As a CIO or IT manager you are faced with typical issues relating to storage, such as the explosive growth of unstructured data, provisioning, capacity utilization, storage performance, and of course a limited budget.

Naturally, you look for solutions that are efficient, used optimally and that offer high levels of application performance. But there’s a lot more to it than just capacity or high-tech products. To solve these issues you really need to understand what technologies and architectures are applicable in different scenarios. That’s why you need some sort of storage strategy. Once you have this in place, you’ll notice that most of the aforementioned issues are tackled upfront.

For instance, the additional storage capacity at your DR site might be largely unutilized for most of the year. Or the extra gigabytes reserved for a particular application in advance, might rarely be used. Perhaps you could assign those extra, unutilized gigabytes to that CRM application that’s begging for it during the peak business season. Maybe HR would have a sudden need for it during the period of appraisals or annual recruitment. And what are you going to use that expensive and fancy SSD storage for?

What about recursive e-mails (with large attachments) that are forwarded or sent to many employees internally. Can you apply deduplication for the space hogging attachment, for which a zillion copies were unintentionally created? And what’s the fastest way to consolidate all those silos of (largely underutilized) storage used by different departments in your organization?

After identifying the business value of information, do you opt for a tiered approach to storage, governed by Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)?

Storage and storage networking technology are evolving, and we have hi-tech like solid state drives, serial attached SCSI or SAS, fiber channel over Ethernet, and 8 Gigabit Fiber Channel. But it’s really important to understand how these technologies can be used to get the best application performance. So go ahead, explore all the buzzwords and technologies. Then devise a storage strategy.