Taming the Storage Beast
Yes, storage. You can never have enough of it. I've heard many people gleefully tell me how they got a new 500GB hard drive that they'll never be able to fill up and then in 6 months they are running out of space. And, no it has nothing to do with Windows, Mac or Linux, it has to do with data and organization.
On the server side, several new technologies let us connect a central storage system to multiple servers, making it easy to manage the storage system and dynamically allocate space. One such technology that is maturing is ISCSI. Think of ISCSI for storage as VoIP for telephony, the connection between the storage system and the processing system (servers) is IP which means you are now open to using network switches and cables instead of much more expensive proprietary devices. Another powerful feature to control storage on the server side is to set user quotas. If a certain user exceeds their quota, you can send them an automated warning, if they don't take action, they are stopped from saving additional files on the server unless they delete some old data.
On the desktop side, something that has potential is eSATA. This is the same SATA interface that hard drives use to connect inside your PC, but the "e" stands for external. So you can connect an external hard drive to your system but still enjoy the performance benefits of SATA (USB is not as fast.) We are now seeing several models of laptops that have eSATA connections on them to hook up external drives.
One thing to keep in mind, weather storage is on the desktop or server, make sure you have redundancy. Sooner or later, a hard drive is going to fail, it's only a matter of time as this mechanical devices is spinning around 10,000 revolutions per minute (RPM)! Yes, same RPM as shown in your car but don't try to get your car engine to that RPM, it will probably cut off way sooner.
We are all eagerly following the development of SSD technology, this will enable hard drives to be similar to flash drives, which have no moving parts and use a fraction of the power. Right now the technology is expensive and has limited write cycles, but the future does look good for this.
Nadeem Azhar 4/7/2009
2007 Copyright PC.Solutions.Net Business process automation, information technology consulting, IT Outsourcing, HP partner, IBM partner, Microsoft partner, Secure Computing partner, GFI partner, Symantec Partner
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NOTE: We are making a change in after hours support. In the past we used to provide critical after hours support only and we decided if a support ticket was critical or not (usually things affecting a single machine were deemed not critical and server down was deemed critical). This did not work very well, so instead of us trying to determine if a case is critical or now, we'll let you decide.
We are going to start providing after hours support at double the standard rate. So, for example, if a certain task is billed at $130/hour during regular business hours, after hours it will be $260/hour. This should cut down non critical after hours support calls where users wait until the weekend to place a support call. Also, now we'll start providing same level of support service after hours as we have during business hours. This will go into effect on 4/15/2009. This does not effect pre-arranged implementations.
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