Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: Dave Vellante
The historical norm in the storage world was to deploy storage in response to application requirements. The challenge for storage administrators, procurers and ultimately business people was that different applications feature different benefits, costs and performance characteristics and as a consequence it was difficult to compare and contrast one set of storage investments relative to another. Storage administrative groups, who enjoyed increasing budgets and a greater sense of control over how monies were ultimately allocated, often reduced the complexity and cost of managing storage by introducing standardized "one-size fits all" storage infrastructures. This was at the expense of user departments who are over or under provisioned.
Recently, we've seen the emergence of a storage services architecture model that can do a better job of directly aligning storage resources, and the quality of those resources, to business benefits. The basic idea is applications or business processes that require higher performance, more secure and perhaps more stable storage resources could pay for those resources whereas application users requiring less stringent storage capabilities could pay lesser dollars. This also could permeate into other types of storage services such as backup and restore, migration, data movement, copy services, etc. The architecture presumes significant processing power at the controller level capable of operating at very rapid speeds even as they are running software that borrows heavily from application domains like supply chain management.
The result of this is that we expect companies like EMC, Hitachi, HP, IBM and others to promote high level storage administration interfaces reminiscent of some of the early efforts at deploying supply chain management technologies in the storage world. There are still gaps that have to be filled between the current state of the technology and this future state where virtualization makes it possible to attach a dollar return to a dollar spent on storage. Users however should begin the process of categorizing their storage investments in terms of business returns such that they can facilitate the migration to a more business-centric view of storage assets provisioned through a services orientation as the technologies come on line.
Action item: Storage administrative personnel will have to get down and dirty with the ugly reality of chargeback to start the process of conceptualizing how storage dollars spent generate business value return. This will permeate not just the buying and allocation of disk but also other critical storage assets from hardware to controller to software and operations.
