The speed and depth of the economy’s decline has taken a lot of people by surprise, me included. Today it’s clear that the Storage Industry is no longer immune to reductions in IT spending. While we all still have to keep our businesses running, we also need to cut expenses and cut them now.

Storage, however, remains one of the most expensive aspects of most people’s networks and the end-users’ requirements continue to increase. We need our users to be doing new business every day. This means we’re telling them to create and save new business objects every day. So how do we control this expense? And how do we do it now!

While Harry Potter can just waive his magic wand, the rest of us cannot. Nevertheless, here are some easy to implement techniques that will do the job – and get it done now!

Block all non-business content. There are numerous ways to create file blocking policies depending on your storage infrastructure. The first and easiest step in reducing costs is to stop treating storage as though it were infinite and free.

Set reasonable limits on personal space. There are very few jobs that require the creation of mountains of content. Normally when someone has a large home directory it’s because they never take the time to clean up, or they’re filling it with non-business content. Again, depending on your storage platform, there are a variety straight-forward ways to set limits.

Analyze what’s out there. Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to do this. You will ultimately need find the right application and probably buy a license for it. But a terabyte of storage at today’s prices costs $47,000 a year to own and maintain. Compared to this price, the cost of analysis software is quite modest. For the customers that we work with, their one-year ROI is normally 3 to 5 times the license cost. (Providing, of course, they act on the information the application gives them.)

Everything here can be done on any storage platform. And all of it should have a positive one-year return whether your investment is in staff costs or applications. There is no reason why you cannot make a meaningful reduction in your storage costs this year. None. To quote Nike, “Just do it!”

Wednesday, May 06, 2009 1:19:34 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Observations | Storage Management