Cloud Solutions Blog

Tornadoes. Earthquakes. Hurricanes. While these events remind business leaders about the importance of continuity plans, most CEOs may not realize that data disasters occur every day, and the repercussions can be devastating.

In today’s information-driven world, the data we keep has a tendency to swell faster than an elastic waistline at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. Left uncontrolled, nightly backups of that data will compound the problem seven-fold. If you find yourself inching ever closer to the limits of your current backup solution, it might be time to shape up.

Costly to transport, vulnerable to loss, and often unencrypted, tapes are increasingly becoming a relic in the data backup world. Those who have been using backup tapes for years may swear by their reliability, but if they were to experience a disaster, they might learn their true cost.

Does all data have to fly first class? Of course not! But the most critical data should be kept first class, on high quality, highly available equipment built for speed and performance. Other less critical data can ride coach class, on less expensive equipment built for volume and capacity.

Let’s face it, capital markets are tight right now. Conserving capital may be the single most important financial objective out there.

Rather than replacing older equipment in a single large purchase, consider introducing one new platform, a smaller-scale solution in parallel with the existing systems. We’re splitting the difference here.

It may be less expensive to add a new platform than to grow an existing one. It can take a little pressure off an older storage array and give it just the breathing room it needs in terms of capacity and performance, to stretch it one more year.

If you don’t already have a data storage strategy, choose wisely.

While storage vendors have solutions to fit nearly every size, performance level, and budget, not all scale seamlessly. Many require significant rework—labor costs—to scale up. Others will hit physical limitations that force a wholesale swapping of one storage array for a larger one. Such “forklift” upgrades translate to more capital and people time.

From file and email servers to databases, archives, and backup, storage takes on many different shapes. Because of this, performance and manageability should be higher considerations than capacity.

In a time of economic uncertainty, one thing remains certain: this time next year there will be more data in the data center. Probably a lot more data.

History shows that data growth has been pacing at about 50% per year. Some growth is driven by new business solutions, such as productivity and quality gains, while other growth relates to regulatory requirements, like those of Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA.

Many IT budgets, if not already cut, soon will be—but from where? All that new data is going to stress every component of every system. Server CPUs will be busier, RAM less plentiful, and networks more congested. Data storage devices may soon overflow.