March 25, 2019 at 2:16 am
Hi,
Not to long ago I asked about methods for document storage in the forum post - Document Storage - Ideas and opinion
I decided to stick with our current FileStream database storage of documents, and by documents I mean pdf's, images etc, nothing to fancy, We need to be able to show the user there are x number of documents attached to a policy, if they click it then we want to load it up for the user.
FileStream does this nicely for us, however we have 2 considerations;
1. The size of this document pool is growing by 100GB a year and archiving anything less than 7 years old isn't really an option to the nature of the work.
2. I've just found out that separate document store which use the image data type to store the data is going to be getting approx. 3 times more documents coming in over the next 3 months, give or take that's another 300GB of documents.
This got me thinking about document storage again and I wondered about storing them in Azure Blob/File storage may be a better idea then we don't have to worry about scaling space as such.
That said I'm sure there are other options as well so I wondered what you thought the best way to safely store documents and allow for scaling may be.
Thanks,
Nic
March 28, 2019 at 11:40 am
Given that disk space, in relative terms, is cheap, and network bandwidth is expensive, I'm not sure the considerations here are properly focused. Handing off the data storage problem invokes a need for considerably more network bandwidth, as you'd then be transmitting ALL of that extra data across the network to AZURE storage at least once, and one additional time, a document's worth; for each document retrieved by a user. That could be a LOT of network bandwidth, given the size of the data. Especially if you pay for that bandwidth by the bytes used. You could potentially be trading a smaller problem for a much more expensive one. Also, what is your backup scenario? How would having that data in AZURE affect your backup and D/R scenarios? Have you considered encryption for such data, as you are entrusting that data to MS, and it's always possible for there to be a bad actor employee who could potentially expose un-encrypted data where it doesn't belong. Then there's the cost of doing that encryption, and any performance penalties associated therewith. Lots to take into account, for sure.
Steve (aka sgmunson) 🙂 🙂 🙂
Rent Servers for Income (picks and shovels strategy)
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