Dorset Police Hi-tech Crime Unit has overhauled its data storage capabilities to improve access to growing amounts of digital forensic evidence.

The force was struggling with mushrooming data storage requirements.

It has installed a Sun StorageTek storage array, based on LSI technology, which has reduced the amount of time required to examine evidence and complete investigative tasks.

‘We needed to install a scalable storage area network that would allow us to add-on storage incrementally,’ said DC Tristan Oliver of the Hi-Tech Crime Unit. ‘We wanted a large central storage location that was out of the way and to which we could attach a lot of computers.’

Dorset’s previous storage system was installed in 2001 and consisted of a desktop computer and external hard disks. As each disk reached capacity the force had to purchase extra disks to cope with the increasing demand for storage, which created delays because only one person could examine data at any one time and crucial investigative tasks could take up to five weeks. The unit tried upgrading network processing capacity and bandwidth, but this proved insufficient.

‘Our plight was not helped by the files getting fatter and the number of formats increasing in type and complexity. We were storing and examining MMS and SMS messages, calls, images, videos and sound files from each new generation of mobiles, PDAs and smartphones,’ said Oliver.

Dorset police now has about 20TB of storage that can be accessed by multiple members of staff simultaneously.

Budget considerations also meant that Dorset police could not afford to invest in a back-up and recovery infrastructure.

‘We had to have something 100 per cent reliable,’ said Oliver. ‘So far it has never been offline and we have had a number of other police forces interested in the set-up.’

Andrew Reichman, analyst at Forrester Research, said: ‘Organisations should be aware that higher standards of data availability and increasing storage capacity requirements also drive up the costs of associated backups and data replication.’