Planning Storage Environments › Enterprise Storage Requirements › Budget Considerations

Budget Considerations

Sometimes it pays to stress the obvious early in the planning of a major project: each of the parameters discussed in this section comes with a price tag attached. If you need speed, you need a faster, higher-bandwidth network and more and faster backup devices. Both require premium prices.

To meet your speed or data security requirements, you may need to buy more media. Media elements are surprisingly expensive, particularly for newer and faster backup devices.

You need to decide how much your organization can afford:

• To spend on a backup and recovery solution
• To lose in lost data and staff time

Then, do the following:

• Decide what you are prepared to do in order to keep both kinds of costs in bounds.
• Decide whether performance or economy is your primary concern.
• Evaluate the trade-offs discussed in the next section in light of this initial decision.