Today's businesses generate more data than ever before. Luckily, storage technology is correspondingly cheaper and more plentiful than ever before. This means your small business has work to do if you want to build an effective storage and backup strategy.
As traditional storage environments hinder application performance and increase latency, enterprises are turning to flash storage to improve performance and implement virtual desktop infrastructure. More widespread use of flash storage, though, may require vendors to be flexible with their pricing.
The minimum "best practice" backup arrangement for your vital data is to maintain three copies of the data: the original, a local backup, and a second backup offsite. With LaCie's CloudBox NAS device, you simply back up to the ethernet-connected unit, which then automatically backs up to LaCie's own online backup service. But easy as it is, CloudBox is also expensive, capacity-challenged, and slower than average.
Your PC's hard drive may have half a terabyte of data on its platters, and you might not remember the last time you backed any of it up. In all likelihood, though, you use only a few gigabytes' worth of files on a regular basis. With a combination of cloud-storage services, you can keep that data backed up and synced among all of your computers automatically, and access your most essential files whenever you want.
No question, the iPad and iPhone are amazing devices. But the iOS operating system isn't perfect. For example: How come AT&T rebills customers every month for cellular data service without asking? Do you really have to buy a AirPrint-compatible printer to print via your iPad? Can you get a refund from Apple on an iTunes purchase?
The Amazon cloud services outage that knocked out several popular Websites last week raised questions about the reliability of the cloud, but the general consensus is that it works if you plan for failure. Like any good business plan, a good cloud plan should include provisions for failure, including plans B and C, and plenty of backups.
The folks behind Dropbox have not been having an easy time recently. First it was suggested their PC client might be insecure, then changes in their terms and conditions raised security concerns.
The IT mantra for the past few years has been all about the cloud, and the myriad benefits of cloud-based servers and storage. While there are some advantages, there are also some serious drawbacks that you should consider carefully before entrusting your valuable and sensitive data to the cloud.
At the Storage Visions conference today, I've been hearing updates on storage connection interfaces, like the state of USB 3.0 (it's going to be everywhere), the WiGig Alliance for faster Wi-Fi transfers, and Intel's jackalope-like Light Peak interface.
If there's one technology that can greatly improve computing environments of any size, it's virtualization. By using a single physical server to run many virtual servers, you can decrease operational costs and get far more bang for your buck. Whether your company is a 2-server or 2000-server shop, you can <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/187391/how_a_virtualized_server_saved_one_small_business.html">benefit from server virtualization</a> in a variety of ways. The best part? You can do it cheaply and easily.