10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage

Theres more to buying storage equipment than meeting with a few vendors … but that helps too.

Source: Glasshouse Technologies analyst Bill Peldzus and eWEEK reporting

When youre about to upgrade your current system or build a new storage system in the data center, come into the transaction from a position of knowledge. Invest in a storage system that you want and your company can afford; do not buy your vendors **QTE

Always include a RFI (request for information) and a RFP (request for proposal) for every vendor. Doing RFIs and RFPs always results in better purchasing decisions. Dont use RFPs for buying expansion disks in an existing array setup—just for

Be sure your priorities are clear in the RFP. If you have a lot of large files (video or scientific data, for example), then clustering for high availability might be top of the list. If a good disaster recovery product is what youre most in need of, say

Consider doing a vendor pre-meeting: Get two or three vendors—no more than that—into a room together and show them the RFP at the same time. Youll get most of all the questions answered ahead of time, and the vendors will know firsthand who the

Ask for line-item pricing from the vendor in the RFP, and ask the vendor to be specific about features (the costs of mirroring versus snapshots and block-level deduplication versus single-instance data storage, for example).

Insist that the vendor be candid about the pros and cons of each major piece of hardware and software. For example, everybody knows that most large (250GB and 500GB) storage drives slow down precipitously as data is loaded onto them, and that they are of

Make sure the vendor gives you complete detailed information in the RFP about servers, storage capacity and security, HBAs (host bus adaptors), software and OS versions, I/O speeds, and cache limitations.

Ask the vendor to include copies of all current service level agreements. Make sure you both understand service-level objectives, and have the vendor include an outline of key compliance objectives, like Sarbanes-Oxley, for instance, and how the new syste

When a vendor responds to your RFP, make sure the vendor includes a legend of all components and how much they each will cost.

Make sure to get in writing that if something doesnt work, the vendor must fix it on its own dime. Youd be surprised at how basic that item is, and how often it is left out of a contract. And make sure some of those fun folks in legal weig

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