And they lived happily ever after

A long-term data storage system: there are several advantages to this. Of course, there are also things to keep in mind, because there are some snags hidden under the grass. In this blog, we’re happy to tell you how the right storage system will help you be long and proverbially happy. And that’s no fairy tale.

Longevity is in itself a positive attribute. When it comes to people, these days we add “as long as they are in good health. There is a grain of truth in that that holds true for the IT business as well.

Benefit: Your investment will last longer

You can simply use your equipment longer, no need to buy something new if your current equipment still works fine. You pay a one-time purchase and then perhaps some maintenance, but otherwise it is purely a financial benefit. That goes for your television, car and also for your storage system. But beware! Of course, it is important that the maintenance of the product does not become too expensive. If your car’s maintenance becomes so expensive after 12 years that it barely pays off, it’s time for something new. That’s how it works in IT, too.

Snag

At the same time, you often see that the supplier of IT products raises the price of maintenance to such an extent that it is no longer interesting to use the product longer and thus it must be replaced. One catch: check carefully the maintenance contract and ongoing costs. Of FAST LTA’s Silent Bricks, we can say that at least maintenance costs do not increase.

Another snag

Most data storage products have a planned life span of five years. In practice, that means that manufacturers stock the parts for that period to provide maintenance. After that, it becomes critical and therefore more expensive. Consider special hard drives or chips. They become scarce and therefore expensive after those five years. Therefore, FAST LTA uses standard components that are widely available and can be easily replaced by similar models. Many of those parts will also become little or no more expensive, so maintenance costs for FAST LTA systems will not increase over the life cycle. This snag is thus also caught.

Adder 3

It is also important that over time your ICT resources remain universally controllable and addressable. So flexibility and scalability. Flexibility is needed because possibly the applications that the storage needs to address change. And scalability is important because you simply can’t estimate years in advance what kind of data will grow how much.

Benefit: less data migration

As your amount of data grows and becomes important (and it almost always does), it becomes more complicated to migrate your data. When it comes to backup data, this is not so bad in itself: you no longer write your data to storage a, but to storage b. After some time, that settles by itself. This is often different for archive data: it is data on the old storage that you want to keep and take with you to the new storage. So transfer, and during such a migration your data is at risk. You need staff to handle the migration. It takes time and money. Depending on your amount of data, it can sometimes take up to a year to transfer everything. That means you have to transfer your data even a year before your storage expires, so you have to buy the new storage by then.

Note

As mentioned above, the lifetime of many data storage systems is five years. But the lifespan of equipment in the medical sector, for example, is often 10 years. So if a hospital wants to store images from MRI and CT and other things, it has to switch to another storage system halfway through the life of the equipment. In other words, data storage with a longer lifespan ensures fewer migrations and thus less risk of errors and even loss of data.

The great thing is that with attention to all those snags, FAST LTA developed the Silent Bricks with a 10-year lifespan, instead of assuming five years. So there are only advantages to that!

Want to know more?

We are always ready for a good conversation and ditto advice. Feel free to call us!