Sometimes, more means less: Law firm Bowman and Brooke has shaved more than $300,000 off its IT costs over the last couple of years, despite experiencing an eight-fold increase in data.
Randall Vogsland, infrastructure supervisor at the Minneapolis-based firm, told Byte and Switch that back in 2004, with just over 2 Tbytes of data, the firm was almost at its storage limit. At that time, the company's storage comprised the internal disk drives within 46 Compaq DL360 servers and a half dozen Quantum NAS devices. The servers and NAS devices, he adds, were spread across six separate sites.
Vogsland's group decided to ease the strain on its servers by deploying a Magnitude storage system from Xiotech at each of the six sites in early 2004. That turned out to be just in time for a data explosion prompted by clients' compliance pressures and increasing use of multimedia by the firm's lawyers.
"Now we're closer to about 16 Tbytes and we have the [potential] for a lot more than that," explains Vogsland, adding that the six SAN boxes offer a total of 25 Tbytes.
Vogsland also saved money by moving away from internal server storage -- and away from NAS. "I don't need to buy disks, I don't need to buy [disk] upgrades, and I don't need to buy RAID controllers," he explains, adding that this has probably saved over $125,000 since 2004. "Then you can lob in around another $200,000 just for the labor cost saving."
What skills do network managers really need to properly secure industrial networks? What new protocols, frameworks, and regulations are important? And what conferences and certifications can help? Here are five tips to get started.
A full-stack approach to retail edge offers retailers a way to optimize operations and adapt to changes in a post-pandemic world.
Network management tool sprawl is getting in the way of network management. It’s time for IT to do something about it.
