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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