Updated: Jul 3, 2021
Just when we start seeing the beginning of the end of the Covid-19 pandemic from a social interaction perspective we are now at the front end of dealing with shortages ranging from lumber to power supplies. In the case of critical components needed for the fabrication and manufacturing of storage systems component shortages exasperated with the overall shut down of the world’s manufacturing capacity except for those roles deemed ‘essential’ we are experiencing lead times that are typically 3 – 4 weeks ballooning to 4 – 12 weeks.
So, everyone who is looking to refresh aging storage infrastructure must wait or explore other short term alternatives. Waiting has been the natural direction in the past but with the lead times to ship being blown up as they are coupled with the time to implement waiting just is not a desirable path.
A couple short term temporary alternatives that we can look at are:
· Software defined storage – repurposing retired storage
· Storage Centric Cloud solutions with short term contractual commitment
These alternatives can certainly become a longer-term solution with varying use cases depending on the applications requiring the storage capacity.
