Five Reasons Why Storage Could Fail for your Business

Management of costs

Do you know how much your data is worth? Does the cost of the technology it resides on match the value of the data to the business?

Those companies who have taken the time to understand the value of their data and classify it in a way that allows them to position it onto different cost tiers have quickly redrawn their architecture and strategy to a more economic model. They've ensured that ongoing costs and capital expenditure is led by necessity rather than the selling skills of the vendor.

Configuration

There are a series of steps that can be taken to improve the configuration of a storage area network. I have seen many environments where historical and compounded miss-management of the physical environment has impacted daily operations by increasing the time spent in fault finding, planning and implementing fixes or delivering new implementions within a nest of network cabling.

If most of the administration team’s time is spent dealing with compounded issues, then limited time can be spent planning the developing the environment, reacting to business needs or increasing current capabilities

Green

There is no avoiding the growing argument around reducing our impact on the environment – even if your sensibilities do not lean towards the moral argument, being ‘green’ offers an enhanced business image and goes a long way to reducing costs.

Considering a technology (virtualisation or MAID storage arrays) that reduces the dependence of physical space, power, and cooling requirements is a great way to achieve this.

Refreshing power hungry legacy arrays, virtualising storage to make better use of your current technologies, or de-duping your data to reduce your storage footprint are simple ways to increase your image and reduce your costs.