The second pillar of secondary storage: flexibility

Much attention (and budget) invariably goes to primary storage, but as we said before, secondary storage is the true workhorse. This is where about 80 percent of the data volume is located. This volume can contain many terabytes or even petabytes. You would like to make sure that this large amount of data is stored properly. Despite expansion of the amount of data – and it happens all the time – you don’t want to constantly move all the data to new storage. It costs time and money as well as an additional storage system that must be purchased. It is highly desirable for secondary storage to last a long time. This does not necessarily apply to primary storage: it is replaced every three years on average.

Keeping up with developments

Of course, the secondary storage must be able to handle that replacement of the primary storage (and perhaps some of the IT environment). You have no use for a secondary storage to replace if you are replacing the primary storage. In other words, the system must be flexible enough to keep up with the rapid cycles in IT. The secondary storage must be scalable, because you don’t know how much data you will have five or 10 years from now.

Shift

On top of that, you don’t know now how secondary storage will be distributed 10 years from now. So do you still have 20 percent backup and 40 percent archive? Or is it the other way around then? That requires flexibility to cover all these possibilities to scale elastically. You want to be able to easily scale up and down for both applications as needed. Another interesting question is whether you can easily expand secondary storage with a new system.

Connectivity

Finally, the connectivity of secondary storage must be flexible. Higher speeds may well be possible or even required in a few years. The secondary storage should be able to handle that. This requires that the secondary storage not be hard-coupled to the server.

Healthcare and ICT

Choosing good secondary storage is especially important in healthcare. At the Care & ICT Exhibition from March 12 to 14 at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, the Netherlands, we will provide extensive information and seminars to explain the four pillars for good choice. Using the button below, you can obtain tickets to the fair and register for one of the seminars!

Visit us at Zorg & ICT 2019