Data storage revolution isn’t just full of hot air
For years, some experts have remained adamantly skeptical that backup and archive solutions would staya solid-state affair, looking to cloud and virtualized servers to host everything from long-term financial records to daily operational files. If business continuity issues have taught firms anything in the last year, though, it’s that corporate security must rely on a remote, physical resource outside the reach of natural disasters or malicious attacks. Companies are expressing this understanding by implementing stronger safety solutions and investing in more hard disk management tools, looking for better ways to get the same work done while saving money.
That’s a lot for firms to say they’re going to do at one time. Focusing on a single initiative may not prove fruitful for years, as companies concerned about rushing a launch may hesitate indefinitely for fear of putting out a software solution that doesn’t work or employees dislike. Instead, building different background infrastructure could be a good initial step, and one that Computerworld wrote will soon be lifting data centers to new heights and savings.
Helium-filled hard drives seem to be an increasingly popular trend among manufacturers. These devices reduce friction by filling hardware with lighter-than-air gases, allowing for more storage per drive while reducing overall heat in the data center and speeding up access time. In short, they do all the things that companies have been trying to accomplish with a half-dozen other fixes for the last decade or so.
One step at a time
But some people want to use these speedy solutions to build virtualized servers. An InformationWeek study showed more than half of all companies are already in this arena, with just under 25 percent saying they would join that group by the end of the year, but these solutions shouldn’t all be implemented at once. Businesses need to slow down and assess how well hard disk management is working before adding virtual infrastructure on top of it – just like building a house on a weak foundation, a server deployment could crumble if its hardware underpinnings don’t work the way they are intended.
Fast Company wrote that businesses should try looking backto see what they’ve accomplished so far. That way, they can see what systems have been updated most recently and what’s in need of attention, uniformly improving corporate infrastructure.