Thursday, April 7, 2011

Five Strategies for SAN Storage Cost Reduction

By Molly Webster


A storage area network (SAN) never stops evolving. To keep up with the company's ever-changing enterprise storage wants, the IT Director, CIO, or Storage Administrator ought to regularly purchase new SAN equipment to expand or upgrade the system.

If you find yourself frustrated at the cost to store, manage and guard information, the following five guidelines can help you put your self in a situation to negotiate, decrease cost, and afford world-class SAN storage infrastructure.

1. Buy Used and New Overstock SAN Storage - Savings of 20-80% are to be found by leveraging used and new-overstock storage. Data center consolidations, canceled deals and bankruptcy typically push the latest technology into the used marketplace, giving IT managers a cost effective alternative for capacity upgrades, DR projects and tiered storage.

2. Assess Your Requirements - Before you cut a purchase order, ask yourself and your team the tough question -Do you definitely require all new equipment? Sure, most organizations will require new equipment for mission critical information - perhaps 20%, but that leaves the other 80% unaccounted for. Take into account alternatives like replacing little drives with big drives in legacy arrays, swapping out the controllers and used storage arrays as choices to reduce costs.

3. Decrease Capacity - When buying from the manufacture, consider purchasing a minimum configuration, permitting you to purchase new-overstock or used upgrades to complete the capacity requirements. By utilizing this method you need to expect savings of 30-50%. Not every single solution can use this strategy, but it's worth exploring.

4. Use Multiple Suppliers - You know the saying about putting all your eggs in one basket. Use a two-vendor strategy, or, in the event you have to use only one vendor, purchase used, overstock, or new-surplus SAN storage from time to time to keep the manufacture on his toes.

5. Check alternative manufacturers - EMC, IBM, HP, HDS and other people are all authorized to sell Brocade SAN equipment, and Brocade can sell it to you directly. By exploring your options to source things like Brocade and CISCO MDS SAN infrastructure you can put budget dollars back inside your pocket or use the cost savings to super size the configuration.




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