As companies strive to implement storage modernization frameworks, they concurrently face the challenges of mapping increases in storage capacity with disaster recovery (DR) capabilities and deploying a storage modernization framework within ever-tightening IT budgets. But within the context a storage modernization framework, how do you budget for DR while balancing changes in your storage environment? Read on for our tips on keeping costs down while updating your infrastructure.
IT departments are facing competing priorities to increase storage capacity, enhance performance, and continuously drive down the costs per gigabyte. However, we at Connection have found that when using traditional spinning magnetic disk storage technology, these demands are difficult to meet while simultaneously meeting goals to scale storage capacity and improve the performance of the storage infrastructure.
How can you meet all these demands, while keeping costs down? I would suggest that you creatively explore storage and DR options so you can develop a customized solution that can be implemented within your IT budget and deliver the performance, scale, and capacity requirements that your organization demands.
This requires exploring cloud storage and DR solutions, and it also requires deploying flash storage arrays to replace or more likely complement spinning disk-based storage platforms. In a modern hybrid-flash disk array, a small number of extremely high-performance disks are paired with cost-effective, extremely high-capacity disks and software. The end result is a storage solution that delivers high performance and high capacity at a lower cost per I/O and per gigabyte stored than traditional arrays.
While lower-cost spinning disk storage is sufficient for most DR infrastructure, you can also introduce flash arrays to your to data center to support critical high-performance, low-capacity applications, such as desktop virtualization deployments.
Budgeting for DR within a storage modernization framework requires expert guidance and procedural testing to continuously ensure restoral effectiveness as changes are made to storage infrastructure. It also requires a careful analysis of the available cloud solutions as well as the many vendor offerings for spinning disk and flash storage so the organization can optimize storage performance and capacity while ensuring DR efficiency and effectively managing costs.
Creating a partnership with knowledgeable, third-party storage and DR consultants with product-neutral expertise accelerates selection of the right storage and DR strategies and helps organizations more quickly select the right cloud services and/or storage platforms to achieve their storage and DR goals.
By complementing your IT staff with guidance from consultants seasoned in storage modernization and DR use cases, you can make more informed budget decisions and accelerate knowledge transfer of the latest storage and DR technologies, products and cloud services to your IT organization. For more information on modernizing your storage, view this brief webinar.
Justifying a storage refresh? Get SMART! Learn how next generation technologies can create a cost effective model with unrivaled flexibility. Get S.M.A.R.T. today.
