Hoarding data

The demand for storage continues to grow year-on-year. Files get bigger, legacy data needs to be retained and new demands are created around compliance and business' growing demand for more accurate, consolidated and effective information.

Home users are also displaying an insatiable appetite for data storage, opening up new market opportunities for vendors.

Enterprise-level storage is now being demanded by users who had no need for and could not afford it before. Likewise, advanced storage technologies need to be provided with these devices that were traditionally reserved for use in data warehouses and the like.

Not long ago, 1GB of data was considered to be a huge amount. Today even small businesses gobble up terabytes of data storage in no time and vendors are forced to come up with innovative ways to offer bigger, safer and more reliable storage solutions.

People's lives are going digital with paid music downloads, digital photography and even movies and television shows being delivered digitally. Home users are now big business in the storage space and technologies such as RAID, traditionally reserved for business users, are now finding their way into home storage solutions where huge collections of digital media need to be stored - and safely.

This demand will continue to grow as media increasingly goes online, using IP as a delivery platform and allowing users to store everything in an on-demand environment. Not only is more and more data being produced by home users, but it is also being preserved for longer periods of time.

Home users are also displaying an insatiable appetite for data storage, opening up new market opportunities for vendors.

Andy Robb is technology specialist at Duxbury Networking.

But desktop and laptop computers still rely on conventional hard drive technology, as do most directly-attached storage devices. Due to the use of moving parts, hard drives in the traditional, platter-based sense, are unreliable. Data is simply not safe on a hard drive as it is only a matter of time before a hard drive packs up.

When someone's house burns down, the biggest loss, assuming all the people are removed safely, is usually of a sentimental nature, with photographs, family albums and other keepsakes being lost. Likewise, digital photographs, videos and other memories are lost when hard drives fail. And so reliable solutions are required to store and backup this precious data.

Innovative solutions in the space are offering home users up to 3TB of network-attached storage in a single device, including technologies such as RAID and mirroring for data protection and integrity, the likes of which were only available to enterprise customers in the past.

RAID is now commonplace in home network storage devices, which when utilised for data striping, makes data robust to hard drive failure as a single hard drive can be swapped out without affecting the data stored on the array. Technologies that combine large storage capabilities with this kind of technology for data protection and the ability to be network-attached and stored safely will be capturing the market in the coming months.

Home users are starting to realise the advantage of network-attached storage as such. It is possible to purchase external, USB or other directly-attached storage devices, but few of these offer the data integrity and protection mechanisms provided by NAS devices and, being in close proximity to the computing device using them, may fall prey to the same physical disasters that claim the computer, negating their ability to protect data.

With network-attached devices, the storage can be safely locked down, away from where data is generated and consumed, so that even if computers and other appliances are stolen, burnt or otherwise lost to circumstance, data is preserved.

Like home users, small to medium-sized enterprises are also demanding more storage in the form of network-attached devices. One of the factors driving this demand is the need for compliance to regulations that require accurate data archiving.

This data needs to be meticulously catalogued, preserved and made readily available should there be a legal need for it. And so affordable technologies in network-attached storage are also needed for SMEs.

Service-oriented architecture, virtualisation and other new demands continue to challenge technology vendors for innovative solutions, changing the way technology is used. But the one constant in all of this is the growing demand for storage - and this is generating a set of new demands in itself.

* Andy Robb is technology specialist at Duxbury Networking.