For the past decade or so, increasing productivity -- the measure of work performed divided by resources consumed to perform that work (P=O/C, where P is productivity, O is output, and C is cost) -- has been a driving force of CIO performance. Offshoring, use of open source software, and storage consolidation efforts that focused mainly on reducing the amount of hardware as a means of increasing gigabyte utilization are examples of very successful IT programs to increase productivity by reducing the amount of resources required to perform a given amount of work (P goes up when O is constant but C is reduced).
In the case of storage consolidation, most of the low-hanging, cost-based, "storage consolidation 1.0" opportunities to increase productivity have been harvested. This next era of "storage consolidation 2.0" will emphasize the amount of business work that can be supported by steady-state (or decreasing) levels of storage-related investment (P goes up when O increases but C is constant). Storage consolidation efforts that are predicated on virtualization, tiered storage, or thin provisioning technologies, capable of dramatically enhancing infrastructure automation, flexibility, responsiveness, and optimization, can help sustain storage-related contributions to IT productivity improvements.
However, IT organizations and businesses have to recognize that these productivity gains will be more difficult to measure and quantify. Moreover, the storage consolidation practices that enjoyed so much success when the focus was on reducing DAS will not be broadly transferable to software-orientated storage consolidation 2.0 efforts. Ultimately, organizations that seek productivity improvements from storage consolidation 2.0 must recognize that this will be a long, committed process that will be highly dependent on the success of storage administration personnel to, effectively, automate their jobs -- perhaps out of existence.
Action Item: Automation of the storage administration function is at the core of storage consolidation 2.0. Successful implementation of advanced storage software, not hardware, will be the key. To achieve storage consolidation 2.0 objectives, storage administration personnel will have to adopt complex, and often foreign, practices usually associated with application development and operations. This will be a very difficult transition for most storage operations groups.
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