Storage
All those electrons have to reside somewhere and it’s leading to a blossoming of storage. A study published last month in the journal Science found that between 1986 and 2007, storage volumes grew by half every year. It found there were 295 exabytes of storage in 2007, so by extrapolation there will be nearly 1500 exabytes in storage by the end of this year and nearly 8 zettabytes in five years.
Much of that storage is in the form of network attached storage, in which many SMEs are investing. Most such devices have cloud services integrated into them or it’s possible to use third parties such as DropBox or Lockbox (for secure online storage).
When advising on a storage solution consider those that have de- duplication features so an emailed document, for instance, is stored as a single instance and isn’t replicated every time a worker forwards it to someone.
Solutions ready for virtualisation are to be favoured because there is a push in most firms to simplify their infrastructure.
And it might be time to ask your customers about their backup and disaster recovery plans – is it time to retire those old tapes to put that data on platters or in the cloud?
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