Exploring key factors in storage

When thinking about storage for systems administration we are concerned with cost, durability, availability, performance, scalability, accessibility, and capacity. It is easy to get overwhelmed with so many moving parts when it comes to storage and that makes it a risk that we may lose track of what it is that we want to accomplish. In every storage decision, we need to remain focused on these factors. Most importantly, on all of these factors. It is extremely tempting to focus on just a few causing us to lose our grasp of the complete picture.

In most cases, if you study postmortems of storage systems that have failed to meet business needs, you will almost always find that one or more of these factors was forgotten during the design phase. It is very tempting to become focused on one or two key factors and ignore the others, but we really have to maintain a focus on all of them to ensure storage success.

We should begin by breaking down each...