– Rebecca Thompson, Vice President of Marketing with Avere Systems (www.averesystems.com),
Tips to consider when improving an enterprise’s storage:
- Choose a storage system design that can meet both I/O and capacity requirements and scale them independently from one another. Consider a two-stage tiered storage approach with a performance tier and a capacity tier.
- Look at both the acquisition costs for your system as well as operational costs. Operational costs over time from an inefficient system can easily add up and hurt your organization’s bottom line. Automated tiering can help lower costs by ensuring data is stored on the media best suited for it at any given time.
- Think about ease of scalability. Can you scale the system as you grow or do you have to guess right the first time and perhaps over buy today in order to meet anticipated future growth? Systems that cluster have built-in scalability.
- Manageability is important. Ask yourself if your storage systems makes your job easier or harder. Look for a system that you can install and upgrade with minimal or no downtime.
- Don’t forget interoperability and open standards support to ensure you don’t get locked into a single vendor that will limit not only what you can do, but cost more. Systems that allow you to mix and match vendors to best suit your needs will give you more flexibility.
