We have the good fortune of having opportunities to contribute our insights to readers of popular online editorials like Processor.com. We have been featured by Processor.com for everything from how web development businesses use our products to the challenges to disaster recovery and even the power of partitioning.
This is the most recent article that we were able to contribute to. We were asked to respond to a series of questions related to storage and the growing trend of virtualization.
Strategies For Growth
Without knowing where to start, it’s impossible to determine an effective and efficient strategy for growth. A key to gaining that knowledge is determining current storage requirements, says Aaron Van Velsir, senior account executive at Abtech Systems (www.abtechsystems.com). Van Velsir recommends that administrators perform a trend analysis, which consists of current information plus any new applications, projects, and new users to be added. With this data, future growth patterns can be extrapolated; assuming a three- to five-year life expectancy for a storage array means administrators should develop total storage requirements for three to five years, says Van Velsir.
Enterprise growth requires scalability in the data center; with storage technology that doesn’t scale well, enterprise growth will be, at best, difficult to manage. At worst, the lack of scalability could hinder business growth when it’s needed most.
Koka Sexton, manager of business development for Paragon Software Group (www.paragon-software.com), says administrators should be sure to use solutions that scale easily to growing storage demands. Consolidating free space with software can reduce new hardware expenses and maximize existing storage infrastructure, Sexton says; however, when new virtual machines or virtual storage is deployed, administrators should look for tools that can manage different virtual platforms.
Read the entire article here