A storage strategy to beat the credit squeeze

Even on a reduced budget, effective storage is still possible claims data centre consolidation experts, RichardsoNEyres

15th January 2009 – The tough economic climate need not threaten the storage of mission critical data if IT budgets come under threat claims RichardsoNEyres. The data centre consolidation specialists believe it is still possible for organisations to have an effective storage strategy on a reduced budget if they take advantage of new technologies, make use of their existing infrastructure and tier architecture correctly.

“Tighter IT budgets don’t necessarily mean that you need to compromise your organisation’s storage strategy,” said Adam Kemp, director, RichardsoNEyres. “Green initiatives and the increasing popularity of virtualisation technologies are already enabling many organisations to save money by using less power and reducing their server estate.

We would advise organisations to consider at the very least making best use of their existing infrastructures and differentiating between mission critical data and older, less important data.”

He continued: “Organisations need to be realistic when it comes to ROI. For example, simple low cost changes can generate ROI very quickly, but sometimes it’s important to invest in technology that will deliver significant ROI in the longer term.”

As a first step towards maintaining an effective storage strategy on a reduced budget, RichardsoNEyres urges organisations to consider the following:

1. New technologies. With the cost per megabyte of storage continually falling, natural cost savings can be made if newer technologies are purchased. Virtualisation technologies enable one server to run multiple operating systems, so organisations can use their existing servers to full capacity. In addition to using less power, virtualisation also offers higher availability of resources, improved disaster recovery processes, tighter security and more efficient desktop management.
2. A tiered architecture. Storage needs to be tiered. Based on its changing value to your organisation, information requires different levels of accessibility and protection. For example, use less expensive tape for aged and less important data and use disk storage for near line and mission critical data.
3. Make best use of existing infrastructure. Utilisation rates of less than 10 per cent are common for physical Windows Servers. However, these low utilisation rates are unlikely to be uniform with some assets running at 100% while others sit idle. Server and storage virtualisation can help design, deploy and view an IT infrastructure as a unified resource pool. Multiple virtual machines or virtual storage pools enable you to get closer to the optimum performance of the host physical devices.