Acronym Soup

At Nexus, we understand that listening to the different IT acronyms appears like a bowl of Alphabet Soup. That’s why we have listed a selection of the more widely used terms at Nexus Information Systems.

Common and not so common IT Acronyms (This page is incomplete because we are publishing it while developing this page.  If you have suggestions to improve this page please help us by contacting us)

•    BMR  (Bare Metal Restore): Bare Metal Restore is a restore practice of data recovery and restoration where the backed up data is available, which allows one to restore a computer system from "bare metal", i.e. without any requirements as to previously installed software or operating system.

•    CAS (Content Addressable Storage): Content Addressable Storage is a means of storing information that can be retrieved based on its content, not its location. It’s usually used for rapid storage and retrieval of fixed content, such as documents stored for compliance with government regulations.

•    CDP (Continuous Data Protection): Continuous Data Protection, also referred to as continuous backup, is backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data.  CDP captures every version of the data that the user saves, and allows the user to restore data to any point in time.

•    CDR (Continuous Data Replicator): Continuous Data Replicator is a host-based solution designed to protect file and application data at remote office locations and provide disaster recovery for applications to remote sites.

•    CVLT (CommVault): Abbreviation for our manufacture partner CommVault Systems Incorporated

•    DR (Disaster Recovery):Disaster Recovery is the process of regaining access to your data, hardware and software necessary to resume critical business operations after a natural or human-caused disaster. DR is usually a part of a larger process known as Business Continuity Planning (BCP).

•    DAS (Direct Attached Storage):Direct Attached Storage is a digital storage system directly attached to a server or workstation, without a storage network in between. It’s largely used to differentiate non-networked storage from SAN and NAS.

•    D2D (Disc to Disc):

•    D2D2T (Disc to Disc to Tape):

•    ESX (Previous version of VI3):

•    FTE (Full Time Employee):

•    HSM (Higherarchival Storage Management):

•    H/W (Hardware):

•    ILM (Information Lifecycle Management): Information Lifecycle Management encompasses the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition.

•    IP WAN (Internet Protocal Wide Area Network):

•    iDA’s (i Data agents):

•    iQ Ops:

•    LAN (Local Area Network): A Local Area Network is a network covering a small area, like office, or building

•    MCSE/Exchange (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer):

•    MFP/ MFD (Multifunction Printer/Multifunction Device): A Multifunction Printer/Device is an office machine that incorporates the funtionality of multiple devices such as: printer, scanner, photocopier, fax, and telephone.

•    NAS (Network Attached Storage): Network Attached Storage is the name given to dedicated data storage technology which can be connected directly to a computer network to provide centralized data access and storage to heterogeneous network clients.

•    POC (Proof of Concept):

•    P2V (Physical to Virtual): Physical to Virtual is the process of decoupling and migrating a physical server's OS, applications, and data from a physical server to a virtual machine hosted on a virtualization platform.

•    P2P (Physical to Physical):

•    RAID (Redundant Array Independent Disc): A RAID combines multiple hard disks into a single logical unit. There are two ways this can be done: in hardware and in software. Hardware combines the drives into a logical unit in dedicated hardware, which then presents the drives as a single drive to the operating system. Software does this within the operating system and presents the drives as a single drive to the users of the system.

•    RAIN (Redundant Array Independent Nodes):

•    RTO (Return Time Objective):

•    SAN (Storage Area Network): Storage Area Network is an architecture to attach remote computer storage devices such as disk array controllers, tape libraries, and CD arrays to servers in such a way that to the operating system the devices appear as locally attached devices.

•    SIS (Single Instance Store): Single Instance Store is a system's ability to keep one copy of content that multiple users or computers share. It’s a means to eliminate data duplication and to increase efficiency, SIS is frequently implemented in file systems, e-mail server products, data backup, and other storage-related solutions.

•    SRM (Storage Resource Management): Storage Resource Management identifies underutilized capacity, identifies old or non-critical data that could be moved to less-expensive storage, and helps predict future capacity requirements.

•    SPAID (Split Path Architeture Independent Disk):

•    SLA (Service Level Agreement):A Service Level Agreement is a formal negotiated agreement between two parties. It is a contract that exists between customers and their service provider. It records the common understanding about services, priorities, responsibilities, and guarantee. The main purpose to agree on the level of service.

•    VI3 (Virtual Infrastrucre 3):

•    VCP (VMware Certified Professional):

•    VSP (VMware Sales Professional):

•    VSS (Volume Shadow copy Service): Volume Shadow copy Service provides periodic snapshots of a system's volumes, which has two primary purposes. They allow the creation of consistent backups of a volume, ensuring that the contents cannot change while the backup is being made, and users can access their files, as they existed at the time of the snapshot, thus retrieving an earlier version of a file or recovering a file deleted by mistake.

•    VAR (Value Added Reseller):

•    VTL (Virtual Tape Liberary): Virtual Tape Liberary is a data storage virtualization technology used typically for archival storage purposes. A VTL presents a storage component as tapes available for use with tape drives.

•    VMFS3 (Virtual Machine File System 3): Virtual Machine File System 3 is VMware Inc.'s SAN file system. VMFS is used solely in the company's flagship server product, ESX Server. It was developed and is used to store virtual machine disk images, including snapshots. Multiple servers can read/write the same file system simultaneously, while individual virtual machine files are locked. VMFS volumes can be logically "grown" (nondestructively increased in size) by spanning multiple VMFS volumes together.

•    WAN (Wide Area Network): Wide Area Network is a computer network that covers a broad area  like a metropolitan, a region, or national boundaries.

•    WAAS (Wide Area Application Service):

•    WAFS (Wide Area File System): Wide Area File System products allow remote office users to access and share files globally at LAN speeds over the WAN. Distributed enterprises that deploy WAFS solutions are able to consolidate storage to corporate data centers, eliminating the need to backup and manage data that previously resided in their remote offices.

•    WORM (Write Once Read Many): Write Once Read Many refers to a kind of computer storage media that can be written to once, but read from multiple times.