Storage area networking is a rapidly evolving and complex topic, and unless your company has staff with a fair level of experience and expertise in storage area networking applications you may want to consider using a consultant that is well versed in issues relating to SAN deployments.

When budgeting for your new storage system or changes to an existing SAN, you’ll want to factor in not only hardware costs but also the likely consulting costs to fully deploy the new systems.   Even for a fully in-house solution there will likely be costs outside of just the new hardware, and these will vary depending on vendors, solutions, and sales negotiating ability.

One new option is to use Dell services SAN consulting, a new offering from the company that now provides more ICSI installs than any other thanks to the aquisition of major SAN market leader Equalogic.    Obviously a Dell consultant will steer you in the direction of Dell|Equalogic servers and products, but unless you have a highly specialized application or prefer other hardware you are likely considering Dell solutions already.   You’ll want to estimate the cost savings of going this route over private consulting with more company choices for hardware to see if you are likely to make up differences in hardware costs by what is likely going to be a cheaper consulting and hardware combination package.

Over at the ARS technica blog an experience SAN IT manager recently suggested:

… get someone that can safely guide you through this minefield and get you a solution that you can understand. We buy all our hardware under the Dell Gold Support contract. It’s a live-saver to be able to call someone that can understand all those systems and get you back on track ASAP.

More important than the initail cost and choice of hardware, it is critical to make sure your consultant understands your storage needs very clearly and is capable of delivering a solution very consistent with these needs, especially if you need to integrate legacy storage systems - for example Fiber based - with newer deployments which are often iSCSI.  Before choosing a consultant take some time to clearly inventory your existing network and your current and future storage needs, and create a brief interview for your prospective consultants that will determine if they appear highly proficient with solutions that address all your storage needs.

So, do you need a network storage consultant?   If you are not sure about it the answer is probably yes, and choosing one wisely should be a top priority.