Intranet Basics:

• What is an Intranet?
• Potential Intranet Costs
• Intranet Applications
• External Hosted Intranets
• Hosted Intranet Benefits
• Open Source Intranets
• Intranet Outsourcing
• Intranet Design Errors
• Administration Errors

Intranet Advanced:

• Securing Your Intranet
• Using Multiple Servers
• The Client-Server Model
• Promoting Your Intranet
• What is Intranet 2.0?
• Standardized Intranets

Intranet Tips:

• Creative Intranet Uses
• Saving Storage Costs
• Intranet Myths Debunked
• Using RSS on an Intranet
• Open Source Add-ons
• The GTD Concept

Intranets and Google:

• About Google’s Intranet
• Using Google Mini

How to Save Storage Costs with Simple Solutions

A storage server is limited by what it can store. That means that multiple storage servers are needed for large companies, organizations, and other institutions. And since storage has remained rather costly throughout the years, administrators don’t always like the idea of spending more and more money each month on new storage - not to mention increases in maintenance costs. Instead of buying more disk space, your organization may actually be better off simply optimizing what you already have.

Using Compression Utilities

There are several ways to tackle the problem. Each way has its own benefits - and compression utilities are perfect for archives. For instance, you may wish to store chat logs, business agendas, fiscal reports, and other data onto your storage server for safe keeping. Since these files are likely to only be accessed a few times throughout the year, we can archive them with a compression utility.

Some of the popular compression utilities include WinZip, 7-zip, Gzip, and countless others. These utilities will take a file and compress it into a much smaller file size. So in the place of your regular files, you may be able to store three times as much - if not more. The only downfall to this technique is that it is often a poor solution for files that are used often. This is because to access the file, it must be decompressed. Not only does this waste time, but the act of recompressing a file after the employee is done with it will only add to the inefficiency. It may not serve useful for popular files, but compression will do wonders with everything else.

Data Removal

It may seem simple at first, but simply deleting records in a database or files you don’t use may be near impossible. Let’s take the example of a customer support database. Customer support representatives track each problem a specific user has. If a certain problem has been solved, then the record floats into the dark abyss of the database - never to be interacted with again (usually).

Now let’s say that instead of keeping all the records in one database, we split it up. This makes the database exponentially faster, since there are fewer records to search. In this instance, we can create a secondary storage database that contains all of the old problems each customer has - just in case an issue is raised in the future about that specific case.

It sounds good in theory, but customer support representatives aren’t paid to painstakingly go through a database and weed out the older solved records. Instead, we can use software to do the dirty work. A company by the name of OuterBay has been selling a service just like we previously described, to mega-giants like Sony, Logitech, HP, and many others. Think about it: we can simply move those old records onto a storage server that zips all of the data - since we likely won’t be using it anytime soon.

Defragmenting Hard Disks

Defragmenting is the process of reorganizing how files are stored on your hard drive. This is necessary because fragmented files may exist on seemingly random locations on the hard disk - and may be using up more space than they should. By defragmenting, users are essentially compressing these files together to provide more free space.

But the benefits don’t stop there. Defragmenting will theoretically help improve the life span of a hard drive, since there is less work finding defragmented files. Less work means less wear and tear - which means less failure. Hard drive failures are disastrous indeed - important documents or files may be unrecoverable. This usually means that secondary storage is almost always imperative to invest in. Even still, improving the life of a hard disk saves on maintenance and new hardware bills.

Outsourcing Storage

If you just don’t want to deal with an entangled mess of wires and hardware, outsourcing is another valid option. You may even pay less on outsourcing than maintenance and upgrades. One good resource to check into is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. Yes, it’s a mouthful - you can simply refer to it as S3.

Amazon’s S3 service is one of the cheapest routes to go. Each gigabyte of space generally costs under $0.20, and bandwidth is around the same level. This eliminates maintenance costs completely, although there is a certain amount of setting up you’ll have to deal with.

If you ever needed an example, just ask the owner of SmugMug.com - he is a prime example of saving money through Amazon S3. Sure, he doesn’t run an intranet, but he does run a website that uses an unbelievable amount of storage space. The owner finally did away with his own hardware, and invested in Amazon S3. His savings? Try a cool $1,000,000 in a year’s worth of cutting maintenance and investment costs.

Closing Comments

In the case of SmugMug.com, you see that you don’t always have to buy more space to cut maintenance costs. In fact, outsourcing your storage may just be the right cure your company is looking for. If you would prefer to keep your company’s private data in-house, simply cutting down on disk space usage is still an option.

Defragmenting, database software, and compression utilities - if you ever needed a reason to not cut down on disk space it won’t be because there aren’t enough solutions. Just keep in mind that those thousands of dollars each month will only grow and grow - so taking a little preemptive action right now can mean all the difference in maintaining an efficient business model.