BUYING TIPS
According to a survey by SoundView on the top storage purchase priorities, the primary reasons that CIOs consider while enhancing their storage are:

• Support for new applications

• Capacity/refresh

• Disaster recovery (backup/replication)

• Archiving/compliance

• Storage management

If that is what is driving their purchase decisions, then from an information infrastructure perspective, enterprises should identify a storage solution based on how it can

• Boost productivity and growth without discarding previous investments

• Lower TCO

• Improve utilization of the network

• Elevate service levels

• Report back to business quickly to ensure best RoI

To help accomplish this, enterprises must focus their attention on some critical qualities that ultimately drive the storage buying strategies for enterprises.

l Lower Costs: With networked storage, users can share from a common pool, resulting in increased storage utilization while reducing the total amount of storage that organizations need to buy and manage. Moreover, networked storage allows consolidation of servers by reducing the amount of file servers and taking away the need to buy more servers just to hold more disks. A study conducted by McKinsey and Merrill Lynch points to 47 cents per MB TCO advantage for networked storage over the traditional DAS approach.

l Protect IT Investment: Using server-based storage means that the disks are likely to be thrown out every time an upgrade is done. With networked storage, SMEs can protect their investments by reassigning volumes as needs change. They can look for modular networked storage systems that allow data-in-place upgrades without disruption, so that users can update storage processors and interchange components with data in place.

l Reduce Backup/Restore Time: The ability to backup, store, access, and restore information quickly and efficiently has a direct impact on the company’s daily operations and ensuring business continuity.

l Speed Application Testing and Data Migration: Application testing and data migration are facts of corporate life, but these should not adversely affect service levels. A consolidated information infrastructure makes information instantly available, changeable, and easily shared throughout the organization. Mirroring software allows users to run a number of operations in parallel for testing without disrupting operations.

l Safeguard Information: When a server goes down, its data goes with it. And, restoring from tape can take hours or even days, halting important business functions. Consolidation allows for one standard way of business continuity, instead of multiple ways in a distributed environment.

l Modularity: Robust modularity ensures that as innovative technology is developed, you can update storage processors and interchange components with data in place. Modularity guarantees that future software and hardware upgrades are compatible between generations, allowing flexibility for the system to be deployed and re-deployed, as the business needs change. EMC, for example, offers an option to cost sensitive enterprises to migrate from a low-end solution to a high-end product seamlessly when their information requirements grow.

l Automated and Open Storage Management Software: Enterprises should select open storage management software that work across multi-vendor environments to consolidate storage and servers. Software can play a major part in reducing cost by automating manual storage tasks so you can free up valuable IT resources and labor to be deployed for more productive tasks.

l Interoperability: Enterprises should select a reliable and open platform vendor. The information infrastructure impacts every part of the IT environment, from applications, servers to databases. It is important to ensure that every device works well with the others. Enterprises must assess vendor claims, by finding out how much the company spends on ensuring interoperability. And how good is their service infrastructure and channel structure.