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Seven Best Practices for Managing Data Storage (continued)

substantially cheaper. But it's not enough to merely classify data according to "old" or "new" says Mike Karp, a senior analyst and head of the storage practice at Enterprise Management Associates, in Boulder, Colo. "You have to look at the underlying value, rather than assuming old data is less important than newer information." Concurrently, it's important to think not just in terms of managing capacity, but of performance, says Kris Domich, principal consultant for Data Center and Storage Solutions at Dimension Data, a $3.1 billion IT services firm based in New York. "Implementing monitoring and management tools is a must, so you can collect and see trends in performance as well as space usage over time."

Talk to actual users To help classify data into these different "value" tiers, it's critical to keep users in the loop, says Scott Robinson, chief technology office at DataLink, a Chanhassen, Minn., enterprise storage integrator. "There's no magic bullet; you have to go out and interview business data owners, and gain a first-hand knowledge of the needs of each business unit and how they prioritize their data," he says.

Understand the true cost of storage "Organizations must also understand the actual cost per gigabyte of storing data," says Dan Mack, a principal consultant with Glass House Technologies, an enterprise storage consulting firm based in Framingham, Mass. Firms need to include everything in this calculation: hardware, software, maintenance, employee time, service and support fees from external parties and -- last but not least -- utility costs. "A huge part of the IT department's budget is storage. They need this cost information to make all sorts of decisions, including calculating the true cost of proposed IT projects," he says. (article continues)

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