Chris Bjorklund: You’re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I’m Chris Bjorklund. If you’re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an online streaming-media player, you can hear interviews with other experts at AllBusiness.com.

Bjorklund: Many small businesses need to think about a direct attached storage system, or DASS, to store all their data. Matt Sarrell, IT consultant and founder of Sarrell Group, elaborates on both the good points and bad points of DASS.

Matt Sarrell: Yes, the plusses and minuses of the direct attached storage system are many. The first plus is that you would, you know, it is an easy thing to do. You just add more drive space to the server that you are already using. You don’t have to find new room somewhere in your office to do it. It’s usually a little box roughly the size of the server that gets plugged in right next to it. It’s easy to manage because it’s connected right to the server so you manage it the same way as you’re managing the drives that are inside the server. Performance is usually pretty good and let’s see, there are a number of minuses though. The first minus is that if your business is rapidly growing, then you may end up surpassing the size of your desk solution so it may just be a stopgap solution where you’d have to go to something more industrial strength later. Another minus is management in terms of growth so it’s an easy thing to add if you’ve only got one server, direct attached storage is, you know, it’s like a no-brainer. You know, just add another drive to the server. But then, you run into an issue where if you have multiple servers and you want to have the data accessible from all the servers. You know, from all the servers to each person in your organization then you get into this issue with direct attached storage of where is my document? Is my document on server 1? Is my document on server 2? How do I find it? This is actually in companies that are growing rapidly; this is actually a very big problem. And that’s the primary issue with direct attached storage. We would call that data siloing. So you end up with these silos or islands of information that different groups don’t necessarily have access to from different locations within your organization.

Bjorklund: Look for Matt Sarrell’s technology blog on AllBusiness.com. You’ll also find more podcasts with Matt in our podcast library. I’m Chris Bjorklund for AllBusiness, thanks for listening.