Transcript EXECUTIVE: Building a Coherent Storage Strategy Richard Scannell Senior Vice President, North America Consulting GlassHouse Technologies.

EXECUTIVE:
Building a Coherent
Storage Strategy
Richard Scannell
Senior Vice President, North America
Consulting
GlassHouse Technologies
Use your keypads to respond
1. I am consistency blind-sided by my business
groups with requests for additional storage
30%
30%
2. I have a storage plan for this year, but I don’t
really have any insight into where I’ll be in 2-3
years
3. We have a technical roadmap that considers
the next 2-3 years but its not necessarily
aligned with our business drivers
20%
20%
3
4
4. I know exactly how information is used in our
business and I can show you that the way we
manage infrastructure supports that
0/0
1
2
Agenda
 Constituting a strategy
 Market realities at odds with your goals and why
 What you can do to get started
 What you should be asking and demanding
 Where are the next breakthroughs going to be
Constituting a strategy
What's in a strategy?
 Risk management
• Shareholder confidence
• Market responsiveness
• Corporate goals - M&A, innovation, quality, etc.
• Governance (compliance)
 Cost management
• Best in class “per managed unit” cost
 Strategy is about creating alignment between risk and
cost
 That’s also the best and simplest definition for ILM
Good news and bad news
 √ Storage is starting to feel more and more like things
we’ve done in the past
• SRM, backup are “enterprise applications” and require that level of
attention
 X At the same time, it’s completely different from
anything we’ve done in the past due to the persistence
of the data beyond the physical disk
 √ There is an opportunity to step up to managing the
information value chain
 X No one is positioning this properly…
Market realities at odds
with your goals and why
Shifts in the market – not really
 Modeling tools remain focused on storage
technology management instead of information
management
 Not likely to change – e.g., current focus is the
widening spread in customer sophistication –
SMB is becoming a focus
 Almost no business vertical attention yet – should
there be?
The reality of the sales process
 ILM to a storage salesperson means “I Love
Money”
 Your value to the salesperson far extends the
transaction
 Yet… their compensation plan drives all behavior
 There is a big gap between when the salesperson
declares success and when your customer
declares success
The inflexibility of your
organization
 You finally got a dedicated storage group – great
– break it up!
 New roles
• Information analyst – business alignment, risk mgmt,
compliance
•
Storage network admin – connectivity, availability,
performance (think technical mgmt)
•
Storage management admin – capacity plan, provision,
report (think process mgmt)
•
Storage comptroller – cost modeling, contracts
management
Half-life of data
 Data may remain valuable in the future
but our ability to access it will be keyed
on three discrete issues
• Where is it - logistics?
• Can it be recovered to primary storage – current
storage medium may be antiquated
•
Is it readable – platform and application refreshes
have rendered data unreadable
Current budgeting for storage
 Organizations continue to budget for storage
from a capital perspective and fail to tie front-end
costs (capital) to back-end costs (expense)
 The ratio of cost of capital to expense is
becoming so high, significant pressure is being
placed on the “back-end”
 If you plan to buy 100TB – you need to think
100TB of managed data for 3 years, not 100TB of
disk
What you can do to get
started
From service to cost
 Define a service oriented architecture
•
Discrete “treatments” for information
 Select appropriate technologies to provide each
discrete “treatment,” leveraging across
treatments wherever possible
 Be explicit in the operational needs to support
those technologies
 Derive a cost associated with each treatment
Use your keypads to respond
1. Everyone in my business thinks storage is
cheap and they never consider the postproduction costs
40%
2. While there isn’t linkage, when I get
budget approved for disk capacity it
automatically has an allocation for
network, backup and software added on.
30%
30%
2
3
3. I have a model that demands that
additional capacity is only approved when
the information model is mapped to a total
0/0 cost over the expected life
1
Create an abstraction layer
 Map the economics of virtualization
•
•
Vertically across varying technologies
Horizontally across “tiers” of storage
 Derive a subset – discrete “treatments” of
information
 Present those treatments to your user community
– you control the technology
 Take advantage of new technology only to drive
economics (assuming performance is as
described)
Map the real cost of information
 For each given application, can you map what the average
expected requirements for information will be in terms of
performance, availability, recoverability, long term retention
 Develop a cost model over the timeline that accounts for
primary, secondary and archiving. Factor in technology
refresh, increasing human costs, consumables etc
 Have a rolling year-on-year “tab” such that even if there is
no additional growth there is a clear understanding of ongoing costs to manage existing information
 Perform actual to plan exercises to refine the process
Refresh impact analysis
 Each infrastructure, platform and
application refresh will orphan some
amount of stored data
 Determine the impact and do selective
destruction and/or recycling of data
Put on a road show
 Don’t be a victim to the situation
 Raise awareness of the realities of the
cost structure
 Lobby for new roles in the IT dept
 Measure and report
What you should be
asking and demanding
Your vendors
 They want you to buy off on ILM
 That’s about risk and cost
 They need to lay out costs over time, not at the
point of acquisition
 What skin will they put in the game to ensure
those cost models?
 If they are a “solutions” company, what's
stopping them?
Your business
 How does information create value for the
business?
 Are there discrete points of inflection in the
lifecycle of information?
 What regulations apply? What about Corporate
Governance standards?
 How will you look to use data that is 3, 5, 10
years old?
Where are the next
breakthroughs going to
Wherever you demand…
 Orphaned data
 End-to-end cost modeling
 Compliance automation and monitoring
OR
 Bigger drives
 Higher density
 Wider market segmentation
Thank You
[email protected]