Lay the Right Foundation
The good news: CIOs have more storage choices, and more mature choices, than they did just a few years ago. Some approaches that were once novel and untested, such as tiered storage and its related archival approach of hierarchical storage management, are now proven, says Nik Simpson, a storage analyst at the Burton Group consultancy. This is also true for the use of SANs.

One increasingly popular category of savings comes from replacing tape backup with disk backup (also called virtual tape libraries), says Dave Dillehunt, CIO of the integrated delivery network FirstHealth of the Carolinas. Tape capacity has not kept up with hospital storage requirements—about 185 terabytes at FirstHealth—and physically managing the tapes has become too burdensome, he says. A caveat: One danger in relying on disk-based backup is the temptation to keep the data online (which can overload storage networks, because people will use the data if it is available). That’s why Dillehunt keeps the disk backup disconnected from the rest of the network.

If your storage needs are modest, tape does continue to make sense because the medium cost is so much less, notes Rich O’Neal, senior vice president of operations at the online rewards-tracking site Upromise. That’s the case for his 4 terabytes of data. Of the established approaches, tiering offers the most significant bottom-line benefit, says Gartner’s Buchanan. It not only lets you increase the amount of cheap storage relative to expensive storage that you use but also forces you to understand the service levels for all your data. Then you can reduce costs by deleting or at least not backing up unneeded data. You can move rarely used data to offline storage to keep network traffic under control. And you can begin to manage demand by users, by showing them the entire data lifecycle costs for their requested applications. “Tiering lets you find the total cost of ownership of your storage,” he says.