Five Reasons to Conduct a Storage Assessment Today

Lurking inside many corporate data centers across America are legacy storage devices just waiting to expire during a critical task. Some of these older storage devices may be insufficient to handle today’s increased data storage and access requirements, let alone the requirements of tomorrow. The challenges are particularly acute as data analytics become increasingly important to corporate America. Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, has identified five reasons to conduct a storage assessment today to provide CIOs and other IT professionals with guidance about making new storage choices.

“Legacy storage simply wasn’t designed with today’s uses in mind. That means there are systemic gaps that may leave an organization exposed to new pressures placed upon it by unpredictable workloads and unrestrained data growth,” says Bob Hankins, vice president, Storage Solutions, Logicalis US.

Click through for five reasons your organization should conduct a storage assessment before it’s too late, as identified by Logicalis.

Now is the time to get in front of the important trends impacting storage requirements. CIOs and other IT professionals responsible for data storage management need to take time today to assess their organizations’ current storage requirements and plot them against the backdrop of other technology trends such as mobility, social media, cloud computing and Big Data. Each of these has a significant impact on legacy storage architectures.

Typical legacy storage is actually not typical. Different drives, different speeds, and different media are all factors that comprise the legacy data device landscape. These devices include drives, disks, optical storage, and tapes – many from different manufacturers. By assessing the landscape and planning today, organizations can reduce management complexity of their data storage environments in the future.

Newer technologies such as software-defined storage provide the ability to deliver storage solutions that scale from entry-level to high-end, sharing common data services across both physical storage systems and software-defined storage. This enables end users to access storage that supports all applications and data types across physical, virtual and cloud resources.

Today, the term “return on investment” as applied to storage is being defined as a reduction in complexity that results in the consolidation of workloads on less equipment and the discovery of hidden value inside existing data. The ability to access data from multiple sources and in multiple forms – structured and unstructured, SQL and NoSQL, etc. — is critical to increasing the ROI for corporate storage environments.

Storage is the center of the corporate universe today and for the foreseeable future. The ability to create an environment for information retention and business analytics is critical for organizations to survive, thrive and compete. This includes developing capabilities for organizations to find the proverbial “needle in a haystack” with unprecedented speed and ease.