Chris Poelker’s Blog

 Lots of folks have recently been asking me about how the cost benefits of introducing the ODS model in their datacenters. I guess the current economic climate is finally pushing the CIO’s to take an even closer look at what they are doing to reduce costs to help the business.

It boggles my mind how much money companies are throwing at their technology vendors to help them solve some simple business problems. Backup and Data Replication for DR are the two big ones. Innovation in the datacenter is at a standstill in many cases simply because the incumbent technology “partners” the company has chosen has only a few ways of doing things. The “traditional” companies have been repackaging the same old methodologies and forcing it down the throat of their customers, and taking advantage of the fact that the technical decision makers in these companies are simply too busy fighting fires to do the proper research to find out what else is available in the market. Sure the old approaches work and feel comfortable, since it is what everyone is “used to” doing. But times are changing, and those companies who make the effort to review the new innovations in the technology market today may be pleasantly surprised to find out they can most likely reduce their current IT expenditures by 50% or more.

In the next few blogs, I am going to dive a little deeper, and give specific examples of how companies can leverage the ODS model to dramatically reduce costs. As an example, what if I can show you how to get all the benefits of data deduplication without actually dedulicating your data? How about saving 80% on your WAN to consolidate data protection for remote offices, without having to buy all those VERY EXPENSIVE network tuning appliances. How about increasing operational efficiency by 70% or more? You need to take your current vendors to task, and I will be more than happy to show you how.