The document discusses the tradeoff between cost and performance for storage solutions. It argues that focusing solely on short-term cost reductions can hurt businesses in the long run. Some common missteps driven by cost are eliminating important data to save space, limiting backups which makes restores risky and slow, and mindlessly adding more storage hardware instead of optimizing existing systems. The document advocates for comprehensive strategies that balance both cost and performance, such as data reduction technologies, tiered storage, and virtualization.

1. Storage Cost vs. Performance: Which Problem are You Solving?
What’s more important to a successful storage environment: cost or performance? Most IT
managers will, of course, say that both are important. But their short-term decisions may point in a
different direction. Faced with a deluge of data that increases by double digits each year, too many
IT managers feel trapped into making decisions based largely on reducing costs.
Unfortunately, in focusing solely on short-term cost-reduction, they may not only put business
operations at risk, but they may actually miss greater opportunities for short- and long-term savings.
Without a comprehensive, integrated storage strategy that focuses on price and performance, it’s easy
to make cost-related decisions that can hurt the business in the long run.
Here are three common cost-driven missteps that can hurt your storage environment and your
company:
Reducing storage by eliminating data. As we’ve often said, one of the best ways to make
your storage more efficient is to reduce the amount being stored. And the way to do that is
through data reduction techniques, such as deduplication (which removes duplicate files and
strings of data) and compression (which removes unnecessary data bits). Unfortunately, too
many companies adopt a storage reduction strategy that involves storing less information. For
example, to preserve space on the company email server, they may require all email to be
stored locally. They may offer little or no opportunity for backup and storage of employees’
PC files. The risk of this approach is that critical company information is vulnerable to
common occurrences like disk crashes, which can put employees or entire departments out
of commission for days. When storage space is tight, don’t stop storing important data.
Instead, maximize your existing capacity through storage reduction technologies
like compression and deduplication.
Skimping on backup and restore. With multiple backups, 1 GB of data can easily balloon
into 100 GB of storage. To stem the exponential growth, it may seem smart to limit the
number of database snapshots you take, or the number of redundant files you keep. Or, you
may store backups in a way that makes restore operations time-consuming and difficult. The
folly of this cost-saving approach becomes apparent when the system is compromised,
requiring a restore of data. If your data is not current, your users—customers, employees,
vendors, and partners—will be inconvenienced, at best, and misinformed at worst. If
restores take too long to perform, your company will suffer loss of productivity and loss of
reputation. Be sure your storage strategy supports backup and restore of data without
impacting performance. Implement a tiered storage solution that gives you the right
price/performance for data at each stage.
Throwing hardware at the problem. It’s true that storage is cheaper, per GB, than it was
in the past, as more efficient, higher capacity equipment enters the market. So, to many IT
managers, the quickest, cheapest way to handle the onrush of data is to keep purchasing
more disk arrays. There are two problems with that approach. First, storage may be relatively
inexpensive, but it’s not free, and neither is the physical space it consumes. Neither are the
©2011 Stratecast. All Rights Reserved. A Technical Brief Sponsored by IBM

2. ancillary costs, such as maintenance, power and cooling. Second, it won’t work.
Indiscriminately loading more and more data onto more and more hardware can impact
application performance, costing your business in lost productivity. The answer isn’t to add
more storage; it’s to make your existing storage work more efficiently. Invest in a
virtualization solution that will save capital and operating costs by dramatically
increasing capacity utilization of your existing storage hardware.
Of course you want both high performance and low costs for your storage environment. And
you can have it all, as long as you don’t settle for quick-fix solutions. Instead, turn to a
storage expert like IBM to help you implement efficiencies, no matter what your budget.
Maximum performance, reduced costs—that’s a storage approach any IT manager can live
with.
Lynda Stadtmueller
Program Manager – Business Communication Services
Stratecast (a Division of FROST & SULLIVAN)
lstadtmueller@stratecast.com
©2011 Stratecast. All Rights Reserved. A Technical Brief Sponsored by IBM