blog.noetech.com

The Challenges of IT in a Medium Sized Business

As a technology manager / System Administrator my biggest challenges are not users but rather data management. Fixing computers is relatively easy and straight forward, but keeping track of thousands of contacts, a calendar that goes back 6 years, tens of thousands of tapes, users and their status, and the 17 terabytes of hard drive space can be daunting.

It seems no matter the status of a company, the data usage is constantly growing and growing fast. Just keeping up with the growth can take up a lot of your time.

Data growth provides several challenges for me:

Keeping pace with the storage needs while keeping budgets down.
Space for the storage. With extremely limited space in the data closet, every inch is valuable.
Backing up data. With terabytes of disk space, backing up is a major challenge.
How to archiving data for future needs.
Organization, being able to find what you need quickly is vital.
Predicting storage needs.

To give an example, when I started at WOW 7 months ago our file server had 500 gigs of storage and about a quarter of it was being used. Now we're about a month away from filling it up. The server has no more room for internal drives, so now more space will be used in the rack. Right now I can back that server up to tape, but once it breaks 500 gigs, it starts to get impractical without an autoloader, which would more than double the cost of expanding the storage.

That doesn't even begin to explain the challenges I have with backing up. How do you maintain a backup of a 2 terabyte RAID stripe? It has to be striped for speed, so mirroring or even RAID 5 is out. Well you have to have a second 2 terabyte RAID of course.

It can also be a challenge to get people in a small or medium sized company to understand the need for strong organization. Workflows may seem fine, but when the company can literally grow fifty percent in a matter of weeks, it's critical to have procedures and process in place. Because adding them once the growth comes is much harder and much more time consuming.

I don't really have a point, other than data management is a problem that is constantly getting worse. And for mid sized companies without huge IT budgets or staff it can be a struggle to meet all your needs. It's a process of tradeoffs and compromises.