Hosted by Storage Management – Why You Need this Brand New IT Competency Richard Scannell Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy Glasshouse Technologies

Hosted by A New Set of Challenges The intersection of Network, Storage and Database is creating complex new technologies and organizational issues

Hosted by Traditional IT Disciplines Applications, servers, networks All share a common characteristic - capital intensive at the point of entry IT has developed varying levels of competency in governing this type of discipline Vendor management, lease vs. buy, 5-Nines operations, bundle maintenance with purchase cost, etc.

Hosted by Storage – Somehow, it’s Different Storage Also capital intensive at the point of entry Capital costs associated with storage have raised eyebrows for quite a while now But, continuing erosion of capital costs has done almost nothing to affect executive level perspective on how IT manages storage costs I.E. Its bad – and getting worse

Hosted by A Core Competency Issue Borrow an example from the retail world Put a box on a half-empty truck traveling to another city – effective cost (to shipper) is free Put that box in a warehouse for a year, keep it safe, at an appropriate temperature, with fire suppression systems etc. – that costs money every single day

Hosted by A Core Competency Issue (continued) Retail understands the fundamental difference between shipping and warehousing and staff them accordingly Storage has a persistent cost model unlike anything IT has managed before (think warehousing) IT must develop competency in managing commodities with persistent cost models

Hosted by What Drives Persistent Cost Policy, by definition, defines the persistence of the data in the environment This leads DIRECTLY to the cost model In many cases, data continues to cost money every day, for years after it has been removed from (disk) environment

Hosted by How Policy Affects Cost Cost is combination of capital, operating expense and risk of loss Irrelevant of capital cost, the cost of providing a given piece of data can vary wildly. Policy drives overall cost at a dramatically higher level than capital cost do by affecting operating expense and risk $ $$$ Operating Expense Value at Risk Capital Cost Operating Expense Value at Risk

Hosted by Policy, Policy Everywhere Examine existing policies Where did they come from Do they make sense Are they vanilla or do they consider other factors such as sensitivity of data What to the policies include – availability, recoverability, security etc. SLAs are a good place to start, if you have them

Hosted by Governance:  Validation and qualification  Movement of data up or down the value chain Architecture:  Hardware/software requirements  Processes and standards Align Cost with Value Occupancy:  Appropriately congregate data by value and rationalize storage requirements at each phase

Hosted by Attribute Based Architecture Attribute based architecture: Availability, scalability, redundancy, maintainability, security, access model, connectivity, size, footprint, manageability Backup window, backup integration, restorability Select a small number of basic architecture options Example: Mirrored, N+1, online upgrades, etc…

Hosted by New Job Functions Storage managers will need to be able to Explain how policy affects cost Explain how architecture protects discrete data set Articulate the cost of “storage” for a given dataset Understand business implications on the infrastructure and vice-versa (think regulatory)

Hosted by First Steps Create a dedicated Storage Management Group Implement Cost Accounting – get an understanding of the persistence cost model Document your policies clearly Negotiate with your business, when you can articulate cost vs. risk, to reduce on-going costs