How can you effectively reduce the cost involved in file storage?

The cost of file storage has always been a problem for enterprise IT administrators, how can you effectively reduce the cost involved in file storage? For years, corporate organizations have faced exponential growth in data, and they have been buying more storage capacity to support this growth, and in anticipation of a slowing economy, Enterprise organizations still do not suffer from the impact of reducing the content created and the need for data preservation. Therefore, the data that needs to be stored will continue to increase, and the budget will be further reduced, which is clearly an uncoordinated state. If you have more data, then you need more money to buy capacity, that's for sure. In the case of austerity, business organizations began to seek solutions that were less costly and at the same time responsive to demand. This will also create an opportunity for more efficient and innovative solutions designed for storage administrators to be promoted by vendors.

Files are now the fastest-growing data type, and non-institutional files and file-based data consume more storage space, and these files are kept for a relatively long time.

There are currently three types of file-based data: Document and output documents, application-created data, and content warehouses. Some of the following recommendations will apply to all categories, while others will only target a specific type of file-based data.

Here are the recommendations on how to maintain your file-based storage cost control:

1, if you don't know who created a lot of data, and for what purpose to create the data and send it to who, then you are in control of file-based storage do nothing. I am often surprised that many employees can save any data in the enterprise's network share. As image technology progresses, higher-resolution files consume more storage capacity. Therefore, if employees store their pictures, music or videos, they consume a lot of storage content that is useless to the enterprise. A typical example is that our current digital camera creates a JPEG format that is typically about 2.75MB in size, and these capacity growth rates are unusually rapid.

So keeping a close eye on the files stored in the network can help you save a lot of space on the file server. Storage resource management software (SRM) can help you achieve this goal, or you can use the storage resource management reporting capabilities of open source software.

2. In recent years, there have been some technological advances in the industry to improve capacity utilization and efficiency, which can be broadly divided into three categories of "capacity optimization, intelligent configuration of storage virtualization technology and resource integration."

Capacity optimization technology is the use of compression technology, a single instance, as well as data de-duplication technology to deal with, so as to reduce the storage space occupied by data locks, thereby increasing capacity utilization. Previous optimization techniques were primarily for backup and archiving, but now there are many products on the market that can also be used for file-based data sets. If the cost of purchasing these technologies is lower than the cost of purchasing more storage capacity, then it is worth considering.

Storage virtualization is a feature that delivers real value, such as an automated, streamlined configuration that can provide benefits to users, helping organizations postpone the purchase cycle of storage hardware until they really need it. However, the automatic streamlining of configuration features does not bring much cost savings, as most storage administrators and enterprise employees increase the efficiency and performance of data reads through excessive allocation of capacity. Block based virtualization is an integral part of the user's real value, which optimizes capacity usage and improves performance. In terms of cost per gigabyte, hardware costs are slipping every year, so delaying purchases can cost less in the long run and control spending in the short term.

Server virtualization plays a very important role in data center consolidation and efficiency, and in a file-based storage world, data is still stored in single-instance file systems or NAS devices. Many enterprise organizations therefore face a major challenge, some systems will eventually be fully exploited, and some systems only to deal with the ease of processing load. System administrators spend a lot of time on the complex balancing of users, migrating data and allocating data to these new storage hardware.

Unified consolidation based on file storage systems is far from a one-size-fits-all umbrella, but it can improve storage utilization, enhance performance, and reduce management overhead. It can load-balance and massively seamlessly improve utilization, improve performance while reducing management overhead. This is achieved through a distributed file system or NAS device as a file system in a server node. Each node can generate performance improvements or provide more usable capacity.

3, another interesting technology in the storage market is the "storage as a Service" (Storage-as-a-service,saas) based on the cloud storage architecture. Use this service to accept storage content in transit. Now those organizations with quarterly data or need to configure new storage resources are considering cloud storage as a complement to their storage infrastructure. Whether the data is static, dynamic, or backed up, it can be stored in a highly available storage cloud. The use of public cloud storage requires less spending and can be purchased for real-demand storage capacity. This way of paying for capacity can also free up more space in the datacenter.

End users will continue to look for better solutions to how to reduce their business budgets, and vendors will seek to maintain their own orders without diminishing opportunities. In this case, it would be a good opportunity for both sides to have a chance to test what they can do today, how they handle and store the data, and make it more efficient to do more things with less money. Manufacturers also have the opportunity to make their products more competitive by increasing utilization, efficiency, and investment protection. Some manufacturers will use existing products to get the opportunity, and some vendors will find partners or acquisitions to achieve. While this is not the way we expect to be able to spark change, after this recession is over, we are sure to have a more efficient and smarter infrastructure for managing the file storage information.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)