As small and midsize businesses plan to spend more than ever on storage solutions to hold their growing volumes of data, we run down the options
An efficient, effective means of storage is vital to business continuity in the event of disaster. Whether disasters are on an upturn is debatable; the growing volume of data at small and midsize businesses is not.
Forrester Research reports that midsize businesses plan to increase their storage budgets by as much as 10 percent next year to accommodate growing needs for data protection and the sheer volume of data generated by small and midsize companies.
The first choice concerning how and where data is stored, is between whether to manage data storage in-house or online, as a hosted service. Either way there are a number of tradeoffs involving access, security, and data recovery. As vendors load up storage offerings with features once reserved for enterprises only, in-house storage becomes a sophisticated component of any IT shop.
Start Simple, Then Cue the Robots
A network attached storage device such as Maxtor's Shared Storage Plus with up to 500 GBs sits on the simple end of the storage spectrum.
A storage robot, like Drobo, can do more. This device is comprised of a USB drive enclosure with four empty bays that can house any combination of SATA hard drives. CNET says it "takes the pain and confusion out of data protection and lets you tailor and expand the drive according to your needs. This so-called storage robot works exactly as promised and is the most innovative storage device we've seen in a long time."
Online Storage Backup Services
No known robot, nor robot army can preserve a company's data in the face of a catastrophic natural disaster. For those occasions online backup services are a better choice. Experts note that, unlike NAS or RAID solutions, Web-based systems "that transmit backups to remote data centers ensure that a copy of your valuable business information is safely tucked away many miles from your office."
Pocket-Size Storage
For business that are physically small, Fusion-io's flash storage card the ioDrive, promises to be a real space saver. Its 640 GB card can fit in your hand and is being called the "next big thing in storage" because it promises performance a thousand times faster than a disk drive and doesn't require a RAID controller. It could make huge storage area networks (SAN) " go the way of the dinosaur or the dodo bird."
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