October 2008 — Features
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A Tight Squeeze
As government regulations mandate the longterm retention of districts' rising volume of information, K-12 IT directors are using new storage tools to put their data in its place.
THE STORAGE NETWORKING
Industry Association (SNIA) doesn't mince
words when describing the looming data
storage problem. In its 2007 report, "Solving
the Coming Archive Crisis-- the 100-Year
Dilemma," the trade group asserts, "The volume
of disparate digital information sources
being kept online for long-term preservation
is overwhelming and leading to a crisis of
cost, business risk, and complexity."
It wasn't so long ago that a 40-gigabyte hard drive seemed gigantic, but today it seems that gigabytes and terabytes-- and even petabytes, which are 1,000 times the size of terabytes-- aren't enough to store the volume of data we generate. And as federal and state agencies demand that more information be kept for longer periods of time, organizations are running out of space faster than ever.
"The responsible handling of electronic information and records should be considered a core value of an organization."
Upon surveying 276 organizations from various sectors, including education, last year, the SNIA found that 80 percent of respondents reported a need to keep information for more than 50 years; 68 percent needed to retain it for more than 100 years. The respondents cited four major factors that made long-term storage essential: legal risk (60 percent), compliance requirements (55 percent), business risk (52 percent), and security risk (38 percent). Given these circumstances, says Michael Peterson, chief strategy advocate of the SNIA's Data Management Forum, "The responsible handling of electronic information and records should be considered a core value of an organization."
Certainly, K-12 school districts have become meticulous information hoarders, if for no other reason than to comply with stringent federal and state mandates to store student records. Despite shortages of staff and funding, many districts have taken a proactive approach, either investing in the latest storage technologies or using a combination of old and new techniques to back up and store information.
The consensus among IT pros is that while tape drives and DVDs won't go away any time soon, storage technology is leaning decisively toward virtualization: pooling physical storage from multiple devices into what appears to be a single storage device managed from a central console.
Administrators also favor storage area networks (SANs: high-performance networks that allow for many terabytes of centralized file storage or high-speed file transfer operations) over network attached storage (NAS). SANs have greater storage capacity and support a broader range of applications than an NAS device, which is an independent entity that is limited to applications that access data at the file level. Multiple NAS devices can be attached to a network. In terms of hardware, blade servers, which house several servers (thin circuit boards called "server blades") in a single chassis, deliver the best value for the money, offsetting their initial cost through increased processing power, greater efficiency, and reduced cabling and power consumption. As part of SANs, they're a powerful way to expand storage capability.
