Protecting Mid-Tier Storage Investments

Companies are increasingly challenged to find mid-tier storage solutions that

will evolve with their business needs. They need hardware and software

combinations that will provide a stable path to future growth while reducing IT

costs, including management and training costs. Most importantly, they want

solutions that will offer the highest level of investment protection.

Virtually all storage vendors promise hardware and software compatibility

within product lines and across generations. Unfortunately, some vendors fall

short of those promises. As a result, companies are left to restrict the

expansion of workgroup solutions across the enterprise; invest in new hardware

only to find that components and/or software are not compatible with the

existing infrastructure; develop custom software or wait for the vendor to

deliver software functionality; incur additional training expenses for new

management software; and interrupt ongoing operations to implement new systems.

Manoj Chugh Companies can maximize their RoI by leveraging their initial investments in hardware, software, training and processes

While each of these issues can adversely impact a company’s RoI, mid-tier

arrays and software that are not developed with long-term product continuity in

mind. To overcome this problem, many companies are evaluating solutions based on

the ability to leverage existing investments.

Key Areas



To ensure that an environment can quickly evolve with business requirements,

a mid-tier storage solution should focus on investment protection and the

ability to deliver non-stop results during periods of growth and change. This

means evaluating four key areas: Hardware, management software, training, and

processes. Modular architectures offer multiple configuration choices for

connectivity, performance, and capacity. With common reusable components (such

as device enclosures, disk drives, and power supplies), IT managers are able to

scale up from one system to another while maintaining a majority of the initial

hardware investments.

Components of mid-tier arrays should be common with high-end systems to

minimize operational impact as an organization’s requirements grow. They also

allow a business to grow without additional product training. Management

software serves as the foundation for networked storage, enabling IT

organizations to tie together all their storage resources and to monitor and

control them through a single management console. By providing cross-generation

compatibility, scripts and management tools don’t have to be changed. The

platform can be continually enhanced with the same look and feel.

To reduce costs, it is important that configuration, analysis, and control be

provided by a central, easy-to-use GUI that can be securely and remotely

accessed anytime.

Storage management applications should not only work with the various

generations of the mid-tier product family but should extend to high-end arrays

as well. Software functionality such as path management and data movement should

be common across all platform levels, offering investment protection as storage

infrastructures scale.

In addition, business continuity implementations are facilitated if users can

transfer data between different hardware generations.

With continuity in hardware and software, mid-tier storage solutions remove

the burden of re-training IT staff as new product generations are introduced.

Administrators who are already familiar with the scripts, tools, GUI and

hardware components, do not need to start from scratch and can instead focus on

the latest feature sets, to cut training costs. And, procedural continuity

eliminates disruptions to the business, even during implementation of new

initiatives such as extending an application from a workgroup to the entire

enterprise.

Companies can maximize ROI by leveraging their initial investments in

hardware, software, training and processes. A mid-tier storage solution that

offers this level of investment protection will enable a storage environment to

accommodate business growth.

The author is president EMC India and SAARC mail@dqindia.com