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Two Companies Cope With Storage And Transfer Of Large Files: Page 3 of 3

The result was a combination of FC and SATA drives, with metadata and constantly accessed data being placed on the faster, more expensive FC drives, and less accessed data being stored on slower, more affordable SATA drives.

"Since we cut over to this solution, we have experienced a 3-4x increase in speed, and we have seen that our decisions on what to allocate to FC versus SATA have worked well," said Arueda. "It has enabled us to support heavy production workloads where we have 70 animators working at the same time and in real-time with files without degradation. We also have scalability. This is the kind of production capacity we need to support our growing business."

Video production houses like Ilion have unique requirements that are not typical for other SMBs, in the same way that multi-national banks do not characterize the bandwidth needs of all large enterprises, but they illustrate that managing large data files will become everyone's challenge. This is principally due to a move toward more files with rich media content, and abundant use of Internet and emerging Internet forums for companies such as social networks. All produce large files, and all demand sizable bandwidth.

What does this portend for corporate IT in enterprises and SMBs? That if they haven't already done so, it is time to review and rethink storage and network strategies. Fiscal conservatism in the data center isn't about to change, so few organizations will discard everything they have and opt to buy new. However, revisiting road maps now, matching these up with hardware and software asset retirement cycles and taking a fresh look at how well data center storage and bandwidth are keeping up with the business make sense for 2011 budget planning.