Government Technology

Storage Demands Increase Need for Better Management


November 24, 2008 By

Gone are the days when an agency could store all of its data on a small server. Industry experts report that storage needs are increasing between 30 percent and 50 percent annually. This trend will only soar as the size of multimedia and other file types continues to explode.

Fortunately as the demand for storage space rises, the cost of storage media declines. Samsung, for example, currently offers a 1-terabyte hard drive for less than $200. Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi offer comparable disks for similar prices. A standard 500 GB hard drive typically costs about $100.

The prevailing thought used to be that there's no such thing as having too much storage. So with the cost of storage dirt-cheap these days, why isn't the public sector jumping at the opportunity to store everything and anything? Jim Burns, CIO of Alabama, said cheap storage comes with its own problems.

"It's a bad idea to offer unlimited storage because management costs skyrocket and backup and retrieval becomes unmanageable," Burns said. "Cost of storage media, such as disk, is a very small part of the overall costs associated with an enterprise storage solution. The industry agrees that disk is cheap, but for every dollar spent on disk, it takes about $5 to $7 to manage it."

 

Infrastructure Costs


View Full Story

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/security/Storage-Demands-Increase-Need-for-Better.html


| More

Comments


Add Your Comment

You are solely responsible for the content of your comments. We reserve the right to remove comments that are considered profane, vulgar, obscene, factually inaccurate, off-topic, or considered a personal attack.

GovTech Papers and Case Studies View Library


Sponsored Links



Phone RSS

Government Best Practices

» A New Model for Human Resources
» Abandoning the High Cost of Enterprise Content Management



Government Technology
Public CIO
Emergency Management
Digital Communities