EXECUTIVE: Building a Coherent Storage Strategy Richard Scannell Senior Vice President, North America Consulting GlassHouse Technologies

0/0 Use your keypads to respond 1.I am consistency blind-sided by my business groups with requests for additional storage 2.I have a storage plan for this year, but I don’t really have any insight into where I’ll be in 2-3 years 3.We have a technical roadmap that considers the next 2-3 years but its not necessarily aligned with our business drivers 4.I know exactly how information is used in our business and I can show you that the way we manage infrastructure supports that

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

Constituting a strategy

What's in a strategy? Risk management Shareholder confidence Market responsiveness Corporate goals - M&A, innovation, quality, etc. Governance (compliance) Cost management Best in class “per managed unit” cost Strategy is about creating alignment between risk and cost That’s also the best and simplest definition for ILM

Good news and bad news √ Storage is starting to feel more and more like things we’ve done in the past SRM, backup are “enterprise applications” and require that level of attention X At the same time, it’s completely different from anything we’ve done in the past due to the persistence of the data beyond the physical disk √ There is an opportunity to step up to managing the information value chain X No one is positioning this properly…

Market realities at odds with your goals and why

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?

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

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

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

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

What you can do to get started

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

0/0 Use your keypads to respond 1.Everyone in my business thinks storage is cheap and they never consider the post- production costs 2.While there isn’t linkage, when I get budget approved for disk capacity it automatically has an allocation for network, backup and software added on. 3.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

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)

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

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

Put on a road show Don’t 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

What you should be asking and demanding

Your vendors They want you to buy off on ILM That’s 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?

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?

Where are the next breakthroughs going to

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

Thank You