Storage buyer’s choice (or when buying storage..)

I happened to read the "Brocade SAN Design and Best Practices Version 2.0" recently. Two quotes from first section caught me straight.

"most SANs tend to stick around for a long time before they get renewed, take the future into account as SANs are difficult to re-architect"

"A fabric design should take into account requirements and plan for a 6 to 8 year life cycle"

Yes, this is even true for storage subsystems.

Unlike you tend to change the compute (servers) as server clustering and server virtualizing technologies allow you to decommission or shuffle servers while applications running. It is still pretty difficult to do that with storage systems unless you use storage clustering, storage virtualization or some sort of federation limited to certain vendor solutions like Hitachi controller level virtualization, EMC Vplex, HP peer motion… etc. These technologies are very different from many perspectives like cost, product maturity, ease of use, market acceptance… etc.

So Storage purchasing decision is still complex. One thing I know for sure when buying storage,

• Take into account today and tomorrow requirements and plan for a 5 year life cycle. Buy the latest technology blend in all forms (hardware – front end capabilities, backend capabilities, controller capabilities, cache capabilities and software – provisioning capabilities, replication and app aware copy capabilities, virtualization and migration capabilities)