Data storage: Now smallest companies get the big picture

Conservative estimates suggest that the average sized company could store over 100 terabytes of data by the end of next year, nearly a hundred-fold increase over figures of just two or three years ago.

This data explosion has caused data storage to assume a pivotal role in the corporate computing environment.

The cost of data storage is also becoming significant. Alone, it could soon eat up as much as 80% of all IT spending, according to research data.

Importantly, the need for data storage is no longer the exclusive requirement of medium to large companies. Today, with the increasing emphasis on comprehensive record-keeping designed to achieve good governance goals, the need in even the smallest of companies for a comprehensive storage management plan has been exposed.

In fact, many industry analysts have indicated that an effective data storage management strategy is fundamental to long-term marketplace success for start-up organisations.

Storage management is traditionally associated with backup and restore operations - activities that are important, but not critical to corporate well-being.

Today, storage needs to be a significantly more sophisticated and mission-critical discipline in which access to - and the manipulation of - corporate data are keys to competitive advantage.

Implementing a comprehensive storage management plan requires a management solution that is both flexible and scalable. It must be able to dynamically manage and monitor storage assets and perform capacity planning.

Importantly, it must be able to operate intelligently to support specific enterprise policies.

One of the key functions of a storage management plan is productivity enhancement. Increasingly, businesses are looking at the manipulation of information to optimise communications - either internally, over the Internet, via e-mail, with suppliers or with customers and potential customers.

This is an area that traditional storage solutions often fail to address because they do not take into account spiralling data densities and the high cost of data storage, neither do they focus on issues such as the off-loading of traffic from the network to streamline and rationalise storage.

It should come as no surprise therefore, that new-age storage technologies are taking rapid leaps towards creating solutions such as serverless backup and the provision of rationalised "snap-shot" storage capabilities that are invisible to the application.

Storage management does not stop with backup. Data migration based on usage is important, so is disaster recovery. Functionality such as image restore, fail-over replication, and multi-format data handling capabilities are paramount.

Another important consideration is security.

Security remains one of the most pressing IT concerns today. Even the smallest companies must take action to secure their resources and provide themselves with a holistic view of their IT and physical infrastructures.

Smaller companies commonly have limited budgets for data protection. As a result, it is essential for them to appropriately assign protection resources to data selectively, based on well-defined risk factors.

With this in mind, a key element of such a data management plan has to be the selection of a solution that is able to map directly to all the corporate business needs of today - while capable of meeting growth demands of the future.

There is no doubt that, with the economic constraints of the past two years to deal with, smaller organisations, in particular, are having to do more with fewer resources.

In the data storage context, this has increasingly necessitated a shift from labour-intensive "reactive data storage management" to resource conserving, "proactive management" methods.

However, the uninterrupted data needs of 24x7x365 e-businesses have added a new dimension to this scenario, fundamentally changing the availability and performance requirements of storage solutions.

This has resulted in downtime traditionally allotted to data management and backup activities shrinking to zero - in many cases.

Storage solutions must now be able to transparently manage and protect data without interrupting the application; they must have policy-based recovery capabilities so they restore the most critical business process first; and they must provide topology discovery, virtualisation and active monitoring of all storage components.

Moreover, storage solutions of tomorrow must provide data organisational functions such as file system management, file sharing, volume management, data replication and dynamic storage allocation - as well application and server fail-over, without clustering, to ensure high availability.

With this in mind, it has been proven that the most cost-effective route is to purchase a single storage management solution - and have it professionally integrated into the company`s IT infrastructure.

This is preferable to the addition of storage capacity - both hardware and software - on a "piece-meal" basis.

This strategy places storage management within a larger effort required by many growing companies to improve the reliability, security and manageability of enterprise computing through the implementation of end-to-end management.

These criteria, not previously common to small business decision-making, are today recognised as the basis for meeting the challenges of backup, archiving, data migration, disaster recovery and media management in the future.