The Value of Storage
One of the most important factors to consider when deploying IT (information technology) solutions is the amount of storage within your enterprise. With the growing demand to store more documents, the ability to house the data may be a step many contractors overlook.
As the number of projects, offices, and employees at Brasfield & Gorrie, www.brasfieldgorrie.com, Birmingham, Ala., increases so does the amount of electronic information to manage. For many years the company has used a SAN (storage area network) for housing data, turning to IBM Corp., www.ibm.com, Armonk, N.Y., for the servers.
Rickey Whitworth, network infrastructure manager, Brasfield & Gorrie, says the company’s SAN controller was depreciating and maintenance costs were going to become a factor. One factor playing a role in the cost of storage was the space being taken up on high-speed drives by data that did not require high-speed access. Whitworth gives the example of digital photographs of a jobsite that may be viewed only once but continue to take up electronic storage space.
“With this SAN going forward we are going to have the ability to have SATA (serial advanced technology attachment) drives, which cost less and have a higher capacity,” says Whitworth. “(It provides) lower performance but we’ll make sure that we classify data so that only things that need to be there get there.”
The classification system comes through Windows 2003 R2 from Microsoft Corp., www.microsoft.com, Redmond, Wash.
“What it basically gives you is some policy based control over what goes on a volume. We can define a volume and say ‘only allow files of this type to go here,’” explains Whitworth. He adds if users try to save the wrong type of file in the wrong location they will get a pop up message that says this is not allowed by the policy.
To solve the problem of storing data at multiple locations, Brasfield & Gorrie is using Steelhead appliances from Riverbed Technology Inc., www.riverbed.com, San Francisco, Calif.
This hardware allows the company to have one SAN controller in the corporate office without adding different drive arrays in different offices. Whitworth says, “It really just helps us on (the IT department) end to be able to manage all of the storage in a central location and push that out. It is a lot more scalable. That way as we add more sites, more remote offices, we’re not stuck buying a lot of storage every time.”