(Happy New Year!)

It doesn't seem like very long ago when 4GB drives were considered HUGE.

With 1TB SATA drives becoming more popular now, and with lower price-points, more people seem to be thinking "hey, we have the space, why not use it". So rather than trying to be efficient with resources as they did in the past, people are not nearly as concerned with the size or number of files. I think it is great - bring on the mass storage at lower prices!

One challenge (and cost) though that many people don't consider is backing up that amount of space. With more and more things stored digitally, as a society we build a dependency on that data being available. So, consider a fairly simple redundant solution of RAID1. That could potentially give 1TB of redundant space - if a single drive fails, no problem, the data is still available. To protect (recover) though from an accidental overwrite, or from a total (very rare but possible) two-drive-failure, or to store some historical record of changing data - a backup solution is needed.

Daily backups with multi-week retention of just the simple, single-server, configuration of 1TB mentioned above can get complex. How fast does the backup run? How quickly can a restore be done? How much backup space is needed based on total space and retention requirements? Does the backup need to be stored off-site for disaster recovery? What is the cost of the drive(s)? What is the cost of the tapes? What is the cost of the backup software? What's the cost to manage it? What happens when there are two servers? How about two hundred servers, or two thousand servers?

Of course backups are just one factor of growing storage requirements. I plan on blogging about a number of the considerations in future posts.

These challenges can be addressed - and we do address them for our clients at ORCS Web. I'm just providing some "thinking points" for the people who wonder why managed redundant storage solutions are sometimes priced higher than they expect.

Happy Hosting!

~Brad