Three ways to avoid the HDD price hike

Rupert Collier from DataCore Software advises resellers on how their customers can protect against hard drive shortages

As has been widely reported, floods in Thailand are restricting hard drive supply, leading to inevitable price hikes. Here are three ways, using storage virtualisation, the channel can help its customers hedge against this.

A hypervisor remains a relatively new concept in the storage world; integrated arrays combining proprietary software and hardware stacks still dominate. However, applying the same rationale to storage hardware as we are long used to seeing with server virtualisation can provide huge advantages.

1. Open up the whole market
A storage hypervisor enables choice: disk becomes just disk, regardless of the vendor badge on the front. Virtual disk pooling anonymises the resource, nullifies vendor lock-in and provides the flexibility to choose whoever you like. And choice lowers costs.

2. Consider SSD
SSD production is less affected than HDD. Using automated storage tiering, customers can assign frequently accessed data to fast solid state disk and hive off less critical data to slower, cheaper formats.

3. Sweat the assets
Virtualising storage allows customers to repurpose and/or extend the life of existing kit. Pre-caching write requests in server RAM also enables significant performance improvements which, combined with thin provisioning, could reduce physical capacity requirements. Perhaps your customer won't need new disk after all?

Ruper Collier (pictured) is regional manager at DataCore Software