Storage costs have a habit of spiralling out of control. If this sounds familiar, storage consolidation and archiving could be just what you need to drive your costs back down...
Avoid storage sprawl
When you notice that your network’s running low on storage space it's tempting just to plug more storage in. This is certainly effective in the short term, but there's a problem: storage sprawl, where data ends up stored all over your organisation on different servers and storage devices with no clear plan or logical order.
Storage sprawl gives you storage that’s:
- difficult and costly to manage
- tricky to back up
- difficult to expand
- wasteful
You can avoid all this with storage consolidation – plenty of low-cost storage, without the problems of storage sprawl.
What is storage consolidation?
Storage consolidation involves storing all your data centrally on a dedicated hard drive known as a network attached storage (NAS) device.
PCs connect to this central store over your network, and each can use as much or as little as it needs. End users won't notice any difference to the way their data is being stored.
How storage consolidation can save you money
Running low on disk space? Not a problem: just add capacity to your storage pool. This solution is much quicker and more convenient than fitting new disks to individual PCs.
When you consolidate your storage pool all your unused storage space is available whenever it's needed. There’s little if any wasted storage space.
By contrast, on a typical networked PC a huge amount of available storage space could be wasted
Backing up a consolidated storage pool is very quick and easy, and it won't slow your network to a crawl – unlike a backup that needs to fetch data from many points across a diverse network.
With less wasted space you'll have fewer hard drives to power, delivering cost savings and cutting your carbon footprint
What are the drawbacks of consolidated storage?
With consolidated storage you are putting all your storage eggs in one basket – a problem with your NAS could affect all your computers.
To prevent this, consider buying a NAS device that includes RAID – a system that protects your data even if one or more hard drives break down – and a redundant power supply which will take over automatically if the primary one breaks down.
Introducing storage consolidation also means your network will be busier than before. Make sure your network has plenty of capacity to keep your data flowing quickly and your programs running smoothly.
Cut costs further with data archiving
If you want to make even more cost savings, consider archiving. This involves identifying older data on your NAS that you rarely use, and moving it to cheaper storage.
What are the other benefits of data archiving?
- Archiving frees up space on your NAS device so you don't need to spend money increasing its capacity.
- When you archive older data, it gets indexed before it's stored. That means you'll be able to find and retrieve individual files in your archive easily whenever you need them.
- Archiving data reduces your total storage requirements as it also gets compressed. And since archived data is not included in your regular backups, they take less time to run.
- You can easily archive your data to unalterable media such as optical disks to comply with regulatory and legal requirements.
Which data should you archive?
When choosing which data to archive, pay special attention to:
- Data that's old, but which you can't delete in case you need it in the future
- Data that you'll probably never look at again but which for legal reasons you have to retain for a number of years – such as tax or personnel records
- Email and other data that you need to be able to find quickly if you should ever face legal action
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