For years storage has been purchased as a resource to support specific applications and business initiatives. When you ran out of storage, you bought more even if there was underutilized storage somewhere on the floor. Today, CIOs should insist, with the exception of certain applications such as Exchange or transactional systems, that storage be a virtualized shared resource.
This week's Peer Incite used a customer example featuring LSI's Storage Virtualization Manager (SVM) and its position as a mainstream technology to support virtualization for mid-tier storage infrastructure. The trend is clear. A large, stable R&D company with an OEM selling mentality has begun to bring heterogeneous storage virtualization, thin provisioning, and advanced software to a large installed base of modular arrays.
The organizational implications are several in the near term and will be heightened by the economic crisis. Specifically, over the next 18 months CIOs should increasingly emphasize infrastructure expertise focused on five key areas:
- Business skills to facilitate storage as pooled services;
- Architecting and implementing a capability to support shared storage;
- The ability to negotiate with both vendors and lines of business to form a new business model that supports shared storage provisioning and management;
- Performance tuning to ensure service levels are adequate;
- Reporting to monitor, measure, adjust to change and communicate success metrics.
Storage infrastructure continues to offer opportunities for consolidation and improved efficiency. The promise of SAN in the early 2000's, while enabling better recovery, fell short of expectations and resulted in too many SAN islands and too much wasted space.
Action Item: The recent economic downturn provides CIO's with an opportunity to impose service level standards that aggressively use virtualized storage as the default tier 2 infrastructure. CIO's should communicate to lines of business and form a cost-cutting partnership that trades a 'my storage' mentality for an 'our storage' paradigm.
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