31 July 2010
Saturday
Top 10 ways to reclaim storage resources and reduce cost
By Victor Ng | Oct 30, 2009
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PrintIn today’s economy, companies are struggling to control costs. IT departments are being asked, even required, to do more with their current resources, the goal being to maximize the use and effectiveness of their infrastructures.
Many organizations pay employees and consultants to manually track backup failures, manually collect performance and storage trending, and manually track storage utilization. Typically such efforts only add to further inefficiency, complexity, and an incomplete and ineffectual view of IT.
Even without today’s economic challenges, companies cannot afford to continue managing IT resources blindly and with inefficient, error-prone procedures.
According to Tek-Tools Software, below are 10 different ways you can reclaim or repurpose resources in your environment:
1. Server consolidation – Identify candidates for virtualization via server consolidation reports, to allow your organization to retire hardware, reduce power consumption, streamline management, and free up rack space.
2. Recover resources in the virtualized infrastructure:
a. Identify unused virtual machines that can be turned off in order to reclaim performance capacity, or deleted in order to reclaim storage.
b. Find orphaned VMDK files that can be deleted, freeing space and improving performance.
c. Expose virtual machines with over-allocated resources (storage, CPU, memory etc.) that can be released back into the virtual infrastructure.
3. Array capacity reclamation – Find storage on arrays that are unused or allocated but free. If you are leveraging your storage fully, you can retire storage you don’t need anymore, and put off future purchases of additional storage.
4. Clean your files – Do you know what files can be archived or deleted? Identify files and directories by age, size, and ownership that can be relocated or removed, reducing primary storage usage, backup size, and duration, as well as disaster recovery requirements.
