All this suggests that choosing the right storage products to protect your data is vitally important. The next hurdle is to decide which solution best suits your needs. When looking at the range of storage products on offer, it is easy to see why companies might be confused. Should you go for MO or LTO, DVD or CD-R, DLT or SDLT? Then there is RAID, WORM, AIT, 3480, Blu-Ray, Mammoth, Timberwolf, 3490 and UDO to consider. When companies approach a vendor to provide them with a storage solution there are three things to consider: what the customer thinks he wants, what the vendor proposes and what the customer actually needs. The discrepancies between these can often be solved through simple education. Storage products have to be tailored to each company’s needs and the best solutions may not necessarily be the most expensive or the cheapest, it is entirely dependent on the application and user requirements.

If storage is critical to the survival of your business then surely it is vital that companies work with their storage provider to ensure that the applications they are buying are the right ones. In the past few years, there have been many changes in the way we approach our storage decisions all resulting in an increased number of considerations when looking for a storage solution. Firstly, businesses need fast, reliable access to their data. Secondly, vendors and their customers must appreciate that because of the amount of data being created, storage has become a critical issue, and that storage now has a major impact on company budgets, staffing, network response and availability. Thirdly, the growing importance of storage world-wide has meant that organisations cannot afford to ignore their storage needs and have not had to address them, but need to consider them directly as part of company policy and the planning process. Recent global events have demonstrated the importance of data protection and show how vital it is to make information security and back-up a primary concern. And finally, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the application and user requirements are dictating the type of storage needed. It is now the vendor’s role to clarify the complex process of storage selection and create a solution that fits with the customer’s needs and expectations.

In order to make an informed decision, it is important that companies have an understanding of the technology and exactly what it does. This may seem an obvious statement until we consider that many staff within an organisation do not understand the principles of storage, how it operates, what it is for and why they need it. This lack of understanding all too often leads to a simplistic approach of adding expensive primary storage which can often raise more problems that it solves.


Secondary storage utilises tape or optical technology, but could also include elements of NAS or RAID. In very basic terms, secondary storage exists to compliment your primary storage e.g. hard drive. It is usually in the form of removable media, such as tape, MO, DVD or CD, and is commonly situated in an automated environment.

The type of secondary storage used depends heavily on the speed and frequency that the customer needs to access data. The access time is the time it takes to retrieve files and documents from your stored information. Access to data is measured in seconds and speed of access, and the solution you choose will depend on access to the data that you are storing. If files are not used regularly it is possible to store them in a form where access time is slightly longer, whereas vitally important files must be available at the touch of a button.