Data Storage Products

Qual has a wealth of experience advising, recommending and implementing a wide range of NAS and SAN solutions for corporate, government and education clients. Working closely with you to design your primary, secondary, and back up storage environments.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Direct-attached storage works well in environments with an individual server or
a limited number of servers, but the situation rapidly becomes unmanageable if there are dozens of servers or significant data growth. Storage for each server must be managed separately and cannot be shared. Performance and scalability are often limited, and storage resources cannot be efficiently allocated. The data management needs of today's SMB and enterprise IT environments are typically much better served by a networked storage approach.

NAS has considerable advantages over direct-attached storage, including improved scalability, reliability, availability, and performance. This enables your organisation to automate and greatly simplify your data management operations.

FC and IP Storage Area Network (SAN)
With the ability of SANs to integrate multiple storage devices and applications, SANs provide many high-availability options for organisations that need to support a wide range of business continuance activities in a cost-efficient manner.
The distributed networked approach of SANs addresses the ability to recover
data and quickly bring systems back online following a disaster.

Without this level of protection even minutes of downtime can pose significant consequences to many types of organisations. To guard against downtime and
to reduce business risk, a SAN solution would eliminate single points of failure, incorporate failover software, streamline data backup and recovery, and enable high-performance mirroring over great distances.

iSCSI IP SAN
An iSCSI SAN may be the perfect choice for companies interested in making the move from direct-attached to networked storage. Using the same block-level SCSI commands as traditional server-attached storage, iSCSI storage networks are fully compatible with existing server software such as file systems, databases, and applications.

Similarly, since iSCSI runs on ubiquitous and familiar IP networks, there is no
need to deploy a new networking infrastructure or retrain staff to realise the
benefits of a SAN.

Unlike direct-attached storage, iSCSI storage solutions enable you to share storage resources across servers, easily expand storage capacity without taking critical applications offline, and consolidate your data protection processes and operations for improved data availability at significant administrative cost savings.

The iSCSI protocol was designed with the appropriate security options to enable the creation of SANs over a wide range of network topologies - from private IP-based subnets to data center or departmental local area networks (LANs) and
wide area networks (WANs).