How To Reduce IBM Storage Costs

There's lots of strategies to reduce IBM storage costs, however there is no one-size-fits-all solution. If costs are spiraling out of control, there is few different ways to start attacking the budget-hogs in your surroundings. There is several common places that storage is consuming your budget. Here are a few they see every day:

Capacity Upgrades

Lots of times, customers are fighting fast storage growth due to growing databases & applications. Sometimes, the issue can be eliminated by implementing strict limits or accountability for end-users of storage. However, sometimes that is not a practical solution & the only answer is more capacity.

Examine where capacity can be added in order to stem the rising tide of information storage. Are there legacy systems that can be used for low-performance retention information? What storage tiers absolutely must have more capacity?

By the time you have identified whether or not you need high or low performance storage, discover a trusted 3rd party storage seller who can help you upgrade your existing systems at lower costs than your traditional storage seller. Make positive that you partner with a company that has the expertise & hands-on expertise to properly size, configure, & check an upgrade. More importantly, make positive they have the expertise to troubleshoot issues along the way.

Maintenance Costs

Often, renewing support for systems creates a recurring annual cost that puts a strangle-hold on your operational budget. If the amount of money you are spending on annual maintenance & maintenance is keeping you from accomplishing project that would drive your business forward, it is likely time to inquire in to options.

Third party support & maintenance partners can help you reduce storage costs by as much as 30%-60% without increasing risk of failure in your information middle.

Licensing

One of the largest budget-hogs for lots of businesses stems from licensing costs for storage arrays. Some costs are inevitable, such as replication program or advanced functionality licenses. However, positive license costs can & ought to be avoided if feasible.

To deal with burdensome licensing costs, identify information that can be migrated off the licensed platforms & moved to another lower-cost or license-free technique. The usual suspects may include database backups & dumps, testing & development environments, archive information, & low-performance applications. Moving these types of information off of expensive, capacity-based primary storage can now free up your surroundings to handle additional capacity without expensive licensing.

For example, a storage array with 20TB of raw physical disk will also need 20TB of capacity licensing. In the event you only have 10TB of capacity licensing, you can only use 10TB of raw physical disk as the storage array won't recognize unlicensed capacity.