At Transam where possible, we like to use
analogies to help the people in charge of storage make sense of what they are
being bombarded with day after day from resellers who pertain to be selling
benefits through providing lots and lots of storage 'that meets their day to day
needs'.
The cluttered house analogy:
The average household over time gets filled up with more and more junk.
Gradually this junk, however worthless, gets moved about and then stored
somewhere more long term - the loft or the shed in the garden - after all, you
don't want to throw it away in case you need it one day. In extreme
examples a storage company is used to take the junk offsite so it is no longer
in the house. However eventually you reach a limit. No more junk can be moved,
no more space in the shed can be utilised - you cant even get the garden mower
in there. You certainly cannot afford more offsite storage space. So - you have four
options:
-
Build an extension or a new shed
-
Move to a much larger
house
-
Get rid of everything
-
Sort through the junk that you have
acquired and acting sensibly to get rid of useless and worthless junk.
You have
to look at what is the most cost effective solution.
-
Building an extension or
buying a new house is going to be very costly financially - and also in terms of
moving all of the junk you have got and finding a new home for it.
-
Getting rid
of everything - well, what if you got rid of something that later proves to be
valuable?
-
Sorting through and removing rubbish? It costs a small amount of time, it
creates space and it means you can sort and manage the clutter that you decide
to keep so it is manageable in the future.
OK so how does the storage analogy help in your own company? Your users
are storing more and more junk, you may not even know who are the main culprits.
Did you know that up to 50% of storage space is wasted on things that are kept
on a 'just in case' basis. That doesn't take into account the storage space used
by users because they don't know what to keep or how long to keep it. So what
are your choices (ignoring deleting everything as this is simply not an option)?
So what do you do - as with the house
analogy your most cost effective and practical solution is to sort through the
information, remove anything of minimal importance, find out who the culprits
are and put in place policies and management structures to manage the space you
have created more effectively. You need to develop sensible policies:
-
Archiving and retention
-
Deletion
-
Less expensive storage
-
Staged approach
Obviously with your data on your systems you cannot simply empty out boxes
of junk and sift through with your hands what is and what is not needed. Neither can you know all
of what you are meant to keep and what you are not. However we have some
software from EMC that will allow you to see how your storage is being used,
analyse what is critical information and what is not. It will show you where
storage is being wasted. It will provide you with reports in 28 days that will
show you how you can free storage space.
We then have the expertise and knowledge to help you use best of scenario
technologies that will help make this storage manageable.
Our underlying message - don't just buy more storage for you to
fill up with more rubbish. Make your storage work more effectively for you and
save costs both now and 10 years into the future.
