I read a stat the other day that only three of five companies have a storage strategy in place. I am pretty sure most of us have faced the dreaded dead drive in our own personal PCs and have either had to pay decent money to get data off the drive or lose some critical files. I would be scared to calculate the amount of productivity lost to bad storage practices. I wanted to run through a few basic principles.
First of all, a plan must ensure the backup/storage is done automatically. Gone are the days that you can rely on a calendar entry to backup your drives once a month. You need something that manages the backup in the background. You just can’t trust people to do it themselves.
Second is reliability. I have heard of so many situations where the backup is not tested and monitored and you find out that the backup is out of sync or unusable or certain parts have not been executing properly. This is more common than you think.
Third, you MUST move a copy of your data offsite on a regular basis. Twoeasy situations to illustrate this – water damage and theft. If they are going to take one server, they’ll take the one next to it with the backup disk.
The options in storage methodologies, architectures and price points is growing every day. There are the majors like HP, IBM, NetApp, EMC who do it all (at a cost) to smaller vendors who specialize in the SMB space to the online and offline personal/small server solutions. Two of the best online resources are storagemagazine.techtarget.com or searchstorage.techtarget.com.
