The price of fixed content

Fixed content, you know, the digital images, e-mail messages, presentations, video content, medical images and check images that don’t change over time are chomping up corporate resources faster than termites through and old house.

Our Special Focus this week takes a look at fixed content issues and makes a few recommendations.

Users need to start evaluating their options regarding the storage of fixed content data now that analysts have predicted it will consume more than half of corporate storage resources by 2005.

The reasons users should be paying attention to the fixed content issue in particular is that The Enterprise Storage Group says that fixed content reference information will represent 54% of all data by 2005 and will grow faster than that of traditional transaction-based and file-oriented storage.

Here are a few tips from users to help deal with the issue:

* Focus on the business problem you are trying to solve. If you can’t make a business case for it, you won’t be able to make a technology case for it.

* Look for pain points in the business. Is it the management of large quantities of physical documents you are trying to overcome?

* Look for technology that is extensible and can be expanded and is independent of the cost of human intervention and management.

* Determine how often the data needs to be accessed and how it will be saved. Once it is saved, is it easily extractable?

* Determine the access rate and performance requirement needed. If this data that doesn’t need to be served up that often, you may not need high performance, you need something that will retain the data for the required retention period.

For more on this article see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0526specialfocus.html