With the New Year already kicked off, you might be thinking about your storage requirements for 2010. For small to mid-size companies this can be confusing, and you certainly don’t have the same level of support that the big guys do. To help, I’ve identified several factors to consider when conducting your sizing.

Know Your Business

As you look at data storage sizing, it’s important to evaluate the tasks performed by the people in your organization. This helps you understand the storage requirements per person, which can then be used to predict future requirements. For example, an engineer who works on CAD drawings is going to have a higher storage requirement than a call center representative. Once you develop per person numbers, a general rule of thumb is to increase that person’s storage by 50-75% per year. If a user operates with 500 MB of storage this year, plan for at least 750MB, or even a gigabyte, the next.
However, per person storage isn’t the only consideration. You also have to look at storage applications for shared applications, like CRM or financial systems. While call center representatives don’t generate a lot of storage personally, they do input data on behalf of the organization, which needs to be part of your sizing metrics.

Account for government-mandated retention laws

Because emails can be subpoenaed for use in court cases, companies are mandated by law to keep them for extended periods of time. The length of time can vary based on several factors, including industry and the country where the company operates. It’s important to take this requirement into your calculations.

Factor in security requirements

When you’re evaluating storage requirements with RAID, Redundant Array of Independent Disks, you should know that opting for a higher level of security requires more storage space. RAID is a method of storing information on multiple hard disks for greater protection, different methods are designated by a number (for example, RAID1, RAID5, etc.) Some of these levels work by mirroring data on two separate disks, so if one of the hard drives were to fail, the other could immediately take its place. This level of security, however, reduces the amount of available disk storage space, so if you’re using two 50GB disks in a mirrored environment, you only have 50GB of storage space available. Some companies assume that their 300 GB storage device offers 300 GB of space, but as much as 100 GBs may not be available.

Understand your options

For small companies that rely on localized file sharing, Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) is a cost-effective storage solution. With DAS, the storage system is directly attached to the server, and everyone in the organization is accessing storage from this device. DAS systems have very limited scalability, so as your company grows, you will eventually need to migrate to a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) environment.

Do you have questions about your company’s data storage sizing?

Use the comments to ask your question and I’ll post my answers.