Managing data growth continues to be a struggle, and organizations are beginning to outgrow that first storage array they bought a few years ago. As they do, some are in for a big surprise. For years, the focus has been on adding storage capacity. In fact, the development of a storage strategy is still referred to as a “sizing” exercise. However, today the challenge is now accessing that huge amount of data in an acceptable amount of time, and the size or capacity of the drive will have little or no correlation to the performance of the storage. An IT administrator who focuses too narrowly on adding storage capacity can end up with an array that can hold all the data, but can’t support the IOPS demanded by applications.

If you are considering a storage upgrade, it is critical that you understand how this can impact your organization. I cover this in more detail in my TechTarget article “Adding storage capacity can actually hurt IOPS“. Please take a minute to read the article, the come back here and leave a comment to contribute to the conversation.