Despite the difficult economic times, storage needs keep growing. IT managers are looking for ways to optimize the investments they must make to keep up with these ever-increasing storage demands.
Here are 5 options to consider:
1. Tier Your Storage – Use lower cost Nearline storage, like Seagate Constellation™ drives for high capacity reference data, backups or the migration of mission critical transactional data from Tier 1 to Tier 2 storage. These entry-level drives are Enterprise-savvy ensuring the performance, reliability and data integrity (choose from SAS or SATA) required while saving on energy (under 3 watts of power per drive), real estate (2.5-Inch FF = 70% rack savings space) and out-of-pocket up-front costs.
2. Move to Virtualization – Check out this video and see how Priceline.com moved to virtualization and is able to capitalize on lean economic times.
3. Search the Clouds – Beth Pariseau of Search Storage reports that tough economic conditions have caused many companies to use “Cloud Services” for Disaster Recovery.
4. Recycle old storage – It’s not cost-effective to keep older storage around past its useful life (generally 5 years) sucking power and cooling. New 2.5” HDDs can save you up to 50% in power savings while providing you with 2X the performance (in the case of 6Gb/s SAS) and roughly the same capacity in a much smaller footprint. Seagate offers low-power 2.5” HDDs for Tier 1 (Savvio 15K and Savvio 10K) and Tier 2 (Constellation).
5. Plan for the future – HP’s article “Storage Budgeting and the Problem of Just Cheap-for-Now” details how you can get the best and the most storage for your dollar considering these three cost-impacting factors: provisioning capabilities, energy efficiency and data reduction features.
What options have you deployed to make it through these tough times?
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