Data storage is an important part of facilities management and often times it goes over looked. Managing storage is often consigned to a junior member of the operations team.
Sites frequently underutilize storage, deliberately striping storage drives so they contain no more than 20 percent of the data that they are capable of holding. In other cases, storage is simply neglected. No one bothers to check where unused storage could be made available. Instead, they just purchase more.
Here are six steps that, according to an article on techrepublic.com, data center managers can take to optimize big data storage:
1. Review your tiered stage strategy for big data
2. Evaluate the costs of cloud-based (versus on premises) data scalability
3. Inventory your storage resources and assess them for use
4. Evaluate your distributed data mart storage
5. Enact edge storage policies and practices
6. Enact and practice data retention policies
The end goal of all of these big data storage objectives is to optimize both the utilization and the spend on your storage resources, whether resources are on premises or in the cloud.
This Quick Read was submitted by Ryan Berlin, managing editor of Facility Maintenance Decisions.
