(18-Jun-10) One morning recently, CMS Products’ Gary Streuter went to pick up his dry cleaning. When he reached the cleaners, he found a customer line snaking out the door. It turned out that the hard drive in the company’s server had crashed during the night. People were rummaging through the racks searching for their clothes, and those lucky enough to find them had to pay with cash because credit card processing was tied to the same system.
“Needless to say, the owner of that business had a very bad day,” says Streuter, vice president of marketing for CMS (www.cmsproducts.com). “Moral of the story: If he’d had a redundant system disk . . . he could have rebooted his server and got through the day.”
This tale illustrates one of the several facets of cutting storage-related costs: Sometimes a business has to spend money to save money. A single-server backup solution might cost a few hundred dollars, but that number pales in comparison to the potential losses caused by even a single day of storage failure. There are two sides to the storage cost savings coin. One side is about business continuity, highlighted by this dry cleaner’s example. The flip side tends to get more attention: focusing on how companies can get by with less hardware.