Moderator: David Vellante
Analyst: John Blackman
The basic premise behind a storage services architecture is thinking about infrastructure as a granular set of reusable services that can be invoked as needed by the appropriate business application. This approach allows organizations to optimize on cost, performance, recovery, and other metrics that are fundamental to business processes.
One way to conceptualize such an architecture is a three-dimensional cube with the following vectors, where infrastructure management includes a stack of resources from device to network to storage and server platforms all the way through applications:
- Infrastructure management (e.g. technology components),
- Information management – technology tiers (e.g. Performance),
- Data protection – (e.g. availability, classes of service).
Information management includes various performance levels built on tiered storage. – Data classification, global name space, retention/archive, and the data protection dimension accommodates a spectrum of protection methodologies from always on to generally reliable (backup, recovery, etc.)
Sets of various storage services are layered within each dimension – for example, provisioning services as part of infrastructure, copy services in data protection and archiving services in information management. The intersection of these dimensions and their corollary services will determine the technologies used, service levels, and costs. Importantly, not all intersections are viable. For example, the choice of iSCSI as a protocol today will not fit continuous availability tier 1 performance requirements and therefore would not be an option on the services menu.
What are the benefits of a storage services architecture? In addition to the lengthening of depreciation schedules, there are four primary benefits of this approach, including:
- It provides granular acquisition options for business lines with a high degree of cost transparency;
- It causes businesses and IT to make tradeoffs between cost and function and will naturally lead to more efficient use of storage as a resource;
- It minimizes the complexity of the technology portfolio and avoids “one off” solutions that can create migration problems down the road;
- It limits the number of suppliers further reducing complexity.
What drawbacks and organizational impediments will a storage services architecture bring? To be sure, there are some political and practical minefields users should consider with such an approach. First, a reduction in the number of technologies and vendor choices will limit technology options and create friction, as leading technologists will naturally want to integrate and exploit the latest innovations. As such, it is critical that organizations use their ‘sandbox’ lab specifically as a means of evolving the services model (i.e. their cube of offerings) so that the services offered remain competitive and current.
In addition, to make storage services effectively pay back, service level agreements and chargeback models must be in place and aligned, which will require deliberate effort, thought, plans, and actions.
Finally, the politics of consolidating storage services deployment options, while limiting the free-for-all mentality, will naturally disaffect certain factions within organizations that have become comfortable with high degrees of freedom.
What best practice advice should be considered? There are several actions organizations should pursue in regard to storage services implementation, including:
- "Construct service level agreements (SLAs)" and chargebacks consistent with services businesses with a one-time cost and an ongoing monthly fee that includes a technology refresh. Build switching costs (aka early withdrawal penalties) into the model and construct agreements over periods of time where lower pricing applies for longer contract periods;
- Limit the number of suppliers and negotiate on-demand contracts where vendors will install equipment but charge upon usage at the current price when that equipment is turned on, not when it was installed;
- Be aware that LAN-based backup will present the most difficult SLA challenge and consider disk-based backup for distributed networks; possibly even outsourcing to a remote service provider.
Most organizations will manage such initiatives as a cost center, or at the very least share some of the profits with business lines or invest back in the business.
Action Item: Storage in many ways has been insulated from the market forces of services-oriented architecture (SOA), software as a service (SaaS) and consumer-like business models. This is changing, and customers should evaluate the feasibility of constructing service-oriented models for storage which emphasize granularity, reusability, and cost transparency. This will allow organizations to make intelligent make vs. buy choices pertaining to an emerging set of managed storage services from a variety of service providers, including EMC, HP and IBM.
