For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Controlling Storage Cost Amid High Growth

by Andrew Reichman, Stephanie Balaouras, February 3, 2010

Storage capacity has been growing fast for the past five years, and an end to the recession is only likely to spur further expansion as projects are re-funded. Recent data shows storage commanding a higher portion of the overall IT budget, but the amount . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage

Current And Planned Adoption Of Storage-As-A-Service Is Minimal For Now

by Andrew Reichman, January 22, 2010

There's been a lot of talk over the past year about moving data to the cloud, from storage vendors and IT professionals alike. Why? Given that data storage capacities are growing at 30% to 40% per year but storage budgets are flat or growing minimally, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

How Efficient Is Your Storage Environment?

The KPIs That Matter Most In Enterprise Storage and How To Measure Them

by Andrew Reichman, October 22, 2009

Building an effective storage environment is a balancing act between performance, reliability, and efficiency. For years, improving storage efficiency took a back seat to the other goals. Now, with infrastructure budgets being cut and data growth continuing . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

EMC Rethinks High-End Storage With V-MAX

Potential Customers Should Look For Efficiency And Favorable Economics

by Andrew Reichman, July 16, 2009

You've probably had the EMC Symmetrix family as a fixture in your data center for high-performance and high-availability storage for years, or at least you've given it strong purchase consideration. But in the past few years, EMC fell behind the technology . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Align Green Storage With Overall Efficiency

Power Savings Benefits Are Limited, But Improved Efficiency Makes Good Sense

by Andrew Reichman, April 17, 2009

Storage vendors worldwide have jumped on the "green" bandwagon in their marketing campaigns, but it's hard to determine which technologies move beyond hype and rhetoric to have a real positive impact. In a gloomy economy, initiatives that sound good but . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Storage Choices For Virtual Server Environments

Most Firms Go Conservative But Still Struggle With Performance And Efficiency

by Andrew Reichman, January 15, 2009

Server virtualization is the most substantial shift in IT so far this decade. Adoption is high, and firms are virtualizing mission-critical and business-critical applications. But while server virtualization has become mainstream, firms still struggle . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

SSD "Chips" Away At Spinning Disk

Options Abound For Application Acceleration Through Memory Use

by Andrew Reichman, December 10, 2008

Solid-state disk (SSD) is by no means new technology, but declining costs and reliability improvements of flash storage have reinvigorated the debate on where and how to apply memory to the effort to improve application performance. A recent wave of storage . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

Dedicated Application Storage Proposes More Simplicity And Lower Cost

by Andrew Reichman, December 4, 2008

It's been the conventional wisdom of the past 10 years that to provide the best performance, protection, and capacity utilization for applications and databases, you need a robust storage array in a storage area network (SAN). But with low capacity utilization, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Calculating Your Relative Cost Of Operations

by Andrew Reichman, James Staten, October 7, 2008

This document provides a simple methodology for calculating the cost impacts of a new technology investment, process change, or project. Rather than conduct a full TCO analysis that can be prohibitively cumbersome, or short cut your analysis with a basic . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

TCO Is Overrated

Use Relative Cost Of Operations For Most Infrastructure Investment Justifications

by Andrew Reichman, James Staten, August 26, 2008

Total cost of operations (TCO)-based financial analysis is held up as the gold standard for technology investment justification, but most firms don't have the rigor to apply the discipline to their environment. To really implement TCO-based analysis it . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Five Key Storage Strategies For A Down Economy

Tips To Make The Most Of A Tight Budget In The Face Of Ongoing Data Growth

by Andrew Reichman, July 16, 2008

It's clear that the economy is on a downward trajectory, and regardless of the duration or severity, there's no doubt that belt-tightening in IT spending will be the norm for the next year. At the same time, most IT budgets were already stagnant or slow-growing . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

10 GbE: Its Time Is Coming

Start Targeted Deployments Today, But Anticipate Broad Investment In 2010

by Andrew Reichman, James Staten, May 16, 2008

Ten gigabit per second Ethernet (10 GbE) represents the next level of enterprise network bandwidth, with vendors hyping it as the next great capability. But as an IT infrastructure and operations professional, you must strike a balance between constant . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Consolidate Storage Vendors To Reduce Complexity

