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SAN Plans: Flirting With Disaster

When we heard about all the millions of dollars being wasted by companies buying storage networking technology they dont need -- or, in some cases, forget they’d even acquired -- we decided to see if we couldn't help our readers avoid some of the tragic stories we’ve been hearing about lately (see Millions 'Wasted' on Storage Nets).

A prime example: Relera Internet Centers, flush with $300 million in funding at the start of the year, proceeded to build hosting centers across the U.S. containing rack upon rack of EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) storage arrays... As if there weren’t enough empty data centers scattered across the country already! According to F***edcompany.com, Relera has closed its doors.

Then there was the law firm that recently forked out $700,000 on a storage system that wasn’t even being used, according to Jason Rabbetts, co-founder and commercial director of U.K. storage consultancy firm Source Consulting. The company bought a massive disk repository from EMC and forgot about it. Each department assumed it was being used by other departments when, in fact, it was standing idle.

The reverse happened at another company known to Source Consulting. It lost close to $15,000 an hour when its systems went down for two days without sufficient backup, according to Rabbetts. The problem? “The company had 300 more servers than it thought it had."

We asked Source Consulting, IBM Global Services, and KPMG Ltd. to come up with 10 ways to avoid disasters like this. Here’s a synopsis of the results:

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