Storage 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.

Increasing commoditisation means that the main storage vendors all have products that address the most common requirements of the storage environment. However, 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.

The reality for most mid-market and large organisations is that complexity will not disappear so it must be managed more effectively. To achieve this, the storage infrastructure should incorporate a combination of hardware, software tools and services.

Hardware
The choice of hardware is increasingly challenging. In a tough economic climate the easiest decision is to buy the cheapest that meets the required performance. However, the purchase cost only represents approximately 20% of the total cost of ownership (see The Real Cost of Storage) and therefore an organisation should consider how the proposed hardware helps to mitigate the additional ‘burdened’ cost such as power, cooling, management and utilisation.

The main vendors and some specialist vendors have products that have been designed to address a number of the key TCO issues as well as delivering on the traditional performance and availability requirements. However, these technologies may require the customer to re-think how they manage their storage assets.

Software Tools
Budget constraints, tactical purchases and rapid data growth will continue to generate complexity in the storage environment. In addition, strategies designed to reduce data centre complexity such as server virtualisation, create additional storage management issues.

Storage Resource Management tools have been available for some time but have not widely used due to cost, skills and the ability to justify the expenditure. However, SRM tools have improved significantly and are at a price point that makes them a viable option for the mid-market organisation. Critically SRM can address a number of the management issues that result in poor performance, unplanned outages and low utilisation rates.

Services
Budget constraints and data growth has also put pressure on the IT department’s ability to maintain the storage infrastructure at optimum efficiency. Day to day tasks are completed but lack of time or skills means that storage resource management, with or without software tools, is ad-hoc.

Using external storage professionals as part of service level management agreement can represents a cost-effective approach to maintaining high operating efficiency in the storage environment.

Tectrade

Tectrade follows a structured approach to designing storage technology solutions. We focus on three key aspects of the current and target solution:

• Total Cost of Ownership
• Service Catalogue
• Storage Maturity

Hardware
Tectrade takes an independent stance and recommend hardware that best meets the solution design objectives.

Software Tools & Services
Tectrade will typically include storage resource management options as part of any storage technology solution. We can sell software tools outright, alternatively we can deliver these as a very cost effective SRM-as-a-service agreement.

Business Value

• Reduced storage acquisition through increased utilisation and provisioning of storage assets
• Improved availability and reliability through 24 x 7 automated monitoring of storage environment
• Simplified storage management
• Reduced total cost of ownership of storage assets