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This past year was rough on technology companies, in particular the second
half of the year was catastrophically worse -- fraught with disaster, a
recession and even greater economic uncertainty. Now, twenty five percent of
our way into 2002 it appears that the recession is almost officially 'over',
yet many companies are still not taking chances -- they are not only cutting
back on budgets, but are trying to find ways to operate more efficiently
with the new tighter funding that they have. Finding ways to save on
operational expenses, and yet still be able to run their business
efficiently is a high priority on anyone's list.
Many point to centralizing or consolidating their data infrastructure
creating a single point of management and backup as a way to save on
operating expenses, decrease time to market and reducing costs.
In the past, expensive enterprise class solutions were easier to justify
because of the return on investment (ROI) that these features brought to the
table. Now though, customers are no longer willing or able to make enormous
investments for a rich feature set, especially since a variety of companies
are now able to offer these kinds of features for a lower cost. So yes,
price is now a valid variable in determining whose solution to buy for
centralization solutions.
You can consolidate in a variety of ways, depending upon your requirements,
and this may be done with Storage Area Networks (SAN), high end SAN (with
Enterprise software tools), Network Attached Storage (NAS), or with
virtualization - which I believe can give you the best of both worlds as
well as interoperability with existing technology.
Because business continuance is something that companies are taking more
seriously, it is an insurance that few companies can afford to ignore. For
smaller companies, the only alternative was to outsource to an SSP for
remote replication. In all cases, finding a solution strategy that is cost
effective may -- depending upon whose point of view you consider -- be as
dangerous as not having one at all. I believe that even here you can
consider price, especially if the solution can demonstrate robustness,
feature sets, etc.
In summary, a company should not be afraid to put pricing higher on the list
of priorities, especially in light of today's leaner business realities. Not
to knock some name brands, who indicate that storage is around $0.15 a MB
today, or others, who indicate that storage will be at $0.01 a MB sometime
in the future, the reality is that there are solutions today that offer
business continuance replication at below even the $0.10 a MB price point
and consolidated storage at less than $0.05 a MB price point. At the very
least, considering these alternative solutions may help you get better
pricing with the name brand solution.
One rule of thumb to keep in mind is that, regardless of which vendor a
company partners with, the more capacity bought up front, and the more hosts
you attach initially, the lower your price will be overall and the better
your long term ROI. Be sure to investigate how much licenses for features
such as those described above will cost you as your capacity and host count
grows. Otherwise you might be unpleasantly surprised in the long term when
your needs grow dramatically and your investment continues to have to grow
dramatically with it just to maintain the functionality that that sold you
on the solution in the first place. Consider all your alternatives, you
might just be pleasantly surprised.
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