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COPYRIGHT 2007 Centaur Publishing Ltd.
As data volumes grow at an increasing pace, companies are realising they cannot just keep buying more space and are turning to smarter digital solutions. David Reed reports
Reed's Law states that the volume of data doubles every 12 months. With data processing power doubling only every 18 months, the mismatch spells trouble for data management. Driven by the expansion of data volumes from digital channels, organisations are now awash in data.
Most of this data pours into existing data warehouses and is processed by core business systems. Unavoidably, as the former gets fuller, performance of the latter drops. If response times are critical, this congestion can hurt the business.
As a result, the issue of data storage is a constant on the IT agenda. More, better, faster or cheaper storage solutions inform many of the buying decisions in this department. But unless a company sees its main business as growing servers, it needs to look at more intelligent approaches.
From load balancing to storage area networks, visualisation to archiving, the options are increasing. Decisions about data storage are no longer just choices between rival boxes, they go to the heart of business processes.
"Customers are still buying more storage and bigger boxes, but the tide is turning," says Andy Holpin, consultant with IT consultancy Morse. "A few major organisations have implemented archiving solutions. They know they can't keep on growing storage at the current rate. Many aim to move data on to other media, not just for performance reasons, but also for compliance."
One advantage of moving data out of the core processing environment...
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