How should small companies deal with soaring storage capacity needs when they have little or no IT resources? What kind of storage should be added? How can this be done without under- or overbuying? If you work for a very small company, focus for the time being on relatively inexpensive, easy-to-use products that don't require IT participation but that can dramatically improve the storage situation. An example is consolidating data into a single repository; larger storage servers have a higher degree of scalability that allow for greater flexibility when more capacity, performance or connectivity is required. For slightly larger companies with about 50 employees, move to Network Attached Storage (NAS), which allows multiple servers to access a NAS box that holds the stored data. For companies with 100 or more employees, go for larger servers that can scale up to dozens of terabytes or storage arrays. Many companies are in this game, including Adaptec, EMC and NEC. To size your systems appropriately, ask how many other activities the file server handles, how many people make up the workgroup and what type of network traffic they generate, and how many files are hosted on a network share.
Read more about how to deal with storage issues at smaller companies:
- read the article at Small Business Computing
ALSO:
- read this on why storage virtualization is no panacea
- and this on why hosted IT infrastructures can save money for small businesses
