Storage costs so much not because the individual hardware components are expensive. Given the capacity and performance per unit, storage is less costly than it has ever been. Storage hardware makes significant advancements each year. The problem is the storage software driving this hardware has not. Most code behind most storage solutions is over a decade old. Even newer vendors typically base their storage software development on legacy code libraries. These old codebases are inefficient and unable to take advantage of modern hardware capabilities.
In this white paper, we examine storage software and help you understand the high cost of its inefficiency. The practice of hiding legacy code behind a nice GUI means that the typical storage system requires far more hardware resources than it should. The inefficiency leads to high upfront costs and high long-term costs.