Andrew Reichman, analyst at Forrester Research has put together cost savings ideas for IT managers facing tough budget constraints.
His focus is on Storage. Storage can on average eat up 11 percent of an enterprise’s IT budget.
In Reichman’s report called “Five Key Storage Strategies for a Down Economy“, he recommends the following:
- Negotiate. The storage market is competitive. Seek bids from multiple vendors.
- Waste Not. Study and find applications locking up more storage space than they need. Consider storage virtualization.
- Audit the number of backups and replications. Reichman reports that it’s not that uncommon to have 10 copies of the same data. Is it necessary?
- Study the technology. Storage changes quickly. Low cost options that offer good performance include iSCSI, NFS protocol, and direct-attached storage.
- Try to minimize the number of tiers of storage. Having too many can be expensive and hard to manage. Again cheap, dense, good-performing disks can minimize the need for tiering and buying expensive hardware.
