I was asked what storage solutions were available for Agriculture. Though the natural reaction to this question might be: Barns, silos, big wooden barrels… there is definitely more subject matter under the surface, especially if you are referring to Data Storage Solutions.

Many vendors talk about data storage solutions for SMB/SME and we tend to reflect more from mainstream businesses. Agriculture has processes, workflows, real data movement, and management problems to solve just like any other SMB/SME; and can suffer very much the same vulnerabilities in information access, data retention, and disaster recovery. Probably more so, Agriculture, like many small businesses, has neither the budget nor the technical staff to design and manage complex IT solutions.

Agriculture is getting its own set of governmental regulated information requirements, for the dating and tracking of product. This too will have an affect on data storage requirement used in agriculture.

As one example, there are many argriculture labs in the US alone that provide independant sample testing of thousands of samples a year for domestic produce as well as any produce bound for overseas. Their needs are just as demanding as any mainstream business, As they need to store their test results and make it available to their customers and field technicians 24 x 7 x 365 days a year.

IT solution definition has a broad a range of possibilities in agriculture; just as any mainstream business would. Design starts like any other IT project, by first identifying the data you have to manage and understanding its criticality – by regulatory mandates or otherwise. Only then can you determine how to move manage and protect this data for what ever length of time necessary.

So, in short, the “solution” depends on understanding what your needs are. There are many choices that are simple to deploy, are remotely manageable, and don’t require a lot of technical skills. There are also options to fit tight budgets that can give you flexibility, capacity expansion when needed, data movement (even over the WAN if necessary,) as well as data protection.

I also reference a good article on the subject by Jon Toigo, though written in March of 2005 titled: “Big-time data protection for small potatoes.” Much of what that article describes is very typical of the real and growing needs of data storage solutions for Agriculture, that tracks very much with the needs of other SMBs and SMEs.

SR

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 and is filed under General, Storage Applications, Platforms, Advisor - Steve Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.