Five Ways For SAN Storage Cost Reduction

A storage area network (SAN) never stops evolving. To keep up with the company’s ever-changing enterprise storage requirements, the IT Director, CIO, or Storage Administrator should frequently buy new SAN products to expand or update the system.

If you find yourself frustrated at the cost to store, manage and guard information, the following five guidelines can help you put your self in a situation to negotiate, decrease cost, and afford world-class SAN storage infrastructure.





1. Get Used and New Overstock SAN Storage – Savings of 20-80% are to be discovered by leveraging used and new-overstock storage. Information center consolidations, canceled deals and bankruptcy frequently push the latest technology into the used marketplace, giving IT managers a cost efficient alternative for capacity upgrades, DR projects and tiered storage.

2. Assess Your Wants – Just before you cut a buy order, ask your self and your team the tough question -Do you seriously require all new equipment? Sure, most organizations will require new equipment for mission critical data – perhaps 20%, but that leaves the other 80% unaccounted for. Take into consideration options such as replacing little drives with big drives in legacy arrays, swapping out the controllers and used storage arrays as options to reduce costs.



3. Decrease Capacity – When purchasing from the manufacture, contemplate buying a minimum configuration, permitting you to purchase new-overstock or used upgrades to complete the capacity requirements. By making use of this method you need to expect savings of 30-50%. Not every answer can use this technique, but it’s worth exploring.

4. Use Multiple Vendors – You know the saying about putting all your eggs in one basket. Use a two-vendor technique, or, in case you need to use only one vendor, purchase used, overstock, or new-surplus SAN storage from time to time to keep the manufacture on his toes.



5. Check alternative manufacturers – EMC, IBM, HP, HDS and other people are all authorized to sell Brocade SAN equipment, and Brocade can sell it to you directly. By exploring your options to source things like Brocade and CISCO MDS SAN infrastructure you can put budget dollars back inside your pocket or use the cost savings to super size the configuration.