This post by Adrian De Luca, Director Pre-Sales & Solutions, Australia & New Zealand at Hitachi Data Systems.
With 2010 now upon us, most (if not all) small businesses would have thought about their business strategies for the year ahead. Most of these strategies would almost certainly include plans to grow the business. Growth holds the key to profitability, stability and consistency of revenue. In order to successfully expand your business, you need to think about a number of factors, such as the number of employees to hire and the skills they need, marketing strategies, inventory, cash flow and expenses such as the office lease, electricity and other operational costs.
However, there is another component to think about that, if ignored, can leave your growth plans stone dead. All organisations, no matter what size, rely on information in one way or another. Be it customer records, customer orders, inventory or balance sheets – information is the lifeblood of any business, with most of this data stored on computerised storage systems. Unfortunately, little attention is given to planning this aspect of business operations – and should your storage hardware crash, your business may be faced with certain disaster.
An additional challenge is the amount of information that a typical small business relies upon today, which is unimaginable compared to just five years ago – and the volume of that data will only increase. Analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2012, the typical company will manage seven times the information that it currently stores today. Yet with even today’s volumes, independent research has shown that one in three organisations in Australia and New Zealand are still unable to recover files from its backup tape[i]. Similarly, a whopping 95 per cent of respondents said they have suffered under the burden of excessive growth in managing this digital information.
So how can you ensure that your storage system is geared for your business growth this year? Below are five rules to consider when looking at data storage hardware.
Storage always grows faster than you think
If you’re in the market to purchase or upgrade your storage hardware, ensure that it has built-in expandability, which is the ability to add extra capacity to store files and process data as and when you need it.
Otherwise known as “modular” storage, this extra capacity can be added to the system while it is running. Typically in the one system, you have a combination of fast storage and slower, larger capacity storage. This kind of flexibility is ideal for growing businesses because you only buy what you need when you need it. It also allows you to take advantage of the latest technology to get the best balance of capacity and performance for your dollar.
Some storage systems will demand that you completely replace your old system with a new one – however, this is not necessary. It is much easier to upgrade and accommodate your new capacity requirements. Today’s storage systems can start with as few as four disk drives and expand all the way up to 480 drives, without needing to buy a new product. This should be more than adequate for your growing business.
Cheap is expensive when things go wrong
Too often the focus is on the initial cost of storage and the cheapest deal available. However, as a result many businesses are potentially sacrificing on the quality of the product, which means you could wind up with a substandard product or one that does not suit your business requirements.
When considering what storage to purchase, its capacity is just one consideration. It is also vital to understand what applications you will be running and your expectations of the system’s performance. This then informs your decision as to the kind of storage you should buy. In order to reduce the total storage cost, today’s systems usually feature “tiered storage”, which assigns different categories of data to the different types of storage media. The information on each tier is usually based on how important the file is and how often they are accessed. Since assigning data to particular media can be complex, determining which information exists on each tier is usually based on company-defined policies or automatically set up for you.
Another consideration is the connection between your servers and your storage. The number of connections needs to be chosen correctly to avoid nasty bottlenecks and unpredictable performance. Your IT reseller or systems integrator can help with understanding the ramifications of these decisions.
Backups are boring until you can’t get your data back
Just like Internet security software, you need to ensure that your data protection software is up to date. Unfortunately, many organisations persist with outdated data protection software that actually does more to make the business inefficient than protect it.
Modern data protection software should be simple to install and manage, as well as provide you with a comprehensive view on the success of your backups. For example, the Hitachi Data Protection Suite can provide a “backup readiness report” that runs automatically before the data protection software backs up your data at the end of the night – this tests all the backups that will take place and proactively identifies any areas that may fail. As a result, you can take corrective action before the backup fails, rather than finding out when you arrive at work the next day.
To ensure that you can easily recover your data, test it regularly so that you can sleep well at night. It is worth taking 10 minutes a week or even a month to pick a random backup to see if you can restore it.
Easy is good
Why make your job harder than it already is? Look for storage products that are easy to manage and then invest in specialist services to install the hardware and provide the training and skills needed to maintain it. That way, your system will be up and running from the start without you needing to spend time trawling through the manual.
Installing a storage system can be tricky for even the most IT-savvy person. While modern storage products are meant to cover all of the common storage allocation tasks and eliminate the complexity of installation, it will make your life a whole lot easier leaving this to the experts.
Clean up your room
While backing up information is about recovering your data should you lose it, data archiving is about keeping certain information stored securely for a long period of time.
You will need to set data archiving policies in order to decide what data needs to be kept and for how long. Then you or your IT expert will need to implement a simple, reliable, automated archival system that combines the right software and hardware to meet your long-term storage requirements. This will free up primary storage space and ensures that your corporate data is archived and is stored in line with government regulations, such as keeping financial records and lodging these with ASIC. Archiving also reduces the costs in purchasing additional storage systems and reduces the amount of information needed to be backed up each night.
While it can be difficult to decide on specific data archiving policies, this makes it harder to manage your data as it grows. The alternative is to implement “generic” policies for data to migrate it to lower tiers for longer-term retention, which can be modified later.
Grow with the flow
When thinking about your growth plans for the following year, consider the information you have and how critical it is to the running of, and success of your business.
Your company data will increase – so it is vital that your storage system can grow with you (and protect you).
– Adrian De Luca is Director, Pre-Sales & Solutions, Australia & New Zealand at Hitachi Data Systems
[i] “The Great Information Glut”, September 2009. Sweeney Research commissioned by Hitachi Data Systems.
