Originating Author: Peter Burris
Transformation to a storage services architecture (SSA) is comprehensive, touching virtually every aspect of storage. Different suppliers of storage hardware, software, and services will invest heavily to position their goods as "apex offerings": the investment around which all other project investment, implementation, and management offerings should revolve. However, while the adoption of new technologies, creation of new sourcing relationships, and formation of new management structures will be important, instituting a system of storage metrics that are both semantically usable, as well as syntactically administrable, in business terms will be lynchpin of success. Ultimately, user, developer, legal, procurement, and finance communities inside the business must adopt an SSA metrics system for IT to successfully administer storage resources as a set of services, otherwise parochial issues will inevitably tear the SSA apart.
Action Item: A program for implementing a common, meaningful, and manageable set of SSA-related metrics must be a top priority in any serious SSA implementation effort, otherwise the IT organization will always be in transformation mode, and never quite reach delivery mode.
