Store It Yourself.

In my November column ("Why Storage Should Be A Service," page 4), I presented the case for outsourcing storage. This month, I'll make the case for owning your own storage devices.

To recap: retaining a service bureau to store your data frees up your capital, especially if you're a startup company. By renting your gigabytes on an as-needed basis, you always have exactly as much capacity as you need and more is just a phone call away. Responsibility for backups falls on somebody else's shoulders and, if they screw up, it's a breach of contract. Sue 'em!

You've probably guessed that I lean towards owning your own data-repository hardware. To me, renting gigabytes from a shared server, far away, sounds a little too much like taking a time-share in a vacation condo, sight-unseen. I must admit that, for several years, the case has been eloquently stated--and briefly, too--in the tagline of Iomega's advertisements, which say simply: "It's your stuff."

Human beings--well, those of us in the industrialized world, anyway--have an apparently unquenchable appetite for owning stuff. Most governments grant tax advantages to ownership, not rentals. They encourage businesses to acquire tangible assets by allowing them to write off or depreciate the price of the hardware and (in many cases) to deduct also the interest on any debt incurred to buy capital equipment.

There is certainly a case to be made for leasing some things such as automobiles, but while you're leasing that car, it's yours, 100 percent of the time. You aren't sharing the trunk with strangers.

Besides, it's never been easier to add storage: there's a plethora of choices and new products hit the market every day. There are plug-in hard drives, like Quantum's (formerly Meridian's) SnapServer; and easily configured tape libraries, like ADIC's new Scalar 100 series; and Quantum/ATL's new LANvault "appliance" that includes its own NT server. HP and IBM are bringing out the Ultrium (high-capacity) implementation of the LTO agreements. You can even have a DVD-RAM jukebox in practically any size that meets your needs.

I'm one of the baby-boomers and we were the first adults ever to own our own computers. (I've had one since 1980.) Some of us still have old 8-inch and 5.25-inch floppies lying around. Sure, they're unreadable in today's drives, but I never let go of any storage medium until I've copied out what I need to keep onto fresh, next-generation media: first to 3.5-inch floppies, then to MO disks, and currently to CD-R and DVD-RAM.

By contrast, in 1983 I signed on with my first e-mail provider and news-group host. It was called The Source, but (excuse the pun) it dried up; by 1986, it was out of business. The Source stored my incoming and outgoing mail and the dialogues that my colleagues and I carried on at the time. Where are those files now?

Don't get me wrong: keep your data anywhere you feel it's safe. At the very least, you should make an extra copy of your most vital data on duplicate media and store it off-site. If the best way to do that is via a dial-up repository, then go for it. I'm only saying that there's a psychological satisfaction that comes from knowing that you own what's yours and that you alone control its destiny.

I suppose it makes sense for a newly minted company to hoard its seed capital, but so many high-tech startups, these days, are nothing but dot-companies: paper boats, afloat on other people's money with nothing tangible to sell except stock certificates. The money they "save" by not buying disk or tape drives isn't going into staff salaries or R&D labs or even market research. It's whooshing out the window to buy advertising space and time in print and broadcast media, ostensibly to create a "brand identity."

In effect, those startups are little more than middlemen, passing money from their venture capital firms to the news-and-entertainment conglomerates. If those dot-com entrepreneurs really cared about high technology, they'd be putting their VCs' money back into the technology sector by buying real-world assets ... like storage devices.