Handling capacity management is an issue almost all IT managers are faced with nowadays, as a result of the growing amount of data that is created and needs to be retained by the business.
These can be from various sources and can include
- E-mail Systems such as Exchange of GroupWise
- Databases such as SQL and Oracle
- Users files including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
In the past, hardware costs were relatively high, which kept the amount of data that was able to be stored down in size. However, as hardware and storage costs have dropped, this is no longer a restraint to the amount of data that can be retained.
More and more IT managers are looking at ways to reduce the amount of data that is retained by its company's users. The amount of data kept has a knock-on effect for the need for bigger and faster backup devices to ensure that the data is backed up within the available backup window.
As the backup size grows so to does the amount of time required to recover the systems in the event of a systems failure and a system restore being required. More and more time is now being spent managing and monitoring this ever increasing problem.
One of the biggest culprits in increasing storage requirements is the E-mail System and several ways can be looked into to reduce this problem:
- Introduce an E-mail policy which will Introduce Mailbox limits and set warnings for users when nearing capacity
- Implement an archive facility that will archive mails that are over a certain age
- Restrict the size of attachments that can be sent or received
