Due to the rapid growth of data and the need to store this data in a secure environment, organisations will definitely get to a point where their hard drive capacity is crippled.
So says Kalvin Subbadu, sales manager at WD Components in SA, who notes to overcome this, organisations should look for drives that are reliable and able to cater to the rapid growth of data.
"We are all too familiar with the challenge of storing digital content, largely due to the huge amounts of documents, music, videos and photos we download," says Subbadu.
However, this challenge is similar for most small to medium enterprises (SMEs) that make use of network-attached storage (NAS) to save their work documents or back them up, he points out.
"Many users - both consumers and businesses - have to at some point face the reality that they are running out of disk space. So what is the answer? Purchase more NAS enclosures and hard drives?"
Fortunately, the industry is taking cognisance of this issue and as such, there is an emergence of higher capacity drives that create the ability to store more content on a single NAS enclosure, Subbadu notes.
He explains the NAS market is growing continuously and with the introduction of higher capacity drives, it will assist the consumer to store more data in a single enclosure. For example, with 5TB and 6TB Red NAS drives, a business or consumer can store up to 48TB of data in a six-bay NAS enclosure.
"Lately, we are seeing more four-bay and five-bay NAS enclosures sold alongside the traditional high volume sale of two-bay enclosures. This indicates the NAS hype is starting to gain traction and consumers are storing more data in a private cloud."
Simon Campbell-Young, CEO of Phoenix Distribution, concurs with Subbadu that data is increasing at an alarming pace, pointing out IDC expects data to grow to a staggering 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020.
Trying to keep up with this overwhelming, constant influx of data, and finding and investing in the latest backup and recovery technologies can be a challenge, especially for SMEs with more modest budgets, Campbell-Young says.
"That is why NAS is a good option for smaller businesses and why it has gained popularity in the SME space," he adds.
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