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Do you need to buy a bigger box?

Cillian Sweeney- Waterford Technologies Is buying a bigger box always the solution to a file management problem? It’s no surprise for you

Cillian Sweeney- Waterford Technologies

Is buying a bigger box always the solution to a file management problem?

It’s no surprise for you to hear that the volumes of data within organisations are growing exponentially year on year. I mean just a few years ago it was nigh on impossible to send a 1 MB attachment with an email as it would either (i) crash the email system in place or (ii) if not, certainly incur the wrath of the IT Manager.

Likewise with file data, organisations such as construction companies & architects now save high resolution site photographs & drawings on their networks taking up vast amounts of storage space. Indeed one could say that those firms who would have been heavy users of paper historically are now the biggest users of storage as they have merely just transferred their huge paper volumes into a corresponding electronic form. Legal firms, financial organisations, local authorities all spring to mind.

So what do firms do to manage this situation?

Buy a box (such as a file server, SAN, etc) to store today’s data perhaps………..however what happens when that box starts to run out of space – buy a bigger box you might say.

Just last week I met with an organisation who have been buying bigger boxes as the organisation has evolved, yet seem to be only managing to keep their head above water regarding storage. Rather than just listen to me rabbit on about there being a better & more efficient way to manage their file data we just logged in remotely the day before and installed a pilot of our file archiving solution & the meeting was spent showing them their own data.

Here were the results;

  • A review of his G drive at the Liverpool office showed it contained 2TB of data
  • There were 330,000 spreadsheets of which 281,000 of them have not been modified in 2 years+
  • 144,000 spreadsheets have not been accessed in more than 2 years
  • There are 38,800 mpegs of which 1,500 have not been accessed in 1 year+
  • 36,000 mpegs have not been modified is 1 year+
  • There are 1.5 million files in the 2TB
  • The top 20 file types account for 1.97 of the 2TB of data
  • File data was broken down as follows; Mpegs 19%, PPT’s 17%, Office 2010 (predominantly power point presentations 15%, Zip files 11%, Spreadsheets 8%, DDF’s 6%, WPV’s 2%
  • The top 10 file types account for 84% of the 2 TB
  •  351GB would be saved if all mpegs were archived after 1 year, 252GB would be saved if all mpegs were archived after 3 years, 151 GB would be saved if all mpegs were archived after 5 years
  • Just one person accounted for 370GB of the 2TB
  • The top 20 files account for 3% of total data
  • De duplicating file data using this file archiving solution would see the data volume reduced to 1.1Tb approx.
  • Duplicate data is 177GB or 9% of the 2TB
  • There are 6 Mpegs of around 622MB in size on the network
  • One 305MB movie could be stubbed leaving behind just a 1KB link while a305MB file could be reduced to 7MB via stubbing
  • If the entire G drive was deleted File Archiver would act as a DR & recover it fully at a click of a button

When asked if he would like us to uninstall the pilot, the IT Manager insisted that it remained in place & we came to a commercial arrangement within 30 mins.

So to find out how you can avoid having to buy bigger boxes to store & create bigger IT headaches let us help.