The best way to hedge against such vagaries is to build flexibility into your systems, to minimize any disruptions.

Sudhanshu Sarronwala, Soundbuzz CEO

Digital music service provider Soundbuzz discovered this at the end of last year. Soundbuzz is involved in the backend of digital music distribution, by providing the technology platform and the content through online and wireless partners such as Telstra, Optus and M1.

The company had started with 100GB of storage when it kicked off in 1999 with Web sites. Having seen this space last until late 2003, the company upped it to 760GB last October. "We thought, well, 760GB, we've grown seven times, that would give us 70,000 tracks--we should be quite comfortable for a while, and then we were done with that in a month or two," recalls Soundbuzz CEO Sudhanshu Sarronwala.

When the extra storage ("our awesome 760GB" laughs Sarronwala) was ordered, the music industry had not given any indication of the volume of songs that was going to be made available. That only came at the beginning of 2004.

"The libraries for digital music started growing very rapidly towards the end of 2003, when the licensing from the record industry sort of opened up," explains Sarronwala. "We're talking about hundreds of thousands of tracks. We needed to keep those files in our database, therefore suddenly the need for storage changed very dramatically." With each song file taking about 4MB of space, Soundbuzz found that their recently-upgraded storage system became inadequate "literally overnight".

"We sort of went into a bit of panic mode, because we could see the wave of volume heading towards us, and we were not equipped to deal with it," he continues. "Then we decided we really need to look at something which was scalable over the next two to three years. Given the fact that our first predictions had all gone down the drain, we wanted to make sure that we didn't have to revisit this in six months' time."

In January this year, the company came up with the numbers in terms of what it needed to scale to, and went into tender mode to look for a storage partner. "It's a partnership rather than buying a couple of boxes," notes Sarronwala, "because this is something we're looking at for the long term. There's nothing more central to our business, because that's where the actual files reside, and it's a 24/7 business, and we service multiple partners. There's so many people depending on a steady supply of the stuff as their customers pull it."

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