10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 1.

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 2.

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 3.

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 4.

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 5.

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).

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 6.

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 7.

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.

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 8.

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 9.

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

10 Things To Think About When Youre Shopping for Storage – 10.

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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