Business Productivity

A Server-Based Network can Help to Ensure Your Data Storage Keeps Pace with Your Business

Though you'll never hear it complain, your network has one of the toughest jobs at your company. Day in and day out, you expect it to manage hundreds of emails, handle dozens of documents, oversee scores of images, and keep tabs on all sorts of video files, all the while moving Internet traffic safely and swiftly along.

That's a tall order, and more often than not, your network will execute flawlessly. But as your business grows and the amount of data you and your team generate grows along with it, network performance may slow in protest.

To keep one of your top "employees" performing at its best, it's a good idea to align your network's data management and storage capabilities with the growth of your business.

The Challenge: Managing the Data Explosion

Without a uniform and manageable method of saving and protecting data, your network will be taxed. But more importantly your business could face multiple threats. Financial data, emails and customer information might be scattered and unprotected. Your assistant may delete the wrong version of an RFP by mistake. Data could potentially be lost during a hardware failure, or even end up in the hands of a competitor or thief.

The solution to meeting these and myriad other data management and storage challenges your company faces can rarely be found in short-term, inflexible storage systems. Instead, focus on the long-term and employ storage methods that will grow with your company.

If you answer yes to any of the questions below, it's probably time to invest in a more comprehensive storage plan:

1. Does your business periodically delete old files simply to make room for newer ones? This can be a risky practice because employees may unknowingly delete files that need to be preserved.
2. Are external USB hard drives your primary solution for storing, managing and organizing files? While this is a simple and inexpensive option, it has drawbacks: external hard drives can easily be stolen; they're not designed in most cases to be transported offsite, and they only add capacity for one user.
3. Do you rely heavily on archiving to portable media, such as CDs, DVDs and memory sticks? While these devices are easily transportable and inexpensive, locating files stored on numerous different CDs or DVDs can be difficult. And because of their compact size, CDs, DVDs and memory sticks are easily misplaced, or worse, stolen.

"It's vitally important for all small businesses to establish a proactive data management and storage plan that's in sync with current and future business requirements," says Greg White, small and medium business storage expert at Dell. "If you plan now for the storage you will need down the road, you'll grow smartly and efficiently. This will not only help you to avoid the hassle and cost of scrambling to add capacity under a deadline, but will also help significantly reduce your risk of data loss."

The Solution: Start with Your Network Server

White recommends that small businesses steer clear of ad-hoc methods that might solve short-term data growth needs, but may add complexity and create "islands" of storage that are underutilized and difficult to protect.

The place you should begin, White says, is with your network server.

Servers have the robust capacity to store information and files, but once they fill up, you'll need to store that information elsewhere. Luckily, servers not only centralize, consolidate and help protect critical information, but also offer small businesses a bevy of preferred and affordable options to add storage capacity, including:

1. A second or third hard drive to double or triple storage capacity.
2. An additional server - this option is a logical next step if all the slots for hard drives are full in your current server. If you just need to share files, you might consider adding a file server (often referred to as Network attached storage or just NAS), discussed in more detail below, instead of adding another application server which requires server management, anti-virus software, a backup solution and client access licenses.
3. Direct attached storage (DAS), a box that contains hard drives and directly communicates with the server. Small businesses can purchase multiple DAS's to add terabytes of storage. And DAS is simpler to manage than adding a server.
4. For file sharing capabilities, the most popular choice is a NAS device (aka file server, storage server or file/print server). A NAS contains one or more hard disks, and is designed specifically for file storage and sharing via a network. Storage servers that operate Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 include a feature known as single instant storage, a tool that saves space and memory by automatically deleting any duplicate documents saved to the server.
5. A USB hard drive can be added to an existing server, notebook or desktop computer. This method is inexpensive and easy. But as you add them, you'll have to back up multiple internal and external hard drives. As a result, the time you save by going with the simple solution can quickly be lost. Lastly, these drives are hard to protect from damage and theft.

Moving to a server-based network is just what Dallas-based LANDinnovation did to help address its expanded services and growing workload. When partners Michael Hulme and Joseph Doye were transitioning their core business strategy, they grappled with frustrating data growth issues. To maintain communication with sub-consultants, Hulme and Doye relied on email, an inefficient method of transferring large multimedia files such as JPEGs and PDFs.

"We had to deal with frustrating revision control," said Hulme. "It was nearly impossible to keep everybody on the same page at any given moment. We had no decent contiguous storage space, and projects had files scattered amongst many locations."

The firm traded in their peer-to-peer network for a server. With just one system, LANDinnovation was able to institute a deeper set of professional land development services, including a 'Members Only' access point to keep clients and sub-consultants up-to-date on project-specific topics, schedules and datasets.

Although LANDinnovation is now clearly ahead of the curve, the same can't be said for a lot of companies. "Companies that fail to adequately address this information explosion run the risk of losing precious data, which can cripple an otherwise healthy business," White says.

White says to avoid the potential headache and expense of losing your electronic data, you need to create a plan of action now, and a good place to start is Dell's Storage Learning Center.

Don't Forget Offsite Storage

No matter which storage method you choose, you need to draft and enact a solid offsite backup and disaster recovery storage plan as well. Adding an offsite backup component to your plan helps protect your valuable data should a fire, natural disaster, theft or human error occur.