When assessing your organisation’s needs, you will have to answer many questions and consider several possible solutions before determining the enterprise storage method that best meets those needs. Finding that solution will depend on how tied you are to your current storage approach and on a careful assessment of future requirements.
From a recent survey of more than 500 system managers involved in managing and purchasing their organisation's storage solution. The participants responded to an exhaustive storage-related questionnaire and revealed aspects of current implementations, plans for the future, and perceived problems and priorities.
The results of the survey indicate that 96 percent of participants will increase their storage capacity in the next 12 months, and four out of 10 respondents expect to increase it by 50 percent or more in the next year.
If you are planning to add more than half of your company's current capacity to your storage pool, you should re-evaluate your requirements and explore possible alternatives that offer flexibility and are less costly to manage than current implementations.
If you have maximised the capacity of your servers or storage cabinets, you are facing a more challenging task than simply adding a few more disks to the pool. You should also factor in the cost of managing the additional storage on a unit-by-unit basis, as legacy storage solutions demand. You are in for a big dent in your IT budget. Kenton Maar will strategically advise on how you may get the best return on your investment.