But Storage Is Cheap!

Do you have enough capacity?

Production of hard drives have been dramatically impacted by the major floods in Thailand. Western Digital (a major manufacturer of hard drives) says that it believes there will be a world-wide shortage of 60 million hard drives in the December quarter. This is already impacting sales of certain hard drives, and is likely to get worse before it gets better. This is likely to impact the cost of storage as well the availability (on the basis of supply and demand).

What is Capacity Management?

Capacity management means the making sure that there is enough resources (storage, memory, CPU cycles etc.) for the current and future requirements. If you believe that you organisation needs to buy additional storage in the next quarter (and potentially beyond) then you may wanto consider bringing the purchase forward to avoid your organisation being one of the unlucky ones that can’t get the vital storage that it needs.

I don’t know if I Have Enough Storage

If you’re not regularly performing capacity management then that needs to be your first priority, this needs to include not only storage, but other resources (servers, desktops, laptops, CPU, memory etc.), as if the shortage of hard drives continues to get worse as some are predicting servers, desktops, and laptops will also be impacted. If you need help in performing capacity management, contact our Virtual IT Director team who will be able to assist you.

I’m trying to Buy Storage and can’t!

If you find yourself in this position, ideally you will know what data is the most important, what can be archived off, and potentially what can be removed. If you don’t have that information then you need to perform a data usage audit, depending on the volume of data concerned, this can be a lengthy exercise, so don’t leave it to the last minute. If you need help in performing this, contact our Virtual IT Director team team who will be able to assist you. A data retention policy can be a great help in determining what to keep and for how long for, if your organisation doesn’t have one then its probably time to create one.

Once you know what you can do with what data, there are many different options, these may include storage on a cloud service (these use hard drives as well though, so we may see a rise in cloud storage costs as a result). You may also consider archiving to tape, make sure that you take precautions, tape is a good medium, but in our experience it is a fragile medium.

Deleting data may be an option, ideally however you would archive the contents to tape or another backup medium to free space in preference to deleting data which can be very permanent.

Your Next Steps

If you’re not confident that your capacity planning, data usage information or data retention policy are up to date these should definitely be your first objective. If you need help in performing any of these functions contact Fifth Step’s Virtual IT director team who will get you back on the right path.