“I can’t wait to do another tech refresh!” – said no storage admin ever
Storage technology refreshes offer all kinds of business benefits:
- Expanded capacity with less physical space
- Lower storage costs
- Lower risk of machine failure
- The chance to introduce a proactive data management strategy
But tech refreshes can also be complex, risky, and time consuming. Here are three tips to make sure your technology refresh goes smoothly:
1. Know Which Files You Have Where
To move old data to the new storage, you’ve got to know which files you have on the end-of-life machine(s). Smaller organizations with only one or two shares might write a script to discover these files, but scripts are difficult to scale for enterprises with TBs or PBs to manage—same for metadata viewers.
A faster alternative is to scan your storage resources with StorageX to see what you have. And while in the Management Portal, you can also analyze those files for business insights. All those orphaned files that nobody’s accessed in years? Get them off critical storage and to an S3 archive for pennies on the dollar.
2. Cut Time Spent Supporting Both Old and New Storage
For some organizations, it’s the incredible savings of new storage over legacy systems that prompts a storage tech refresh. But some companies claim their storage costs actually increased after buying new storage. How?
Once you buy the new machine, you’re supporting two systems until you retire the old one. So the faster you transition, the sooner you realize the storage savings you were sold on.
Saving time is powerful benefit of the StorageX platform. It’s saved 80 years of employee time over traditional tools thanks to its large-scale parallelism.
3. Know the Extra Expense of “Free” Tools
Imagine I asked you to dig a 1’ x 1’ hole with a shovel that I gave you for free. It might not take you very long–maybe a few seconds.
Now imagine the hole needs to be 10’ x 10’…dug with the same shovel. Could you physically do it? Probably. Is your free shovel the most efficient way? Not really. You could hire ten people, but their labor expense will probably offset any money you saved by providing them with free shovels.
Now imagine, you have to dig 100 10’x’10’ holes. How do you coordinate? Who does what? Is there quality control?
We think digging a giant hole with a shovel is like using rsync, robocopy, and other “free tools” in your storage tech refresh. You can do it…it’s just unnecessarily time-consuming. It also requires specialized employees’ time—making it pricey—and extensive manual input—making it risky.
But faster options are so much more expensive that they could never be worth it, right? Actually, the break-even point for StorageX compared to “free” tools typically occurs 15% – 25% through the project timeline. Gaining the efficiency of centralized control, logging, and management allows your tech refresh to complete with less labor, less risk, and faster.
4. Shed Light on Your Dark Data
A storage tech refresh is also a great chance to deal with your dark data, which might be taking up expensive storage resources. Found a bunch of files with no corresponding name to a SID? Move them to S3 archive instead of onto the new platform—and poof! You just reduced the amount of data you need to move. In addition, you can add tags to that data to help identify it later.
StorageX empowers you to scan shares and exports for dark data and for unstructured data—you can also have them enumerate automatically as new ones are generated. By comparison, most free tools give little information on shares or exports, and no info on unstructured data.
With these tips in hand, you’re sure to have smoother tech refresh experience.
