Have you taken a look at your shared storage lately? If you look close enough, you are likely to begin asking “where did it all go?”. This is a very common situation for many people, finding that their storage bills have gone through the roof. As you start to look around, you will likely find free storage trapped in pockets all over your environment. This storage is not being used to actually store data, it is simply allocated and provisioned based on future projections. In some cases, it is simply poor judgment or bad business practices that have caused these allocations to be grossly overestimated.

Nothing is more frustrating than to be presented with a huge bill for a storage refresh, along side an analysis report showing that you are only using about 1/2 to 2/3 of the storage that you have provisioned. How do you combat this? It is never too late to correct course, and there is a lot that your storage vendor can do to help. Vendors like NetApp, EMC and Compellent have some great product offerings and feature sets to combat this wasted storage, while also helping you streamline your storage tiering and even your overall storage footprint.

For more on this topic, please check out my SearchServerVM article “Storage: Blinded by the virtualization light” at http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid94_gci1520838,00.html

After you read the article, please come back here and leave any comments. There is a lot that can be discussed on this topic.