With everything we do in our lives being online, we store a huge amount of data. No matter what we try to do, we will invariably go online.
If want to go to the cinema, they will make you buy your ticket from an Internet terminal in the corner, rather than a ticket booth.
If you want to get some photos printed out, you will be sending them via a website to the printers.
If you want to reserve a library book, you will head to the online catalogue and search thousands of titles, in order to reserve the one you want.
Nearly every task we do on a daily basis, will involve going online. It is no surprise then, that we value the what we put online. Our photos pretty much live in the cloud, and rarely see any ink being printed onto paper.
If you look at the way you work, we generate a tonne of data every single day. The emails alone would be a suffocating amount of paper, if we were to print them out. Yet if we were to lose one, it would be devastating.
That’s the reason we all use back-ups. Or at least the reason we SHOULD use back-ups. The clever ones amongst us will use a RAID storage system. It fails less often, works faster and is relatively cheap. You’ll have seen one in the office. It will normally look like a tower of hard-drives.
It will look like this because that is exactly what it is. There’s nothing fancy about a RAID storage solution, it was designed to be simple to run and cheap to buy. The unit maximises it’s use by allowing data to be spread out through the separate drives and back-ups created at the same time as the original files.
If you ask your IT team about it, they’ll tell you that it is just the box sat in the corner of the Server Room.
But what happens when everything does manage to go wrong. All of the wrong boxes get ticked within seconds of each other and the whole system goes down? You lose your phone, the computer will not turn on, the back-up system isn’t even willing to make a sound, let alone allow you to use it.
On the list of disasters, this is one of the biggies for an company. How do you know what you did, who owes you money, where your next contract is coming from? All of this data was sat, really securely on the RAID storage system. It should not have been able to go wrong.
The very first question any of the management will ask is ‘How much is RAID recovery?’ We work in business and the bottom line is king, so we know this question is going to come. Luckily, the answer is only a click away and no where neat as high as the number you were thinking of.
RAID systems are a great solution to the storage problem and data recovery is the best solution when all else fails.
