In the next section, we will take a look at a few strategies that firms use to tackle these issues. The usual path is through hardware refreshes, tuning or data consolidation. We will look at each of these and complement that with data archiving.
Most enterprises try to deal with the issue by adding or throwing in more hardware resources. This includes adding more servers, or upgrading the number of CPUs, memory on existing servers, and adding expensive, fast Tier 0 or Tier 1 storage systems. As the data growth is not a one-time problem, organizations quickly tend to realize that hardware upgrades can only take them so far. Apart from hardware upgrades, just adding new hardware will not address the underlying issue of increasing backup and recovery windows putting pressure on the business continuity strategy deployed by IT. The continuous addition of hardware also has a significant impact on the maintenance costs of the applications...