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A Better Outlook
for Information Management
New storage industry trends help organizations face the information explosion.
by Nelson Ruest and Danielle Ruest
It's hard to believe that some IT shops still think allocating 50 megabytes (MB) per user on a network is enough. Others don't manage user storage at all, waiting until people complain and then giving them unlimited space on the servers. But this willy-nilly approach to storage is not an answer. Storage space shouldn't run amok in the enterprise just because it keeps becoming less expensive.
The storage story doesn't end with where you put the data, though. It must also deal with how you protect it. If your organization allows uncontrolled growth of storage requirements, especially in distributed storage environments, you will soon be faced with a disaster—what's worse, it will be a disaster of your own making.
That's why you need to tackle storage issues today. Many companies are addressing the issue, partly because storage goes hand in hand with disaster recovery. If all of an organization's electronic assets are located within an information store, the store must be both secure and protected.
The good news is that the industry is at a crux in terms of both storage and disaster recovery. New technologies such as Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (Serial ATA, or SATA), Internet small computer serial interface (iSCSI), and Windows Server 2003, along with advances in current technologies such as Fibre Channel, paint a pretty picture for the future of storage technologies. In the end, these advances should make access to a simpler, more streamlined storage approach readily available to organizations of all sizes.
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