The Past, Present and Future of Digital Storage: Is Your IT System Keeping Up?

Digital storage has come a long way from the days of mercury delay lines, magnetic drums and other pioneering technologies. (The Apollo moon capsule's computer famously stored data on hand-knitted meshes of magnetic cores.) As storage options have grown faster, larger and cheaper, with programs and file formats ballooning in size, organizations are hard-pressed to provide large amounts of data to many users instantaneously.

Our IT business support team in Austin can help you get over this hurdle by embracing the state of the art in large-volume multi-user data storage – a storage area network, or SAN. An SAN gives your data its own dedicated high-speed network that can be routed to multiple users via switches or hubs, freeing up your common user network. SANs can even make use of tiered storage with differing levels of data protection.

Advances in hardware and software have made SAN setups more attractive than ever. The speed, small form factor and mechanical durability of solid-state drives (SSDs) have already brought the world of personal desktop and laptop computing into a new era of efficiency and convenience, and now SSDs are finding their niche as SAN storage devices. At the same time, data compression is making a triumphant “return” to enhance the effectiveness of SANs still further. For instance, some enterprise-class solutions can compress the data on SSD or hybrid networks by as much as 80 percent. That's a hard combination to beat if you need multi-user access to large files.

Gravity Systems can help you make sense of all your SAN options and point you toward the ideal enterprise-class SAN solution for your organization's need. Don't let the fast pace of digital storage evolution leave your company in the caveman era – call our Austin IT support team for help!