Discover the Real Cost of Storage

Explosive data growth, low cost hardware and ad-hoc acquisition has helped create increasingly complex storage environments which are difficult to manage efficiently and face a growing risk of unplanned downtime or outages.

In the face of static or falling IT budgets, organisations are rightly asking questions about the real cost of their storage environments and how they can deliver improved business value without investing in yet more hardware.

Unlike the Backup and Recovery environment, the issue of cost involves administration practices more than administration time. The challenge for management is access to current and accurate information concerning the state of the storage environment. Multiple devices from different vendors make information gathering a difficult and often manual task.

It has long been recognised that the purchase cost of storage only represents around 20% of the total cost of ownership. (Gartner Group). The remaining 80% comprises of environmental, administration, backup & recovery and downtime costs.

Another key consideration is the amount and type of raw capacity that is purchased. There is a number of factors that need to be considered:

Storage Utilisation
In a typical storage environment it is not unusual to have utilisation rates of 40% or less. The absence of reliable management information often leads to over allocation of LUNs, and failure to share storage between subsystems or move data to lower cost tiers.

Storage Tiers
Many organisations do not have multiple service levels based on the importance of the data to the business. Consequently, inactive data resides on high performance disk and is likely to be subject to a single tier backup policy.

Storage Performance
Often additional hardware is purchased to improve performance whereas the root cause lies elsewhere in the environment.

Chargeback & Reporting
A key tool is controlling storage capacity is an understanding of the quantity and performance of the storage used in each business area.

Tectrade

Tectrade offers a range of services and solutions aimed at reducing the cost of ownership and improving service levels in the storage environment.

Total Cost of Ownership Study Measurement is the key to improvement. These studies will identify the current burdened cost of the environment and measure key performance indicators. The study will make recommendations around service improvements and identify achievable cost savings. Read More

SAN Optimisation Review The review helps administrators and IT Managers understand the strengths and weaknesses of their current infrastructure. It identifies cost-effective improvements that can be made to reduce inefficiencies, improve performance and better meet the future requirements of the business. Read More

Storage Technology Solutions In the face of static or falling IT budgets, organisations are rightly asking questions about the real cost of their storage environments and how they can deliver improved business value without investing in yet more hardware. Read More

Managed Storage Storage resource management as a service. Read More