Industry benchmarks reveal that storage workloads vary considerably based on workload types: business processing, Internet applications, technical applications, collaborative applications, decision support, or infrastructure maintenance, for example.
"Business processing -- the real-time operations that involve large amounts of data, high read-to-write ratios, and maintaining high levels of integrity -- will require more people: One person per gigabyte or even per one-half gigabyte," said David Floyer, VP of research for ITCentrix, a developer of innovative IT decision support solutions. "Financial institutions will have at least a 25 percent higher overhead because of more stringent backup and integrity requirements. Integrity in this environment is much more important because if you lose a piece of data you may have to roll back thousands of transactions taking hours to get back online. It's headline news if they lose data."
