Data is now as responsible for making the world go around as money because businesses can’t have one without the other. That means how you handle your data is equally as important as how you handle your money and while most businesses have ample data security where it matters, they often don’t manage their data in the most efficient way.
The buzzword in data management is scalability, but that doesn’t necessarily mean adding another blade drive to your hardware stack. Scalability increasingly concerns accessibility and the number of users a system can realistically accommodate. If you are using a managed cloud based storage system, then ensuring your data is always accessible is someone else’s problem until it fails…then it’s your problem again.
It wouldn’t be good advice to suggest shunning the services of a managed data management centre because in reality, they are often the best solution. However, if you are insistent on managing your own data or your business is a data management centre, then today you need to deal with what you anticipate happening a year from now because a year in data management can be a very short twelve months.
Capacity Management and Capacity Planning
Capacity management and capacity planning were much more important in previous decades because once your business spent on infrastructure it was expected to have a working life of at least five years. Consequently, many businesses overspent on IT because they anticipated a need that sometimes never materialised. At that time, capacity planning was the only way to future proof your hardware setup, but even then, it was really down to speculation despite the best efforts of people to add a touch of science.
Today, capacity planning and management has moved on considerably. For example, Dell storage solutions a decade ago would have consisted of hardware with space to expand the number of drives or server blades, but today [tp lang=”en” only=”y”]Dell’s Data Management Solutions provide flexibility[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]Dell’s Data Management Solutions provide flexibility[/tp] that allow businesses to expand in terms of accessibility. Dell is a good example because they are one of the better known suppliers to industry. That doesn’t mean server blade expansion is no longer a prerequisite of IT planners, but ensuring the ability to handle traffic is just as important today.
Scaling Data Server Accessibility
The load balance of your LAN or WAN network server is an area of data management often overlooked when entering into a capacity planning exercise. Load balancing and bandwidth are key areas where less capable data centres fail and they receive poor feedback as a result. This has driven more and more data centres to concentrate on bandwidth as a priority purchase rather than storage, which is easily expandable.