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June Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Storage
Message from Taos CEO and Co-Founder, Ric Urrutia,
and Co-Founder, Alexis Tatarsky
The deployment, utilization and maintenance of data storage is
an infrastructure issue ripe with opportunities for the forward-thinking
IT executive. Publications and conferences abound focusing on emerging,
maturing and evolving technologies. The cost per megabyte, then
gigabyte, now terabyte, and soon petabyte continues to drop exponentially,
while ever-faster networks deliver the data and ever-hungrier applications
consume and create it. This much is a given, and is the exciting
reality that we all live with every day.
Taking a step back however, one notices that
some things haven’t
changed as much as all this might imply. Backups are still often
poorly implemented; storage tiering is understood to be a good
thing and yet rarely implemented comprehensively; shadow IT organizations
create “off the books” storage islands; and so on.
The result is that organizations tend to spend far more than they
should on storage to obtain results that are far less reliable
and efficient than they might otherwise be. Among the key reasons
for this is that it is both easier and more fun for a bright IT
director to think how to incorporate the latest technology than
it is to think through with one’s user community how to tier
storage for lower cost; it is more exciting to design a SAN than
it is to design a truly effective backup strategy; and it is more
natural for a technologist to deal with technical implementation
issues than it is to deal with the political and interpersonal
issues that arise when a non-IT group buys cheap and off-the-shelf
storage rather than petition for (and pay the burdened cost of)
additional storage from the storage group. These can be your competitors’ weaknesses,
or they can be your own, but to make sure that they’re the
other guy’s you’ll need to follow in the footsteps
of those who’ve been in the trenches and made it work.
We present a
talk by James Rutledge, Sr. Director of Enterprise Technology
Services at Corio. Mr. Rutledge spoke recently at Taos’ Experts
in the Industry educational series, sharing his perspectives
on opportunities for cost savings in data backup. At Corio, reliable
high-performance infrastructure isn’t just a requirement,
it’s integral to their product: providing applications
on demand to their customers. Corio’s data centers, security,
storage, systems, and monitoring need to be both first-rate and
economical, so Rutledge speaks from experience as he discusses
strategies for reducing the cost of backups – a topic dear
to his heart. Rutledge points out a number of areas one can improve
performance while cutting costs, and emphasizes the human element
in doing so.
Taos’s Professional Services Group spends
a lot of time talking with clients about their most vexing challenges.
Recently, we held a
round-table discussion on storage-related topics. Shawn Tu,
senior storage architect with our PSG, shares some of his take-aways
from that conversation. Among his observations are that there is
a disparity between IT’s understanding of what it takes to
provide enterprise-ready storage, and non-IT perspectives that “storage
is cheap”.
Reliable data storage isn’t necessarily the
sexiest issue, but it is at least as fundamental as any of the
technologies we read about. Implemented correctly, it can be a
competitive advantage – which
is why we refer to this issue of IT Intelligence as “a
Strategic Look at Storage.”
We hope you enjoy and benefit from reading IT Intelligence.
The intelligent deployment of emerging technologies is one of the
primary keys to a CIO’s providing value to his or her company.
Taos is privileged to provide insight and strategic direction to
many forward-thinking IT organizations. If you think our experience
might of value to you, please do let
us know.
Ric Urrutia
CEO & Co-Founder
Alexis Tatarsky
Co-Founder
Taos
"delivering excellence
in IT”
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