The Frugal Networker

Do you see the Infographic to the right? You only see part of it. How much information can you use from what you see now? Not much, right? It’s the same with your storage–you’re only getting part of the story because you’re only seeing part of the picture. Only seeing part of the picture is disturbing enough here but think about what you’re not seeing from your current storage tools.

What do you know about the storage in your company or organization? One thing you do know for sure, without much investigation on your part, is that a lot of the storage you’ve paid for is wasted. Your money’s wasted. Your capacity’s wasted. And all the while, your technology staff’s begging for more storage because they’re running out of space–or at least they think they are running out of it.

Some of it isn’t your staff’s fault. They too, are only seeing part of the picture. It’s your storage management tools, your storage management strategy, and your storage technology that’s causing most of your space waste problems.

But waste is also only part of the picture. How will you manage the rapidly growing volume of data with which you must contend? How efficiently can you retrieve it? Are you still relying on tape and traditional data recovery technologies?

And how about disaster recovery? How many tapes and restore points will you have to manage in case of a major outage? Have you estimated your mean time to restore (MTTR)?

There’s a way to manage your storage environment efficiently, with less waste, with lower power consumption, and with less sprawl. Check out the full The Top Trends in Storage Infographic from IBM to see the solution and get the whole story.

IBM offers a range of Storwize products from Entry to Enterprise.

Five of the many outstanding features of the Storwize family of products are:

• Flash Copy – Make up to 2,040 copies of your data.
• Remote Mirror Function – Copy data to a remote location for disaster recovery.
• Data Volume Management – Real-time compression takes place on data as it is written to disk.
• Visual enhancements – You can easily view your storage capacity, how much you’re using, how much is free, and how much space is saved by compression.
• Lower costs – Easy to manage storage that is space, time, and cost efficient.

The Storwize product line is part of IBM’s Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing solution.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.