Our first IT Business report of 2006 looks at developments in data storage. You’re receiving this report because you’re a subscriber to one of the IT Business Group family of publications – including Computing Canada, Computer Dealer News, Technology in Government, EDGE, Communications & Networking and Direction Informatique.
While demand for other technologies is curbed by economic fluctuation, there is always more data being generated, always more demand to store that data. File types associated with data stores now include space-hungry multi-media files. Regulatory compliance requires auditable data maintenance. And since your data store of customer, supplier and financial information is your business, continuity and disaster planning are dependent on that data. The amount of data Canadian companies have to store doubles every 12 to 18 months.
In Storage is Your Business (page 6), Matt Friedman examines the trends that are developing in the networked storage environment. Perhaps most significant is the rise of information lifecycle management (ILM), which demands a fluid approach to the value of information and access to it – the priority of the data determines how and where it is stored.
Next, we take snapshots of a couple of storage implementations. In Tale of the (Virtual) Tape (page 10), Grant Buckler looks at how a storage services provider wrung more efficiency out of its tape backup infrastructure. The Art of the Archive (page 16) by Adam Pletsch examines the options a university faced to deal with its ever-growing data needs. Finally, we wrap up with some brief notes on some of the new software, hardware and services vendors are pitching to solve your storage problems.