Cutting costs? If you care about your data, cut somewhere else

Henry Newman had an interesting article at EnterpriseStorageForum.com at the beginning of May (we missed it, but thanks to Rich over at Sun’s HPC Watercooler for the link) on the forces that his customers are feeling during the financial crisis, and why you might not want to get all your cost savings in your storage architecture

Let’s face it: Times are tough and there’s a lot of pressure to cut costs. I hear it all the time from my customers.

But it’s not as simple as choosing the cheapest data storage technology. If you care about your data — and if you’re reading this, you probably do — then you need to consider the technology and reliability tradeoffs of storage technologies, whether you’re an enterprise, small business or even an individual home user (my own home backup and data protection scheme borders on the paranoid). Storage costs aren’t just about the price of the hardware or software; they’re about operating and maintenance costs — and the cost of lost or corrupt data.