Storage costs are nearing all-time lows, enticing many organisations to expand their enterprise storage infrastructure immediately. But this may be the beginning of a prolonged trend of storage vendor price warfare, suggesting that perhaps a few months' wait could shave a hefty percentage off the cost of your proposed storage investment. Whether or not you can and/or should forestall your impending storage purchase must be dictated by your established storage strategy. And every storage-conscious organization should have a stated and enforced storage strategy.

Putting cheaper storage to good use

The real strategic benefit of cheaper storage is in departmental or data centre storage, especially as new technologies come to market. Companies and departments of all sizes can benefit from the advances in Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions. NAS devices allow users to share storage without having to manage the complexity of a local server.

NAS has become synonymous with reliability, simplicity and the lowest TCO of any storage networking solution. Originally deployed in data sharing environments, NAS solutions have become a preferred solution for enterprise applications and database environments where automated performance tuning and sophisticated data management capabilities can reduce costs, improve data availability, and simplify operations.

Fibre Channel SANs have become the de facto standard for storage networking in corporate data centres, providing significant advantages over direct-attached storage through improved storage utilisation, higher data availability, reduced management costs, and highly scalable capacity and performance.

Several trends are driving demand for more data centre storage. As online storage keeps getting cheaper, tape backup solutions become less appealing because of the time required to recover from tape and the sequential nature of tape storage. Plus, the cost per gigabyte of tape storage is staying relatively constant, while the cost per gigabyte of hard drives keeps dropping. As connectivity’s cost decreases and its reliability increases, more companies will consider consolidating storage in the data centre. Web applications and data warehousing systems both contribute to the consolidation trend.

As you develop and create your storage strategy, you need to realise that storage solutions are following a path similar to that of the personal computer. As the cost of the hardware declines, the cost of the software and personnel to maintain and manage it becomes much larger.