How to Plan Storage Needs When Moving from File Cabinets to Hard Disk—Why Invoices Are a Key Indicator

If you're implementing document imaging technology, it's a fairly safe bet your storage requirements are going to increase. This article describes an easy way to determine the added demand, and provide some viable options to meet it. The discussion is framed within these five areas:

1.      Capacity Planning

2.      Backup Strategy

3.      Repository Options

4.      SharePoint

5.      Disaster Recovery

Capacity Planning: First, you'll be planning for something that's been handled in the physical world for many years. Fortunately, it's the same as determining how many filing cabinets you need for all those invoices - except this time, storage is digital. Here's a good guideline:

Consider that a four-drawer vertical filing cabinet typically holds 10K pages of paper (capacity is 12K but you have to leave room for that lunch container). That much paper stored digitally, requires approximately 1 GB of disk storage.

Calculate how often you fill a four-drawer cabinet. For example, if you receive 100 invoices a week (assuming an average of two pages filed per invoice), you're filling one new filing cabinet per year. You know that you're going to add 1 GB to your storage requirements.

Backup Strategy: Chances are you already have a formal backup strategy and storage medium. DAT and DLT tape have been the backbone of backup systems for years. But with the continually decreasing cost of high-capacity disk drives, tape has transitioned to the role of creating the periodic "off-site backup" (it's a hassle to drag that SAN home every Friday).

EMC founder Richard Egan got the ball rolling 20 years ago. "Why do we need tape drives?" Egan asked rhetorically. "We don't. Someday, everything will be stored on disk." Of course, if you started a disk ...