Storage device: Before you purchase

I'm interested in purchasing a storage device. What are the principal issues I should consider before making my selection?

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There are many points to consider when purchasing a storage device. The short answer includes, among other items:

What are your application and technical requirements in regards to performance, availability, capacity and energy (PACE) consumption?
What servers and operating systems will you be attaching the storage to and do you need block or file-based access?
What features -- such as point-in-time (pit) copy, snapshot, local and remote mirroring, RAID and thin-provisioning, among others -- do you need?
Will you be buying or leasing the storage resources?
What other technology do you need to co-exist and interoperate with?
What are your growth plans along with data protection requirements?
What IT initiatives or pain points are you trying to address?
What applications including SQL, Exchange, Oracle and VMware, among others, need to be supported by the storage?

There are many other items and factors to consider when purchasing a storage device, and the list above is far from comprehensive. However, it should form the basis of what to look for and consider before you make your storage device selection.

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This was first published in May 2007

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