A quiet drama is under way at the offices of Chicago’s Information Resources Inc.
The company is engaged in testing the buying habits of millions of consumers and, in a constant battle to keep up with the flow of data that arrives around the clock from 37,000 point-of-sale terminals, finds it necessary to add to its information storage capacity almost continuously. Where home users and small businesses still talk in terms of gigabytes, IRI deals in terabytes–1 terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes, or about 20 times the storage capacity of a typical desktop PC.
“When I joined the company 3 1/2 years ago we had a grand total of 22 terabytes of storage–today we have 122 terabytes,” said Doug Mackie, executive vice president of information technology operations. What’s more, he added, that’s only half the actual storage capacity since there is an equal amount of backup.
As demand for electronic information continues to grow in volume and in importance, storage issues have become a problem that haunts many companies. Even in a tight economy, companies must continue to find ways to support effective data storage needs.
New applications in e-business and customer relationship management are dramatically increasing demands for information storage, according to a recent study by the Meta Group, a technology research firm.
“Many studies have continued to show an underlying 60 percent compound growth in the amount of electronic data being generated,” said Linda Sanford, IBM Corp.’s group vice president for storage.
“From my observation of the industry, everybody is in the same boat,” said IRI’s Mackie. “There is just more and more data to be collected and handled.”
While companies are addressing this demand in part by simply adding more disk drives, some are investing heavily in various networking schemes which permit sharing of storage. This newer technology is designed to make more efficient use of storage and improve the ability to share data.
With more than 300 servers in the IRI data center, Mackie says the company’s previous system “simply ran out of gas.” Instead, IRI moved from storage built into each of the servers to banks of shared storage connected by storage area networks. The networks “allow data to be shared and moved freely,” Mackie said.
IRI is using a storage area network from EMC, a dominant vendor in storage and storage networks. Other providers include IBM and Hitachi.
Another organization working double time to keep up with its storage needs is the University of Chicago Hospitals & Health System. The group will soon complete the installation of an IBM-based multiterabyte archiving and distribution system for medical images.
Scott M. Reid, administrative director for imaging services, said the hospital is growing its volume of individual patient image studies by 6 percent to 8 percent per year. What’s more, the number of images used in each examination is growing–sometimes reaching 300 images per patient, several times more than was typical a generation ago. “That shows the magnitude of storage growth we are working with,” he said.
Reid is also investing in technology that makes the data more useful. Previously, University of Chicago doctors and medical technicians would have to wait several minutes to retrieve diagnostic images electronically–including CAT scans and MRIs–and view them on their PCs.
Need for increased efficiency
With the new equipment, it is anticipated that the amount of time will be reduced to seconds, a critical difference.
“If a radiologist needs to review 150 cases in 8 hours and you add just a few minutes of waiting time for each image, that can add up to 3 hours taken out of that person’s day,” Reid said.
Whirlpool Corp. also is increasing storage investments, which support the operations of 300 offices around the globe. Jim Haney, a vice president at Whirlpool’s Benton Harbor, Mich., global data center, said his company always sees double-digit storage growth from year to year, despite fluctuations in the economy.
Making better use of data
“We are making more use of all of our business information, and we are collecting and analyzing more consumer data than ever before,” he said.
But the rapid growth has led to inefficiencies, Haney said, which he hopes to eliminate with a shift to a storage area network. “In the past we went through periods of growth and rationalization with servers and networks. Now it’s time to do it with storage,” he said.
Haney credits the new technology with reducing the time needed to run many key applications by half while eliminating the need to add personnel. Most crucial, he said, is that Whirlpool can add storage capacity into the future without having the costs go up exponentially.
