In Part 1 of this series, we highlighted Enterprise Strategy Group\u2019s 2012 Spending Intentions Survey, showing that organizations plan to spend 60-72% of IT budget maintaining existing infrastructure in 2012. This second installment takes a deeper look at the maintenance cost of data storage infrastructure and how cloud technologies can help.
\nConsider the IT burden of maintaining data storage. Regardless of industry, data storage capacities are constantly growing and on-premise storage arrays require upgrade and replacement on a regular basis. This results in a constant stream of maintenance tasks.
\nLet\u2019s take an example: Assume an organization stores data across 6 separate storage arrays. A typical 3-year life cycle per storage array would mandate at least two migrations\/retirements of storage arrays per year in addition to two new storage array purchases. And remember, each time a storage array purchase is required, there\u2019s a qualification process that precedes the purchase. Also, if each storage array requires three software upgrades per year, 18 total upgrades would need to be orchestrated annually in a way that minimizes business risk. Let\u2019s not forget that hardware and network failures, which may not cause outages thanks to RAID-protection and redundancy, also require manual intervention and repair.<\/p>\n