Trying to configure a Disk to Disk backup system that is the appropriate size, connection options, and compatibility is a daunting by itself. Counter that with diminishing budgets, uneducated management, and willful ignorance by your employee's makes it literally impossible to create an optimized configuration. As an administrator and system integration engineer, I fight these battles almost daily, and the desire to just throw it all away bubbles to the surface.
I know that this is not a healthy approach to stress, however, the inability to effectively disseminate proper training and education on new systems becomes arduous at best. I have example after example, however, it wouldn't have any basis on this article. I can explain what is needed to present a successful project request, however, it will mean tedious data crunching, so that you can provide the educated decision your executive committee needs.
First Step: Gather the needs of each of your departments. Identify their system needs, storage needs, how often they need to access these files, backup/archive strategy, and/or storage requirements.
Second: Identify storages amounts and security requirements. Look at those departments that seem to hoard all of their files forever. Think about the different solutions out there to fill in specific needs of your implementation. For example, if you have the money, look for a deduplication foundation to help reduce the expansive storage overhead that you may have. Deduplication solutions allow for steamlined data storage by linking multiple copies to a single version. As an example, department a sends an attachment to 50 individuals, and those 50 forwards it on to 10 people each. Now, you're looking at 500 copies of the same document. At 3mb each, you're looking at a single email causing a net loss of storage to the tune of 1500mb or 1.5 gb of storage. Use the De-dup solution, and instead of 1.5gb, you would only have 3mb with links to the file.
Third and Last:
Administration and maintenance is key. Disk space is growing exponetially, and the ability to maintain your disk's efficiency is key. It is not unheard of anymore to have a system capable of saving 1-2TB of data, and if you do not maintain the disk, either through defrag and/or scan disk, your disk performance would drop almost %50 .
I will check back periodically to show and explain that steps that I have taken with regards to my immediate project.
Thanks!
