Many companies are wasting significant storage resources because half of their stored files are unlikely to be accessed again, according to research from e-mail archiving firm Waterford Technologies. By Billy McInnes
Hardware & Equipment | 25 May 2007 :
Although the price
of storage hardware is dropping all the time, the costs of managing storage are
still very high, according to sales director Gary Cosgrave.
He argued companies
should try to move a lot of their retrospective data from their server storage
onto cheaper alternatives such as network attached storage (NAS)
drives.
The amount of data
stored on network servers is growing at more than 20 per cent a year and
Waterford Technologies believes companies should take advantage of the
proliferation in low cost storage.
It is preparing to
release a product in September, known as MailMeter
File Archiver, which the company claims can help
businesses to archive files on a NAS drive or other storage
system.
The software runs on
Windows server and communicates with agent software on the company file/server.
Businesses set their own file archiving policy rules and the agent analyses the
files. It alerts the MailMeter File Archiver server when files meet the policy rules and copies
them to the archive storage volume.
The file on the
server is replaced with a link to its new location on the archive
volume.
"If you have 2Tb of
server storage and you never access 50 per cent of the data you store, you can
gain 1Tb in your first archival process," Cosgrave
claimed.
He argued the
product allowed businesses to "manage the file/server better with the insurance
that you have moved all your archive documents onto cheaper storage but it is
always retrievable".
When it becomes
available, MailMeter File Archiver will cost €4,000 including
installation.