resource center
  See your link here
|
Subscribe to Computerworld Computerworld -
At GlassHouse, we regularly survey our clients to keep on top of their issues and concerns. One recent survey on storage budgeting priorities revealed a couple of interesting tidbits.
First, regardless of the size of the organization, cost-cutting is a high priority. Not really much of a surprise here. However, the survey, whose respondents represented companies with infrastructure budgets ranging from $10 million to over $250 million, did find that larger organizations appear to be willing to go to a greater extent to find savings.
While everyone is trying to reduce costs by improving utilization and lowering unit costs, at larger companies additional areas like staff management and data retention policies are also being scrutinized.
The second interesting finding was somewhat unexpected: across the board, information life-cycle management came out on top as the highest storage budgeting priority, trumping compliance, security, and virtualization. ILM has been hyped by analysts and vendors for nearly two years, and now it appears that companies are buying into the concept at least at some level. This is surprising, because it had seemed as though some of the ILM clamor had abated of late. For a time, I used a presentation slide consisting solely of ILM snippets from the home pages of every major storage vendor. Have browbeaten customers finally succumbed to their vendors' sales pitches, or is there another reason?
I suspect that the most likely explanation is tied to finding No. 1: Storage managers relate ILM to cost-cutting. If so, then here are some caveats these budget planners should consider:
First, ILM does not equal tiered storage. It's easy to buy multiple classes of storage. Using it effectively, however, can be a considerable challenge and may fall short of cost-savings goals.
Second, smaller companies can benefit from the experiences of larger ones. Nontechnological factors, including organizational structure and data classification policies, are critical to successfully realizing the vision of ILM. Basically, don't shortchange people, policy and process. The field is littered with underutilized second and third storage tiers.
Jim Damoulakis is CTO at GlassHouse Technologies, a provider of independent storage services. He can be reached at jimd@glasshouse.com.
Speeding business innovation with HP Data Center Transformation solutions
Data center transformation enables your IT organization to focus more on business priorities and innovation by decreasing spending on maintenance and management by...
Four Principles for Reducing Storage TCO
(Source: Hitachi Data Systems) Difficult economic times require new strategies for reducing costs. Where storage technology and economics meet, there are...
HP Data Center Transformation Solutions
CIOs today are challenged to respond to economic and business pressures, to change from being cost centers to becoming strategic business enablers. There...
Boost your CAE productivity, and break-away from the pack
(Source: Sun) Join Clemson University as they present their groundbreaking engineering simulations research at their Computational Center for Mobility Systems. Dr. James Leylek,...
Using Symark PowerBroker™ to Enrich Your Organization's RBAC Model
The essential notion of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for IT security administration is establishing permissions based on the functional roles within the enterprise,...
Deduplication and Other Strategies for Protecting Your Assets with the Veritas NetBackup Platform
(Source: Symantec) Many companies find their backup and storage resources strained by data growth and increased regulatory requirements for data retention. In today's...
Using VMware Site Recovery Manager to Simplify DR
(Source: NetApp) Nothing is scarier than the prospect of having to recover an entire site after a disaster. VMware® Site Recovery Manager (SRM)...
Controlling Email and File Server Growth and Costs with Intelligent Archiving
(Source: Symantec) According to IDC 54% of the storage capacity added by organizations in 2008 will be dedicated to the storage of file-based...
NetApp and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Storage Best Practices
(Source: NetApp) NetApp has been providing advanced storage features to VMware ESX solutions since the product began shipping in 2001. During that time,...
Maximize Storage Assets with Thin Provisioning, Tiered Storage, and Cluster File Systems
(Source: Symantec) Thin Provisioning is an opportunity to immediately optimize your storage systems and make more capacity available to your applications. In order...
Sign up to receive updates on the latest Storage resources
CIO
Computerworld
CSO
DEMO
GamePro
Games.net
IDC
IDG
IDG Connect
IDG Knowledge Hub
IDG TechNetwork
IDG Ventures
IDG.net
InfoWorld
ITwhitepapers
ITworld
JavaWorld
LinuxWorld
Macworld
Network World
PC World
The Industry Standard
Copyright © 1994 - 2009 Computerworld Inc. All
rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium
without express written permission ofComputerworld Inc. is prohibited. Computerworld and Computerworld.com and the respective logos are trademarks of International Data Group Inc. |