More Companies Prefer To Buy Storage From A Single Vendor

by Andrew Reichman, April 23, 2008

According to a Forrester survey, storage equipment and management software represents 10% of the IT hardware budget, and spending is expected to increase by 4% in 2008. Given the significance of this spending and the tenor of the economy these days, it's . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Market Overview: File-Based Storage

NAS Offerings And Other Approaches To Address An Avalanche Of Files

by Andrew Reichman, April 14, 2008

Firms must store more and more file data as users generate more office documents and create more rich digital content such as photos, audio files, and video files, and as applications do more with these and other forms of file-based content. With increasing . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Cost Comparison Of iSCSI Versus Fibre Channel SAN Components

Favorable Economics Makes iSCSI Worthy Of Serious Consideration

by Andrew Reichman, February 7, 2008

Although a great deal of energy is expended discussing the performance differences of IP-based and Fibre Channel (FC)-based storage area networks (SAN), it is generally accepted that it is cheaper to deploy an iSCSI SAN. This report dissects the components . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

SRM Needs Services To Succeed

IBM Shows It Gets This By Acquiring Storage Service Provider NovusCG

by Andrew Reichman, January 22, 2008

The storage resource management (SRM) market has been stagnant for years, despite significant needs on the part of storage end users. A big part of this low adoption rate is the combination of complex tools on the market and limited bandwidth for implementation . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Storage IPOs Hot, Acquisitions Not

Multiple Storage Firms Go Public As Pace Of Acquisition Slows

by Andrew Reichman, November 27, 2007

For the last several years, enterprise storage has been an acquisitive market, with big fish gobbling up minnows and even peer-sized firms at a dramatic rate. But during the past year, the pace of acquisition has slowed and a significant number of storage . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Measuring The Cost Of IT Consolidation

Identifying The Elements That Contribute To Economic Analysis

by Andrew Reichman, November 12, 2007

Consolidation can help to optimize cost structure for IT organizations with limited resources. Technology enablers like virtualization and remote computing eliminate requirements for dedicated physical assets for each application and for physical proximity . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Trim The Fat In Storage With Thin Provisioning

Thin Provisioning Offers Green Storage Through Improved Utilization

by Andrew Reichman, July 23, 2007

Companies face an uphill battle when it comes to managing storage capacity effectively: Utilization is low (often around 40%), they have inadequate forecasting capabilities, and there is poor communication between the storage organization and application . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

SRM Is Knocking; Open The Door

The Pain Is Acute, But Organizations Resist The Cure

by Andrew Reichman, May 4, 2007

Storage environments struggle to cope with exploding capacity demands, constant availability needs, and strict mandates for data protection. In the face of these challenges, few environments have tools that enable them to consistently view, report on, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Bleeding Edge NAS Joins The Big League

HDS OEMs BlueArc To Compete With EMC And Network Appliance

by Andrew Reichman, Stephanie Balaouras, March 21, 2007

In December 2006, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced that it had taken a minority ownership stake and established an OEM relationship with niche network-attached storage (NAS) player BlueArc Corporation. The partnership helps HDS bring to market BlueArc's . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Large Enterprises Lead In Demand For Storage Virtualization

Marketers Must Tune Messages And Products For High-End Early Adopters

by Andrew Reichman, Frank E. Gillett, January 17, 2007

In the past two years, leading storage vendors have added storage virtualization to their product suites, wading in with initial offerings that are best suited for small to medium-size businesses (SMBs), but tech marketers at these firms have been frustrated . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Storage Virtualization Emerges . . . Slowly

Lack Of Architecture Consensus And Scalability Issues Impede Progress

by Andrew Reichman, January 17, 2007

Storage hardware refreshes and software upgrades are costly and disruptive. Interoperability and organizational challenges lead to islands of low utilization and overly complex management, and communication problems lead to inadequate responsiveness to . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Storage Chargeback Is Problematic

But Getting It Right Could Make A Big Difference

by Andrew Reichman, December 26, 2006

As data storage grows exponentially, organizations are focused on finding ways to leverage economies of scale and simplify management complexity through centralization. Doing so without a means to charge users based on how much they consume is impractical, . . .

When Calculating Terabytes Per FTE, Consider The Big Picture, Not Absolute Benchmarks

by Andrew Reichman, November 3, 2006

Storage managers spend a lot of time thinking about the storage volume managed per employee, often measured as terabytes per full-time employee (TB/FTE), as a metric of storage management efficiency. Variability in measurement methodology and environment-specific . . .