EXECUTIVE: Building a Coherent Storage Strategy

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EXECUTIVEBuilding a Coherent Storage Strategy

• Richard Scannell
• Senior Vice President, North America Consulting
• GlassHouse Technologies

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Use your keypads to respond

• I am consistency blind-sided by my business
  groups with requests for additional storage
• I have a storage plan for this year, but I dont
  really have any insight into where Ill be in 2-3
  years
• We have a technical roadmap that considers the
  next 2-3 years but its not necessarily aligned
  with our business drivers
• I know exactly how information is used in our
  business and I can show you that the way we
  manage infrastructure supports that

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Agenda

• Constituting a strategy
• Market realities at odds with your goals and why
• What you can do to get started
• What you should be asking and demanding
• Where are the next breakthroughs going to be

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Constituting a strategy
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What's in a strategy?

• Risk management
• Shareholder confidence
• Market responsiveness
• Corporate goals - MA, innovation, quality, etc.
• Governance (compliance)
• Cost management
• Best in class per managed unit cost
• Strategy is about creating alignment between risk
  and cost
• Thats also the best and simplest definition for
  ILM

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Good news and bad news

• v Storage is starting to feel more and more like
  things weve done in the past
• SRM, backup are enterprise applications and
  require that level of attention
• X At the same time, its completely different
  from anything weve done in the past due to the
  persistence of the data beyond the physical disk
• v There is an opportunity to step up to managing
  the information value chain
• X No one is positioning this properly

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Market realities at odds with your goals and why
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Shifts in the market not really

• Modeling tools remain focused on storage
  technology management instead of information
  management
• Not likely to change e.g., current focus is the
  widening spread in customer sophistication SMB
  is becoming a focus
• Almost no business vertical attention yet
  should there be?

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The reality of the sales process

• ILM to a storage salesperson means I Love Money
• Your value to the salesperson far extends the
  transaction
• Yet their compensation plan drives all behavior
• There is a big gap between when the salesperson
  declares success and when your customer declares
  success

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The inflexibility of your organization

• You finally got a dedicated storage group great
  break it up!
• New roles
• Information analyst business alignment, risk
  mgmt, compliance
• Storage network admin connectivity,
  availability, performance (think technical mgmt)
• Storage management admin capacity plan,
  provision, report (think process mgmt)
• Storage comptroller cost modeling, contracts
  management

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Half-life of data

• Data may remain valuable in the future but our
  ability to access it will be keyed on three
  discrete issues
• Where is it - logistics?
• Can it be recovered to primary storage current
  storage medium may be antiquated
• Is it readable platform and application
  refreshes have rendered data unreadable

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Current budgeting for storage

• Organizations continue to budget for storage from
  a capital perspective and fail to tie front-end
  costs (capital) to back-end costs (expense)
• The ratio of cost of capital to expense is
  becoming so high, significant pressure is being
  placed on the back-end
• If you plan to buy 100TB you need to think
  100TB of managed data for 3 years, not 100TB of
  disk

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What you can do to get started
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From service to cost

• Define a service oriented architecture
• Discrete treatments for information
• Select appropriate technologies to provide each
  discrete treatment, leveraging across
  treatments wherever possible
• Be explicit in the operational needs to support
  those technologies
• Derive a cost associated with each treatment

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Use your keypads to respond

• Everyone in my business thinks storage is cheap
  and they never consider the post-production costs
• While there isnt linkage, when I get budget
  approved for disk capacity it automatically has
  an allocation for network, backup and software
  added on.
• I have a model that demands that additional
  capacity is only approved when the information
  model is mapped to a total cost over the expected
  life

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Create an abstraction layer

• Map the economics of virtualization
• Vertically across varying technologies
• Horizontally across tiers of storage
• Derive a subset discrete treatments of
  information
• Present those treatments to your user community
  you control the technology
• Take advantage of new technology only to drive
  economics (assuming performance is as described)

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Map the real cost of information

• For each given application, can you map what the
  average expected requirements for information
  will be in terms of performance, availability,
  recoverability, long term retention
• Develop a cost model over the timeline that
  accounts for primary, secondary and archiving.
  Factor in technology refresh, increasing human
  costs, consumables etc
• Have a rolling year-on-year tab such that even
  if there is no additional growth there is a clear
  understanding of on-going costs to manage
  existing information
• Perform actual to plan exercises to refine the
  process

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Refresh impact analysis

• Each infrastructure, platform and application
  refresh will orphan some amount of stored data
• Determine the impact and do selective destruction
  and/or recycling of data

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Put on a road show

• Dont be a victim to the situation
• Raise awareness of the realities of the cost
  structure
• Lobby for new roles in the IT dept
• Measure and report

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What you should be asking and demanding
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Your vendors

• They want you to buy off on ILM
• Thats about risk and cost
• They need to lay out costs over time, not at the
  point of acquisition
• What skin will they put in the game to ensure
  those cost models?
• If they are a solutions company, what's
  stopping them?

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Your business

• How does information create value for the
  business?
• Are there discrete points of inflection in the
  lifecycle of information?
• What regulations apply? What about Corporate
  Governance standards?
• How will you look to use data that is 3, 5, 10
  years old?

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Where are the next breakthroughs going to
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Wherever you demand

• Orphaned data
• End-to-end cost modeling
• Compliance automation and monitoring
• OR
• Bigger drives
• Higher density
• Wider market segmentation

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Thank You

• Richard.Scannell_at_GlassHouse.com