Storage- Introduction

Store is the term generally used to preserve everything that can be preserved & can be retrived at any point of time. to store perticular thing we all use perticular methods, ways and technologies.
ex: to preserve money we use Banks, lockers and so on. to preserve livelyhood we use different methods.
In technical business espicially information technology, the most important thing to preserve is Information (digital data) and the methods or technologies that facilitate you to preserve information is 'Storage Technology'.
Storage technology evolved over a period of time and very primitive storage devices are Puntch cards, tapes, Magnetic tapes, drum & so on and at present Storage technology not only remained technology but become huge business and lot of well known & top companies are into this business, to name a few IBM, HP, Seagate, Hitachi, Maxstor, Dell, SUN, EMC2 & so on.
various modren Hardware Storage technologies that are currently deployed includes TApe drive/Library for Backup, Direct Attached storage (DAS), Network attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN) and the software technologies include RAID, SNMP/CIM based Storage management SW, Virtualization SW, SAN Management SW, Volume Management softwares and so on.
with such diverse technologies we can store and retrive Information in organised way and also safegaurd it with many security features for many many years.

Need for having multiple Storage technologies:
* The information (digital data) generated by all the companies which uses information technologies is different and the way information needed to be stored, mantained, safegaurded and retrived is different.
for example: For Financial companies such as Banking, Accounting companies along with information storage & retrival demand more security, more availability and scalability. similarly if its just an IT company (ex: Google) then requirement will be different, along with Availability, scalability, security, performance, cost & many more factors has to be considered.
* The evolution of Storage technology should also be blamed because newer technologies developed mostly focused on immidate needs and took very long time to focus on futuristic needs and hence diverse storage technologies co-exist.
* Storage technology is must for all the companies who uses Information technology but the information (digital data) generated by these companies are different (ex: normal data, Audio, video,imaging and so on). so newer storage technologies developed also depended on type of information to be stored and in future as long as newer type of Information gets generated there might be more specific storage technologies developed to deal with them.