get A SENSIBLE RECOVERY PLAN
What is the dollar value associated with time to recovery? How long will it take to get systems back up, and how much is that time worth? Those are a few of the questions you should ask as you put a plan in place, says Kerns. "If I'm back in business in two hours, it will cost me X amount of revenue. If eight hours, I've lost revenue and maybe lost customers. In two days, maybe the survival of the company comes into play. The value of knowing that tells you the importance and expenditures you need to make to implement a [storage] solution," he adds.
GlassHouse's Scannell agrees that the cost of a recovery or backup strategy should be measured. He cites one customer who had a tape-based backup environment with multiple libraries of tapes it didn't need. Hundreds of tapes were only 10 per cent to 30 per cent full because of a configuration option that was chosen when the tapes were purchased. By simply tweaking the configuration, fewer tapes went offsite, reducing hardware and processing needs and requiring fewer people to manage the process. Total savings: $US1 million.
Scannell also says the area of data replication may be ripe for potential cost savings. Say a company has two data centres with data copied automatically - in real time - between each centre. Yet the company also employs a snapshot solution that replicates data every 15 minutes. Does it still make sense to take snapshots as often when the data is also replicated in the two data centres? "These questions of policy and the domino effect they have are very poorly understood," Scannell says.
look FOR CREATIVE WAYS TO REDUCE COSTS
There may be a number of ways to save money that you haven't had the time, resources or brainpower to consider. Yellow Technologies acquired storage in larger portions in one procurement cycle per year instead of multiple times, says Corwin. Instead of buying one terabyte four times a year, for example, the company buys four terabytes once a year. That allows Yellow to leverage price breaks from its vendors, and it reduces the overhead costs of being in multiple procurement cycles. "Four RFPs a year is quite time consuming," he says.
By paying attention to his faculty, Case Western's Gonick tries to figure out how much storage he'll need at a future date. If he needs 10 terabytes of storage now, but thinks that he may need five more terabytes in a year, he gets his vendor to commit to one price in advance. "We have an option to scale at the same price point," he says.
Goodwin also advises charging storage costs back to the business units. "When there's no relationship between cost and consumption, there will be unlimited demand for consumption," he says.
think LONG-TERM
Buying the cheapest hardware or software may save you money up front, but how does it fit into your long-term storage plan? The majority of your storage budget is spent on administration, not product; and hardware and software that costs less initially might cost significantly more down the line.
Ultimately, says Evaluator's Kerns, the business requirements must drive the storage purchase. "Maybe the cost of implementing fibre channel versus IP [channel] is twice as much money. But if you're worried about that, you better find a new job because it's a bigger picture issue," he says.
Storage must be managed like a resource, says Paccar's Flynn, so you need to invest in the people and tools to best manage it. Now is a great time to negotiate with vendors, he says, noting that there's probably never been a better time to get them to compete for your business.
"We can continue to invest and drive out some screaming deals," Flynn says.
Yes, rock-bottom bargains are a good thing. But if you don't have a handle on what you're buying and why, the deals of today are doomed to failure. Make sure you have a storage management strategy in place and people dedicated to carrying it out. Then use the rest of the tips previously mentioned to crank out the most value from your storage investments.
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