How to Cut Data Storage Costs

By Drew Robb
November 12, 2010

Email Print Digg This Add to del.icio.us

Storing data doesn't generate revenue, so businesses are eager to cuts costs in this area. Drew Robb discusses techniques to trim data warehousing costs.

---

In last month’s story, Top Ten Ways to Trim Storage Costs, we offered up some alternatives to expensive disk arrays and a few tips and technologies that can make storage more cost efficient. Since there are more than 10 ways to skin your storage budget, here are 10 more ways to keep costs down and streamline your storage environment.

Dedupe Again

There are so many ways to deduplicate data these days and more interesting approaches seem to emerge every week. One example is Nexsan DeDupe SG, which is said to cut power usage by 60 percent and storage capacity requirements by more than 30X, according to Victoria Grey, senior vice president of marketing for Nexsan.

“The first generation of deduplication systems focused on saving storage capacity,” she said. “The DeDupe SG delivers 10-30X deduplication rates while being the only power-managed deduplication solution that saves on energy and data center cooling costs between backups.”

Nexsan’s disk-based deduplication solution provides backups at 750MBps via CIFS and NFS and up to 1500MBps with Symantec OST. Performance is given a further boost via a high-speed RAID subsystem. Time savings are achieved by first writing and storing backups on disk cache (deduping at a later time or concurrently) so that backup tasks are completed quicker.

File Servers Begone!

Moosa Matariyeh, an enterprise storage specialist at CDW advises users to ditch their many file servers and switch to NAS appliances, which, he said, are lower cost, easier-to-administer and consume less power.

Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.