STORAGE SOLUTIONS
Conquer the storage blues
As data stacks up, every business needs a storage strategy. Steve Cassidy looks at ways to manage your megabytes
Some enterprise storage systems only work with “validated” drives
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lmost everything a business does generates data. So it’s entirely possible – even quite likely – that at some point you may abruptly and painfully run out of storage space. This isn’t a concern that’s always taken seriously, because avoiding it seems like almost the simplest job in IT: just stack up some more disks, job done.
However, if you take a closer look around, you may find that storage doesn’t scale up in the way you think it should. Older enterprises may still be relying on expensive boxes, with dedicated, special-purpose drives inside and six Ethernet ports on the back. These drives do the same job as cheap, generic SATA disks, but they’re coded to work with the supplier’s own NAS hardware – so while they’re technically hot-swappable, you can’t just replace one with a reclaimed disk from a decommissioned desktop, or bulk-buy a cheap batch of spares. You’ll have to pay whatever price is demanded for the approved drives, wait for however long it takes for them to arrive – and hope that support continues for as long as you need it.
This kind of protectionist approach is why many businesses have turned to cheap and cheerful desktop NAS systems. Unfortunately, these bring plenty of issues of their own. One thing that can be said for an enterprise NAS is that you can use it right off the bat, more or less; with a self-build device, configuring and reconfiguring your arrays can take days.
More to the point, these smaller, friendlier devices aren’t built for the demands of a larger office. I remember one company that centralised all its operations on a little two-drive Buffalo NAS, expecting it to host about 100 roaming profiles for Windows PCs. Inevitably, this task required far more memory than its logic board could accommodate: every morning, as people arrived for work and all started accessing their profiles, it would be called upon to serve up thousands of tiny files at once, and would end up totally overwhelmed.