How to Use Single Instancing to Control Storage Expense (
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In a world where 80 percent of CIOs admit to never seeing
their energy bills, enterprises are under the illusion that they have limitless
inexpensive storage. While no one can hold back the rapid escalation in storage
demand, the opportunity does exist to control storage resources and expense by
employing a familiar green mantra: "reduce, reuse, recycle." No
electronic IT is inherently green; it depends on how it is used and what it
replaces.
Electronic archives are an operational area that requires new
attention in order to generate optimal results, as demands for document storage
continue to grow exponentially. One key strategy is single-instance storage.
Contemporary, server-based technology can be used to enable single instancing
for High-Volume Transaction Output (HVTO) applications, as well as deliver
dramatic reductions in the cost of electronic document storage.
By way of explanation, HVTO encompasses internal content
such as operational reports and customer-facing content such as statements, policies,
bills and routine correspondence. These documents, traditionally destined for
physical print and fulfillment, are typically stored in Enterprise Content
Management (ECM) systems for internal stakeholder use and online customer
presentation. In an effort to reduce storage requirements, ECM vendors have
historically offered compression options. But compression is largely
ineffective when dealing with graphically-rich, customer-facing content.
Single-instance storage is "a system's ability to keep one copy of content
that multiple users or computers share. It is a means to eliminate data
duplication and to increase efficiency." Single instancing, when combined
with transformation, is a perfect example of "reduce, reuse and
recycle" at work. Transformation is the process in which output is fed to
another system, perhaps in a different (that is, transformed) print or
presentation language. Single instancing reduces the overall storage footprint
by storing information only once and reuses common composition elements
from high-volume documents. High-speed retrieval and on the fly format
transformation permits recycling of stored content and content
repurposing.
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