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Top 5 criteria to keep in mind while choosing a storage vendor

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Sharath Kumar
New Update

BANGALORE, INDIA: As our reliance on information increases, so does the volume of information that business must manage. Managing data effectively is one of the key challenges for CIOs today. This challenge is compounded by the exponential growth of digital data within the datacentre.

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A key aspect of developing an effective information management strategy therefore, is to begin with a strong foundation by aligning with the right storage vendor. These are the top 5 criteria to keep in mind while choosing one:

#1Economics: Price is not equal to cost

The acquisition price of storage typically hovers at around 15-20 per cent of the total cost incurred for owning the storage. There are 34 different costs associated with storage and include:

  • Quantitative costs such as Cost per TB
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  • Qualitative costs such as reducing risk for an outage (which presents a business justification for deciding on enterprise storage over modular storage)

All of these costs may not be relevant to every business, so organizations have to carry out due diligence with the help of vendors to identify which costs are the most relevant within their datacentres.

The objective for a CIO is to prioritize the cost types which will be the most relevant over the next three to five years. Asking the questions below would help to understand these costs better:

  • How can the storage vendor reduce storage wastage in current and future environments? For example, storage virtualization can re-use or re-purpose existing storage.
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  • What are the storage upgrade costs? Can the storage vendor reduce the cost per TB for future upgrades?
  • What are the management costs per TB of capacity? This is going to be extremely critical in large storage environments.
  • What are the costs involved in migration, remote and local replication etc.
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  • What are the software licensing metrics?
  • What are the power, cooling and maintenance charges for a three year period?

#2 Technology Curve/Future Orientation

Nobody wants to buy technology which is untested or nearly obsolete. It is important to verify vendors' claims regarding their storage technology and its relevance in the context of future trends. For example, one still sees some vendors promoting FC-AL based storage arrays whereas disk technology has shifted to SAS. On the other hand, SSD/flash which has been around for a while now is finding its place in the datacenter. Organizations should therefore, examine the practicality of these claims and adopt the right technology.

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Storage software is another aspect which is significant to IT. Storage vendors have realized that datacentres are increasingly running on heterogeneous storage platforms and there is a concerted effort towards developing storage software that embraces these heterogeneous storage platforms. Storage management, provisioning and reporting are key aspects that these solutions address.

#3 Technology that Works

In evaluating storage technologies, some features like replication (remote and local), data tiering , and thin provisioning have become standard. However, one still has to investigate further as to how these features if turned on, will impact day to day activities. One needs to be aware that there is a difference between a feature being available and the feature actually working in a production scenario. It has been observed, for example, that although almost every vendor offers remote replication, very few can actually claim to have successfully deployed it with the expected RPO (Recovery Point Objective), without degradation at the Primary Site. As a result, many organizations turn off this feature to avoid performance problems.

#4 Analyst and Industry Reports

Numbers can be very deceptive sometimes. For example, vendors sometimes claim to have sold XYZ petabytes of storage in the Indian market but what may be hidden here is how much of this capacity is part of server or computing systems.

One needs to be sure about whether the vendor is really committed to the development of cutting edge technology, with a strong focus on and a compelling strategy around storage platforms. An ill informed decision today can lead to extremely painful, expensive and risky platform migrations in the future.

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#5 Reliability and Flexibility

No company can afford to lose the data that they create or exchange. The chosen platform has to be resilient from a hardware as well as a software perspective to deliver at least 5 9's or sometimes 100% data availability guarantees. Sufficient evaluation should also be done on storage architecture, especially for enterprise-level storage which is significantly different. The maturity of the architecture is of great importance while carrying out this exercise.

One should also properly assess the skillsets and strengths of the vendor's services and support teams. A good product does not always guarantee successful integration.

 

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The flexibility that the platform offers to expand its scope within the data centre is very critical. For example, this could help avoid creation of silos or islands of storage within the datacentre, help create custom policies around datasets, manage huge pools of data centrally or create custom reports for technical and IT leaders.

Remember, price is not equal to cost. One needs to evaluate the total cost of ownership of the storage architecture over a 3-5 year period, considering both Quantitative as well as Qualitative costs.

CIOs need to ensure that their investments are parked on to a platform which ensures that the investment stays protected and has minimum disruption in terms of technology refresh.

Every feature that is enabled means additional cycles on the processing unit, and additional memory from DRAM. Hence, it is critical to ensure that the storage architecture is able to handle these requirements.

Finally, analyst and third party audited reports and benchmarks offer great insights that can assist in the decision making process. Reliability from an architecture perspective, as well as service accolades and references should form the basis of the evaluation.

(The author is Sr Consultant, Platforms & Solutions, Hitachi Data Systems)

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