Kevin Kruse, CIO, Reshare Corporation
Q: How have you coped with increased requirements for storage capacity?
A: The key considerations are management and data protection. Managing storage involves the need to minimize human resources, power, cooling and asset utilization, while improving service delivery. Data protection is comprised of backups, disaster recovery, security and compliance requirements. We have pursued a unified storage approach that combines network-attached storage (NAS) and block-based storage (SAN). Unified networked storage leads to much higher storage utilization, which means we require fewer storage devices and lowers costs other areas, such as maintenance and administration. It was important to calculate current and future storage requirements, determine SLA requirements, determine the budget, and build the plan for execution. From a data security standpoint, both logical and physical security needs to be addressed, including securing facilities and technologies. To address privacy requirements, customer-sensitive information is encrypted throughout the organization.
