Why you need to start ‘storagemaxxing’

While tokenmaxxing has taken the tech industry by storm in 2026, it’s time enterprises start ‘storagemaxxing’ to avoid being hit with huge infrastructure costs.

That’s according to David Boland, VP of cloud strategy at Wasabi. Speaking to ITPro, Boland believes that a confluence of industry trends means IT leaders need to sharpen their focus on storage optimization.

Hardware supply chain issues and rising prices are an area of acute concern for IT leaders in 2026 and are forcing some to alter strategies to compensate for growing costs, he said.

“We all know that the supply chain issue for storage is big news,” Boland told ITPro. “It’s really hard for organizations, especially if they don’t have deep pockets or are large, well-known organizations; it’s always difficult for them to get the hardware that they need.”

The result, according to Boland, is that they “need to look elsewhere” for alternatives or maximize the use of their existing infrastructure.

With AI in the equation, this adds a new layer of complexity to storage optimization, Boland noted. Simply put, there are a “ton of different storage options out there” yet each AI use case has different requirements from a storage perspective.

“Whether it’s inexpensive, long-term storage for compliance and regulatory reasons, or in the training process or the preparation process, [such as] storing checkpoints of training,” he explains. “Each one of these, let’s call them phases, in the AI lifecycle have a different storage need.”

Given the varied storage requirements when it comes to AI data sets, Boland said that some enterprises find their existing infrastructure isn’t compatible.

“Some high performance, expensive storage is not a great fit for your long term archiving, so therefore knowing where to put your data at which phase of that AI pipeline helps you maximize your investment or maximize the amount of money you spend.”

Storagemaxxing explained

Storagemaxxing is essentially a term designed to “give some new life” to traditional storage optimization processes, Boland said, and one that is inspired by various social media ‘maxxing’ trends.

We’ve all seen them online: ‘looksmaxxing’, ‘tokenmaxxing’, even ‘hobbitmaxxing’.

With storagemaxxing, this is primarily about streamlining storage to accommodate for various stages of the AI lifecycle, be that from data collection to training, deployment, and retention.

The aim here is to ensure that data stays “AI-ready, secure, cost-predictable, and free to move between cloud and compute providers as workloads change”, Boland noted in a recent blog post.

Notably, this has a critical impact on both AI and cost efficiency. AI tools need swift access to the data that feeds them. Ensuring seamless access by optimizing storage also reduces the strain placed on infrastructure.

Costly changes

Being “free to move” data between cloud and compute providers is an area Boland said many enterprises have been caught off guard with in recent months.

Many enterprises didn’t anticipate certain costs associated with storage, he said – be that storing data on the wrong platform or in the wrong cloud tier.

This has a direct impact on costs, he said. Even simply accessing that data or moving it can incur further charges due to egress fees. Indeed, Wasabi’s 2026 Cloud Storage Index survey found 48% of storage costs now go toward fees rather than actual capacity.

As ITPro reported at the time, this is severely impacting IT budgets and forcing a rethink of storage strategies.

“Being locked into a storage solution because you can't afford to move that data out, either through egress charges or retrieval fees, is an issue,” he said.

“I see that becoming more of an issue in the AI space. What's nice about hyperscalers is they have a broad range of services that go from GPU to CPU to high-performance storage to low-cost object storage,” Boland added.

“If there comes a point when a customer wants to move that data to another provider for either a better GPU cost or for availability of services, then they get hit with fees that they don't anticipate.”

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