The ROI of Using What You Have

11:10 AM -- If you are under pressure to reduce your IT budget needs, one of the best things you can do is take greater advantage of what you already have. The challenge is you have to add something to the mix to increase functionality. What do you select that will be the most minimal investment yet provide the greatest return?

One of the best ways is to add a storage appliance to your infrastructure that will add additional capabilities or improve the performance of your existing storage. A great example is a network-attached storage (NAS) gateway type of solution. Companies like NetApp Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), and ONStor Inc. provide these types of solutions.

A NAS gateway is an ideal investment right now; it brings increased flexibility and ease of use to your environment. NAS appliances offer much more than just file services these days. For example, if you are using VMware, you can leverage them to take advantage of its ability to place VMDKs on NFS shares. The ROI here is that with simplification of the storage infrastructure, you can virtualize more of your environment, reducing physical server count while increasing storage efficiency.

If you need inexpensive block I/O, many of these gateways also provide iSCSI connectivity. With iSCSI you can cost-effectively bring the advantages of shared storage to more of your servers. This delivers the ROI of increased storage utilization and, often, improved data protection from features like snapshots and off-host backups.

Then there is the traditional NAS capability to provide file services. In most cases, a single NAS gateway can outperform many Windows file servers, once again reducing costs by eliminating servers. If you use a NAS gateway that has solid multi-platform (Windows and Unix) support, you will also increase ease of use by allowing cross-platform sharing.Some suppliers even build a global file system directly into the NAS head. This allows you to connect different types of storage to the NAS gateway and move data transparently to the users, between the storage tiers. This provides for even deeper utilization of all your storage and allows you to begin to build a tiered storage strategy.

The best part of investing in NAS gateways is that they deliver all of this increased functionality and efficiency while being relatively simple to implement and support.

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George Crump is founder of Storage Switzerland , which provides strategic consulting and analysis to storage users, suppliers, and integrators. Prior to Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest integrators.