.

Solving the Information Management Puzzle

Ever-increasing quantities of electronic content are stored in organisations, fed in part by business
transaction data generated by CRM, point-of-sale, and other data-gathering applications, and by the
proliferation of unstructured content related to knowledge management, multimedia applications, and especially
the growth of e-mail traffic.

The quantities and disparate types and versions of information being stored make finding what users need
efficiently a problem, but the problem doesn’t end with access issues. Despite a long-term decline in the cost
of storing a given quantity of data, the volume of the increase and the management costs associated with
managing large data storage systems mean significant and growing expense for companies.

IT has long emphasised the tangible elements - PCs, servers, storage devices, networks and software, while the business is only interested in information. Little effort has been made to understand the value of a specific
piece of information to the business, how its value fluctuates with changing business conditions, how to define
its life span, and what to do with it in each stage of its life.

Every new IT application or technology brings with it a new domain of information. Employees accumulate enormous quantities of e-mail and personal files, much of which is never reviewed or deleted. Excessive redundancy adds to the problems: backups of backups and multiple copies saved by users mean that numerous copies of the same piece of information may exist, creating potential version-control problems as well as adding unnecessarily to data volume.

The most visible negative effect of this vast and mushrooming amount of content is cost — of hardware and
software and the personnel needed to support it — a problem exacerbated by the common practice of treating all information as “mission-critical,” ...

Click here to read the rest of this article, including solving the puzzle and the first steps to ILM.

One of the most important aspects of disaster recovery is to have a location from which the recovery can take place. This location is known as a backup site. In the event of a disaster, a backup site is where your data centre will be recreated, and where you will operate from, for the length of the disaster.

There are three different types of backup sites:

• Cold backup sites
• Warm backup sites
• Hot backup sites

Click here to read the rest of this article,
including how to identify backup sites and returning to normality.

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For more information about Trustco or any of our technology solutions,
please contact us on 0870 160 1505 or visit this page for alternative contact details.

Trustco Plc is a leading provider of Servers, Storage, Communication & Security Solutions from the very best vendors. Our focus on dedicated specialist account management along with technical resources make us the supplier of choice for a wide variety of businesses across the UK. Our ability to traverse the direct, distribution & reseller channels enable us to retain our competitive price advantage and keep lead times down to a minimum without any compromise on quality of after sales care. Visit www.trustco.co.uk for further information.

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