“New Normal” Storage Buyer’s Guide

Published by Tom Cook | Filed under Tom Cook, CEO

Last week I wrote about the “New Normal” in Storage and how I think we are looking at a future of much greater value (lower effective cost) and slow revenue/investment growth in storage. Today I wanted to outline what this means to the enterprise - how a storage buyer or administrator should adapt their organization’s storage selection and consumption patterns to take advantage of market changes.

1. Drive-up storage utilization. By eliminating redundant processes and inefficient LUN allocation the typical enterprise can delay storage expansion by 12-18 months. Start with an audit of your storage practices that includes an application by application analysis of redundant data copies generated and systematically eliminate them. Then evaluate utilization and fill rates by LUN. Use this as a guide to “free-up” space.
2. Align storage performance with required service levels. Over time, “primary” storage has become the largest part of many enterprise storage environments. This is inefficient as “primary” storage is purpose built to address only transactional data. Return Tier 1 storage to its proper place and aggressively move non-transactional data to cost effective near line or value tier storage and realize 10X-50X cost savings.
3. When evaluating additional storage investment or issuing an RFP, make sure your storage purchase has the flowing attributes:
   1. Thin or zero provisioning to eliminate inefficient LUN allocations and drive up utilization.
   2. Integrated Dedupe/Compression space reduction. Your savings should be proven by the vendor prior to purchase for ROI calculation.
   3. Incorporates high-capacity (1TB+) disk drives or SSDs. To achieve improved performance to power ratio and decrease footprint.
   4. Incorporates modern processors. Again to achieve improved cost and performance to power ratio.
   5. Scale out architecture. Your information needs are growing. The storage solution must provide one management interface for hundreds of TBs to PBs of data.
4. Add expansion stage storage vendors to your approved vendor list. Gartner recommends selectively including innovative vendors in your environment to take advantage of advancing technologies and to keep entrenched vendors competitive.
   1. Best of Breed vendor selection has never made more sense.
5. Before your next storage purchase, engage with your vendors and have them present their product roadmap to you. Make sure your current purchase is with a company that embraces cost efficient storage technologies in their product plans.
6. Finally, never purchase more storage than you need. It will cost less next quarter and next year. Your scale-out vendor should supply incremental additional capacity at a lower cost as required.

The “New Normal” in storage is a great opportunity for enterprise storage organizations. You can now meet the challenges of your rapidly growing storage needs within budgetary constraints.