Originating Author: David Floyer
Black box storage is going to disappear. The application owner will demand to make informed decisions about the storage services purchased based on the business value they will deliver. Three actions may avoid IT being part of the problem:
- IT should work with application owners to create on organization that provides an internal storage services market, and itemizes the costs for each service consumed. IT also needs to provide tools and expertise to show the value of each of the storage services to the business. For example, demonstrate that providing a snapshot every two hours will improve the time to recover from a failure by 10 hours an average of five times a year.
- IT should create the necessary structures to work with the business and agree criteria for qualifying storage service vendors. This should include auditing the delivered level of service, testing recovery and location of the data.
- IT should agree clear guidelines to application owners about the data most suitable to use external services, as explained the storage alert entitled "Storage services inside out".
Action Item: IT should anticipate storage services and organize to exploit both internal and external storage services. They should create the forums, tools and collective experience to ensure that application owners make informed decisions about storage services.
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