Originating Author: Nicholas Allen
Users looking to provide Storage as a Service (STAAS) internally must understand that such a service must be productized, sold and marketed just like any product. STAAS must be run as a business replete with an organization consisting of teams dedicated to sales and marketing, product development, product management, product support, and a “finance organization.”
Of these, sales and marketing are, perhaps, the most foreign concepts to a traditional IT infrastructure organization. But they are also the most important. Their job is to sell STAAS based on the merits of reduced complexity, fewer vendors, better storage efficiency, faster provisioning, and lower TCO. Their customers are usually application managers or lines of business who are accustomed to owning their piece of the IT infrastructure – after all they paid for it. Or, they have just come back from an application software vendor meeting or conference and have been told that these applications run best with some specific hardware which is not part of the STAAS standardized offering.
We have seen that STAAS can be driven from the bottom up, top-down, or both. Bottom-up can be career threatening and can take years to get buy-in. Top-down often comes when there is a changing of the guard. Being driven from both levels often happens when service levels are consistently not being met and senior management gets frustrated enough to buy into the STAAS approach that has been championed by the STAAS advocates.
The second rather foreign concept is that of a STAAS “finance” organization. STAAS must, in essence, perform the magic trick of turning fixed-cost capital expenditures into variable operating expenses for its customers. As such, the STAAS organization must be able to generate a profit in order to have the working capital to purchase fixed resources (e.g., a storage array, a disk drive, or a network switch) and serve them up as a variable resources (e.g., allocated storage, bytes managed, bytes protected). Exactly how that profit is accounted for is problematic, but most STAAS organizations shoot for a zero-profit at the end of the year approach. The STAAS finance unit must also, of course, provide a billing and collection function that can hopefully leverage an existing chargeback mechanism. This only works if the business units pay real money for services rendered and not “funny money.”
One strategy that greatly simplifies this magic trick is to buy from vendors that offer “storage on demand.” Obviously, this just shifts much the capital expenditures to the vendor, but many are willing to do it, realizing they will become one of only two or three vendors supplying the standardized STAAS offering.
Action Item: Organize and run storage-as-a-service like a business. Develop a top sales and marketing team backed by senior management. Work out the financial intricacies in advance including real chargeback. Plan on having many difficult meetings. Use vendors that offer “storage on demand.”
Footnotes:
