consider BUYING SRM TOOLS
Storage resource management (SRM) tools can provide some clarity in a complex environment. "SRM software is one of the best ways to look at capacity - who's consuming it, and who last accessed it," says Gruener.
Goodwin likes SRM tools because they can help identify duplicate and obsolete copies of data, which can slow storage growth. He says that the real culprit in growth is not primary storage (such as transactional data) but secondary storage requirements, such as duplications for backup, disaster recovery and data mining. According to Meta Group research, secondary storage requirements will exceed primary by seven to 15 times through 2008. "[SRM] is really a storage reporting tool," Goodwin says. "You have to understand what you've got and how it's used before you can make a decision on how to improve it."
classify YOUR DATA
Companies are sitting on mountains of data, especially in recent years with the growth of data-intensive ERP and CRM systems, news feeds, Web-based marketing programs and the like. Adding to the information explosion are regulatory requirements. Richard Scannell, vice president of corporate development and strategy at GlassHouse Technologies, a storage analyst company, says that reference data - data about data - outstrips the amount of original data being created. He recommends segmenting data into two or three discrete tiers. For example, 20 per cent of a company's data might be deemed critical; 30 per cent very important but could be lived without for eight hours; and the remainder necessary to keep for regulatory purposes, but a company could wait for three days to recover it from tape.
At Alliant, Louis Chiang, manager for IT applications hosting, says his company is classifying data now and hopes to do more in the future. He cites the storage for a customer support application, which resided on a two- or three-year-old disk, that they recently upgraded. Instead of discarding the older disk, it now stores less critical file and print apps.
know YOUR CUSTOMER
As CIO at Case Western Reserve University, Lev Gonick deals with customers - faculty and research administrators - who can be right prickly when it comes to data ownership. About a year ago, Gonick began moving from a highly distributed DAS environment to a highly centralised, more secure SAN architecture. As part of that security, Gonick thought it made sense to have the SAN management team be responsible for restoring enterprise data that had been deleted. But, Gonick says many of the faculty felt ownership of the data and wanted the ability to restore it themselves. So Gonick decided to allow faculty and their research administrators to access servers with digital IDs, even though it increased security risks to some extent. The value? "Significantly fewer Tylenol 3 headaches", from dealing with peeved users, says Gonick.
measure YOUR DECISIONS
Make sure decisions take into account your favoured metrics, whether total cost of ownership (TCO), ROI or something else. In terms of TCO, Randy Kerns, senior partner at storage analyst company Evaluator Group, says the dominant metric should not be the total amount of storage, but the amount of managed storage, or capacity per administrator. That number can affect decisions about such issues as utilisation. He says that SRM software vendors will tell you you're only using, say, 40 per cent of your storage and that their product could push that to 60 per cent. But Kerns advises that increasing your utilisation rate may not make economic sense if, for example, it would require a higher cost to manage that capacity.
Another metric he advocates is time-to-deployment - the time it takes from the moment you need more storage to the time it goes live. "If it takes two weeks, how much value have I lost?" he asks.
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