While it’s true that storage capacity has grown exponentially in the past decade, demand for that storage capacity has grown significantly, as well. There was a time when the answer was to just send more and more storage space at the growing demand, but that’s not a good option in a tight economy. Besides, the virtualized storage environments of today’s landscape create unique needs.

Meeting data requirements is twofold: increasing capacity while at the same time finding new ways to dramatically reduce the amount of data required.

Here are some things you can do that will lessen your organization’s demand for data:

• Tiering. One of the latest and most effective trends in storage management is tiering. Tiering looks at your data and then matches it up with storage equipment and methods that are most appropriate to the level of access the data needs. So, infrequently used data and most data that doesn’t need to have instant access can be stored on your older storage media, while the stuff your organization uses many times each hour is on your fastest, best-performing equipment. This allows you to archive data that’s only accessed from time to time, which can greatly reduce data needs.

• Compression. This is often the first step that an organization will take in order to reduce its data requirements. Compression is certainly useful and worth doing, but it’s not always as effective as some of the other methods. It works very well when you’re dealing with documents, email, and databases. It doesn’t work as efficiently with formats that are already highly compressed, such as images.

• Deduplication. Deduplication is a buzzword right now. Some experts suggest that you can reduce data requirements by half or more via deduplication. Others are more conservative and estimate 20 percent space savings. If deduplication is done right, it can reduce significant space in email alone. Think, for example, of that 2 MB PDF file sent out from HR regarding the spring picnic that’s sent to 3,400 employees. Space for that goes from 7 Gigabytes down to 2 Megabytes.

• Thin provisioning. Thin provisioning doesn’t reduce data requirements, per se, but it will allow you to hold off on adding data capacity for a season.

• Virtualization. Storage virtualization does for your data requirements what server virtualization does for the data center footprint. Whenever possible, look into this kind of architecture.

Extending Tier-1 Storage Choice