Make Room for Computer Storage
from
May/June 2002
by Michael Rosenberg
Every so often you get a company-wide request from the IT folk imploring you to erase your backlog of old e-mail messages so there’ll be more room on the server. But that’s not the only place where the company’s computer systems are running out of space. Odds are that your CIO will soon be begging the board to invest in mass storage, a new system that provides ready access to the kinds of data you can’t simply dump like your arrangements for the Princeton-Yale tailgate party.
Companies as varied as Continental Airlines, Target, Xerox, Harley-Davidson, and Florida Power Corp. have already started to set up extra storage for their can’t-throw-away data. We’re talking lots and lots of data, since computers now eat information the way ’50s cars gulped gasoline—and far more expensively. A company’s computer files represent a huge investment in all kinds of digital assets, including letters, documents, pictures, diagrams, artwork, audio and video clips, and valuable intangibles such as talent and hard work.
How much space does all this need? A lot. Far more than you have now, and much more than you may think. Remember that a single snapshot of your family can take almost a megabyte. A song one of your kids downloaded from the Web may need 10 megabytes. So how much do you think that PowerPoint presentation uses up, the one with the Bach chorale? IDC Corp., a technology consulting firm in Framingham, Massachusetts, says that storage requirements will increase fivefold by 2005. If your company uses a higher-than-average amount of data, its needs may be even greater.
When your CIO starts talking to the board about what he wants to buy, you’ll probably hear a bunch of new buzzwords. If he says “Five nines,” for example, he means that data is available 99.999% of the time.
Here are some other terms he’s likely to use, and what they mean:
Digital asset protection.
Data is copied and moved to offsite warehousing as a protective measure. It can be reinstalled easily. This becomes an important piece of any disaster-recovery plan.
Digital asset sharing.
Data is available to everyone who needs it. That means many users and groups, both inside your company and outside.
High availability.
All the data is available to you, the user, all the time. The “five nines.”
Network attached store (NAS).
Multiple sets of computers are deployed in different locations to form the storage system. This is a different architecture from . . .
Storage area network (SAN).
A set of centrally located computers that make up the storage system.
Scalable.
The proposed storage system will grow with you. Look for relatively small incremental costs over time as the system expands.
Storage engine.
Same as a storage system.
How much is all this going to cost? Starter systems capable of storing 250 gigabytes can run $30,000 to $100,000 to install, but a company with a serious amount of data and a serious commitment to it should budget up to $3 million. A good rule of thumb is that a storage system will set you back 3% to 5% of your IT budget. You can, however, offset some of the cost against what you’d otherwise spend on disaster recovery. Indeed, before signing off on any storage proposal, the board should make sure that the new system is a key component in a comprehensive disaster-recovery plan.
