The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today

By Chris Preimesberger

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 1. Effectively utilizing more than 30 percent of available capacity

Sun Microsystems did some research among its customers and found that clearly 70 percent of storage capacity is wasted. This is a generally agreed-upon statistic among storage companies.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 2. Cutting power and cooling costs

This is considered the No. 1 problem by everybody who thinks utilization is No. 2.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 3. Getting a good deduplication strategy into production

Redundant data slows down systems and costs money on the bottom line, and not enough companies are using deduplication yet.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 4. Getting a good thin-provisioning strategy into production

Applications need the storage space they need to run effectively, and no more.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 5. Finding a good way to improve I/O flow

A couple of new companies, Xsigo and InovaWave, have come up with ways to virtualize I/O and open up that former bottleneck in the data center.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 6. Keeping the physical footprint small in the data center

Many companies tend to just keep adding boxes and racks in their data centers as their data store grows, so the limitation of physical space is a continuous problem. Virtualization and more powerful appliances help assuage this issue for a while.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 7. Identifying a good e-discovery strategy and getting it into operation

New federal court rules require that organizations pay more attention to how they store and archive business-related documents in case of litigation. This includes virtually everything: e-mail, spreadsheets, word documents, photos, audio, movies–even ins

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 8. Deciding whether to implement online storage as part of an overall strategy

Online storage can be very cost- and labor-effective, but companies must decide if they want to trust their family jewels with an outside service.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 9. When and with what data to use low-priority disks or digital tape for archiving

This media is used for data that probably wont see the light of day again, except in a legal emergency.

The 10 Biggest Storage Challenges Facing Companies Today – 10. Choosing whether to utilize Master Data Management best practices for primary data

An MDM platform offers a consolidated view of a companys data assets and a consistent way of aggregating and distributing the data, which has been proven to accelerate processes, projects and products through their various channels.

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