Thailand Floods Drive up Hard Drive Prices, Storage Foundation Can Help

[Sanjays]

The Thailand capital Bangkok has seen the worst floods in its history. This event while unfortunate also highlights some of the problems data centers are facing and potentially making them worse. It is also a wakeup call to data center managers to rethink their storage strategies and leverage software tools such as Storage Foundation to optimize storage.

One of the constants in the data center is storage growth and the resulting spending on storage. While hard drive prices have been falling over the years, the sheer growth of storage has meant that storage costs have been ballooning out of control. The rate of growth of storage has far exceeded the rate of drop of storage prices leading to the overall growth of storage costs. 

But, all of this is about to change for the worse. The Thai floods have affected potentially 40% of the world hard disk supply creating shortages and resuling in price increases. This means that in all probability hard drive costs are going to reverse course and start rising, making the overall data center storage cost story much worse. Now, Data center managers really need to think about how they can optimize their storage and not rely on buying additional storage to solve their problems.

Storage Foundation can help optimize storage here's how: Storage Foundation along with VOM can provide deep visibility into your existing storage and helping data centers find out where storage is being wasted. Once the problem areas are identified, it can then help optimize storage by providing many ways of reclaiming storage such as Thin Reclamation (for thin enabled storage) and reclaiming orphan storage. To keep these savings from dissipating, administrators can run Thin Reclamation on an ongoing basis. Finally, when data centers are looking to refresh storage Storage Foundation can help lower costs by allowing data centers to use any storage vendor they wish by avoiding single vendor lock-in.

Find out more about the affects of the Thai floods at:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/11/07/roundup-hard-disk-drive-shortages-pricing/

Find out more about how Storage Foundation can help optimize your storage at:

http://www.symantec.com/business/storage-solution