Five tips

  for storing your data

Your company data is the most valuable asset you own, but are you storing it correctly? It’s important to understand the benefits of centralised storage for your business.

Consider these 5 storage tips:

Tip 1: Don’t rely on your servers to store your data

Many businesses we speak to think that the server hard drive is the right place to store data but if you run two or more servers then think again. You should consider a central repository for your data because centralising your storage makes it easy to share, control and access your data efficiently. You should invest in a device that’s sole job is to store and retrieve data.

Tip 2: Don’t confuse storage and back-up

It’s one thing to store your data and another to back them up. The purpose of a storage device is to share files across multiple servers and do it in a way that is fast, secure and reliable. A back-up device should sit “behind” a storage device and its job is to maintain copies of the files should you ever need to recover them. You should have both an effective data storage strategy and back-up strategy but these are not the same thing.

Tip 3: Store your data “locally”

The key to centralising your storage is to maximise the speed at which your data can be shared, stored and retrieved. Connecting to your storage device via Optic Fibre or iSCSI is your best option. The performance bottleneck is likely to be the connection between your server and storage device so keep this in mind if you run remote offices. Each remote office should have “local” storage and you should not rely on an internet connection to access data.

Tip 4: Virtual servers should be treated differently

If you are running a virtualised environment then you’ll need to consider a storage solution that can handle both physical and virtual storage. The storage device needs to “talk” to your virtualisation software (e.g. VMware or Microsoft) and it needs to be able to scale without slowing down your network. In short, a traditional storage device probably won’t do the trick.

Tip 5: Don’t waste space

You would be surprised how often you store the same data more than once. Duplicate data takes up unnecessary space and slows you down. These days you can buy products that “de-duplicate” your data before storing which will save you time and money.

In summary, if you run two or more servers then you should definitely consider centralised storage. Give us a call to discuss whether it’s right for your business.