Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Five Ways for SAN Storage Cost Reduction

By Steven Jorgensenn


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

Should you find your self frustrated at the cost to store, manage and protect data, the following 5 guidelines can help you put your self in a situation to negotiate, decrease cost, and afford world-class SAN storage infrastructure.

1. Get Used and New Overstock SAN Storage - Savings of 20-80% are to be discovered by leveraging used and new-overstock storage. Information center consolidations, canceled deals and bankruptcy frequently push the latest technology into the used marketplace, giving IT managers a cost efficient 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. Reduce Capacity - When buying from the manufacture, take into consideration buying a minimum configuration, permitting you to purchase new-overstock or used upgrades to complete the capacity requirements. By utilizing this technique you must expect savings of 30-50%. Not every answer 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 technique, or, should 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 others 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 it is possible to put budget dollars back inside your pocket or use the cost savings to super size the configuration.




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