While removable storage suppliers continue to tell your customers that they have places for people to "store their stuff," businesses don't have stuff. Businesses have documents, data, images, multimedia presentations, research that has been downloaded from the World Wide Web, customer and strategic partner records, engineering and manufacturing records and volumes of information that is necessary, but becoming difficult for IS and network managers to manage.
Organizations generate over one trillion pages of documents every day, and nearly three trillion pieces of paper go into file cabinets every day. The amount of paper used may be surprising, but another fact isn't. As the volume of information generated continues to soar, accessibility decreases. When you add the storage demands created by memory hungry applications, mixed media development, workgroup/enterprise workflow and the Internet, it's apparent that your storage and on-line access needs will continue to soar.
Much of the growth in the demand for storage capacity can be attributed to today's highly competitive, information-dependent business environment. There is an increasing need for companies to exchange volumes of information -- internally and with external business partners, vendors and customers. Sharing vast amounts of proprietary information also requires a high degree of data security (so that distributed information cannot be altered) and standardized media formatting (to ensure universal data access). To keep pace with this demand, Framingham, MA-based IDC projects that over 2,800 Petabytes of storage will be purchased this year (one Petabyte is one quadrillion bytes).
In the past, companies just kept upgrading their hard drives. Today, however, organizations realize that information residing on individual hard drives isn't being put to optimum use. They are turning to departmental and enterprise-wide storage solutions. Fortunately, there are now a wide range of price/performance solutions-- hard drive, tape and optical--available for service bureaus to recommend.
While most customer network and records managers have preferences based on old buying habits or experience; the truth is, people really don't care what technology is used to store their documents images and data, as long as the information is available fairly quickly. Likewise, IS managers really don't care which technology they use, as long as the solution is easy-to-install, easy-to-maintain, reliable, upgradeable and economical.
Server manufacturers such as Sun, Dell, Compaq and IBM have responded by developing storage management-specific servers such as Intranet servers. According to Sun, sales of storage to support corporate Intranets are growing at a rate of more than 60 percent.
Expensive, maintenance-hungry RAID (random array of inexpensive hard drives) systems with capacities ranging from 400 to 1.5B and higher have been popular because everyone expects instant access to their data--even if they only use it once or twice a year. Working to retain their position in the marketplace, tape autoloader suppliers are marketing tape data warehouses with TB+ capacities.
Like tape, optical storage was initially only viewed as an archival solution; but optical technology has undergone significant advancements since it was first introduced. More importantly, the leading manufacturers have taken a hint from the CD industry and have finally established a firm set of standards and a road map for future product introductions.
Although hardware/software costs will always be a key consideration, corporate network, records and IS managers are now taking a harder look at the features and benefits of the solutions being recommend. They are balancing factors, such as flexibility and scalability, with accessibility and data life cycle costs. As a result, rather than choosing a single, all-purpose storage solution, they will often want a mixture of removable and on-line technologies that cost-effectively meet the needs of each application without sacrificing performance. The final solution the customer often will deploy is a mixed storage solution that not only puts the best technology to work for both sets of requirements (real-time access and near-line access), but also provides a growth path for the future.
For instant access to current documents and data (information less than 30 days old), companies should consider RAID systems can be used with capacities ranging from 100GB to 800GB for small firms or departments; and 500GB to 1TB for large corporations. For older information, or data that can tolerate 5 –30 second access, people should consider the implementation of optical (MO, DVD or CD) jukeboxes that provide capacities ranging from 500GB to 90+TB at a fraction of the cost of hard disks, and with considerably better reliability and data life.
Archived documents and data that doesn't require split-second access will probably be stored on recordable CDs; and recordable DVD media. In addition to balancing the customer’s users' sometimes unreasonable demands for fast, reliable access, network and records managers will focus on meeting management's demand for a centralized storage solution that will improve the accessibility of the organization's information and reduce data management costs.
With centralized storage, the service bureau’s customers will be able to spend more time evaluating users' real needs and educating them on the proper use of storage, and less time managing data that is distributed among various servers and workstations.
The alternative is to stick with a solution that has paper as its foundation, and have people spend hours--or days--looking for a specific file. That's a solution no company can live with.
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CHOOSE STORAGE SOLUTIONS YOU CAN LIVE WITH - To learn more about this author, visit Andy Marken's Website.
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