“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This adage offers an accurate summary of how organizations currently purchase storage solutions. What are changing are the drivers that affect IT decision making — executives want IT to reduce costs and improve responsiveness to business requirements. From a technology perspective, there are always new storage innovations coming to market—such as deduplication and thin provisioning — that promise to help companies deal with massive data growth. What is staying the same is how IT executes a storage solution purchase. Despite evolving business drivers and innovations, most organizations still procure storage the same way they did a decade ago: by focusing on capacity requirements.
To actually take advantage of the innovations in storage, organizations need a new set of purchase criteria to evaluate the various solutions in the marketplace. By altering their storage buying perspective from a capacity point of view to one that centers on solving real business challenges, businesses can build a more cost-effective, operationally efficient and flexible storage infrastructure.
When buying storage from a business problem perspective, ESG recommends that companies make a concerted effort to avoid making each purchase so unique that the solution only addresses a specific challenge. Having a separate system for every problem precludes any economies of scale that a shared infrastructure could provide. As a result, ESG believes that companies should establish a set of common criteria that becomes a standard part of storage solution RFPs so that IT has the flexibility to build and efficiently run a shared infrastructure. ESG’s suggestions are highlighted in this slideshow.
Click through for six recommendations from ESG to help improve your strategy for purchasing storage.
Flexibility in shared infrastructure is critical as IT may want to add an application that is optimized for NFS storage connectivity. If the shared infrastructure only supports Fibre Channel, such an action will require a new system. IT should not have to worry about these issues or get caught off guard because they cannot leverage an existing solution. Having a solution that supports multiple protocols provides a strong, flexible foundational element to any shared infrastructure.
Source: ESG white paper, Changing the Way You Purchase Storage, August 2010.
This level of technology support is critical from a data protection perspective, because the real value comes in how many applications a solution can support. IT cannot afford to deploy several systems each optimized for a specific application.
Source: ESG white paper, Changing the Way You Purchase Storage, August 2010.
If IT is going to compete with the agility of cloud providers, it will need the tools to do so. When evaluating storage systems, companies should inquire as to the types of management software available to automate provisioning tasks, monitor resource utilization, and schedule data protection tasks. This software makes it easy for storage management to scale as capacities within a shared infrastructure increase.
Source: ESG white paper, Changing the Way You Purchase Storage, August 2010.
This criterion is far too often taken for granted. Systems and their components fail — it is a part of the technology lifecycle. In a shared infrastructure, storage solutions should have configuration options that create highly available implementations and functions that automate system failover and failback operations. At a minimum, organizations should ask in an RFP how a solution not only delivers, but also automates high availability.
Source: ESG white paper, Changing the Way You Purchase Storage, August 2010.
For a storage solution to properly underpin a shared storage infrastructure, it has to support multiple application workloads. Having a unified architecture, the option to use flash technology and lower-cost disk drives, and management software to optimize system resources, allows a solution to cost-effectively meet a variety of workload demands as data across all of the applications continues to grow. QoS helps IT optimize all of these resources across the workloads. Aside from performance, systems must be able to scale in terms of capacity. As data growth continues, organizations do not want to “run out of room” within a shared infrastructure environment as this can disrupt availability and create unnecessary operational burdens.
Source: ESG white paper, Changing the Way You Purchase Storage, August 2010.
A derivative of the unified architecture is the ability to support a variety of capabilities (deduplication, thin provisioning, multi-tenancy, data protection, etc.). It is important to seek out solutions that have these capabilities; it is just as important to make sure they can be used regardless of the size of the system and the server connection protocol in use. Companies should have the option of using these capabilities as they deem necessary rather than buying individual systems that only support one or two functions.
Source: ESG white paper, Changing the Way You Purchase Storage, August 2010.
