Enterprise-class Storage Doesn't Have to Break the Bank
Data growth is increasing rapidly, putting pressure on storage infrastructures. Organizations are being urged to reduce storage costs. SMBs, small to medium-sized businesses, often attempt to reduce costs by using consumer-grade storage. However this is risky. It will reduce costs in the short term but it can lead to higher operating and downtime costs later on. Simply put, consumer grade technology is designed for consumer-grade workloads. Consumer-grade hard drives can handle a limit of 25TB in annual workloads, which is far lower than the 500TB limit for enterprise-grade drives. Failure rates are unsurprisingly high when consumer-grade drives get plugged into arrays and put to heavy data center workloads. Another important difference is the constant-on nature and operation of the business environment. The data center storage arrays are always powered up and rarely go down for long periods of time. They are frequently involved in maintenance tasks such as error detection, backup, and...