June Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Storage

“Storage is cheap. Not!”

Taos Professional Services Team

Although the raw cost per unit of storage has indeed dropped, the cost of managing an organization’s storage has not. To address topics such as this head-on, Taos regularly meets with its key clients and hosts “round table” discussions to get a better understanding of the causes and effects of pressing IT issues. Here is a brief summary of the general consensus reached during a recent round table discussion along with two short examples of how Taos is helping customers deal with the cost of storage.

The real cost of storage has many elements

The reasons contributing to the total cost of enterprise storage go beyond the price tag of the hardware and software itself - the contributing factors touch the realms of ‘politics’, user expectation, and regulatory compliance.

In the area of ‘politics’, the lack of visibility to upper level management over the hidden costs of data storage can cause a detriment of storage budgets. While data storage is clearly a necessary asset to an organization, it does not get the hype that other IT projects receive and is often not perceived as strategic. Rather, it is viewed as something that should function as a “utility” and the acronym ROI is often brought up in meetings that discuss getting money for future storage projects. The CIO often faces an uphill battle in getting non-IT management to understand the fully-burdened costs and value associated with data storage. IT is often asked repeatedly “Why does it cost you that much to buy more storage when I can go to Fry’s and buy it for a tiny fraction of that price?” The answer, of course, lies in the reliability, availability, and management of that storage - backing it up and making it highly available and robust all add to the initial purchase price.

“User expectation” can also add a fair amount of hidden cost. For example, the general user expectation for a $60.00 hard drive purchased from Fry’s is much lower than that with hard drives populating a company’s enterprise storage arrays. Fifteen minutes of downtime at home while the hard drive is swapped out will not hinder the user to the same degree as it would in an enterprise environment. IT managers must have backup systems and processes in place that assure the level of robustness required by users, and this necessarily adds to the total cost. SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are simply not a factor at home.

A significant opportunity to reduce storage costs comes through tiering – moving rarely accessed files to near-line storage, and archiving other data to offline media. Decisions as to where data is kept can have a tremendous impact on its cost, but there is a trade-off that the user community needs to buy into: moving to near-line may slow access; archiving most certainly does.

Storage technology may eventually come to the point where the actual physical location of data is imperceptible to the end-user and even the general IT support staff. For now, the lack of complete transparency in a tiered storage strategy makes it difficult for a storage manager to gain support in the end-user community. The added expense of IT support staff’s time to hold those difficult conversations with users has not been worth it. And IT managers who make these decisions on their own risk complaints from users who experience degraded performance. So, to avoid an uproar, they often keep users’ files on the high-end (expensive) storage arrays. These files are then backed up and managed along with more critical, dynamic files, again adding more management costs on to the initial purchase price.

The third most commonly stated cost factor was regulatory compliance. Strict compliance rules and regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and others, have added to the explosive amount of storage a company must now manage. Unfortunately, the compliance rules and regulations concerning IT operations are vague at best, leaving companies unsure of what data to keep online, and for how long. Consequently, to be “safe”, they keep all of it. This, of course, increases the amount of storage an IT department must handle, and adds even more complexity to the management of storage.

To address the problem, the advent of SANs (Storage Area Networks) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliances promised to usher in ease-of-administration. However, many of our clients are telling us that this is just not true – it’s not that simple. While these technologies pull storage together under a common infrastructure, disparate management tools are still being used, and additional training is needed for all the different interfaces.

So what’s the answer?

Cost savings can be realized

Even though storage costs continue to rise, there are countermeasures. By taking a step back and reviewing storage strategically and holistically – analyzing all relevant processes and technologies - IT managers can usually find many ways to reduce costs.

For example, Taos recently helped a well-known global hardware systems/software company in Silicon Valley transition its storage infrastructure from an outside, third-party vendor to its own recently announced storage products. Taos assisted the company in seamlessly integrating their own storage product into their server environment, enabling full exploitation of the Operating System’s inherent functions instead of relying on (and paying for) extra licenses that were necessary on the other vendor’s storage appliances.

In another example, Taos helped a client implement a capability that was already present, but untapped in their Windows dominated environment. In this case, a built-in snapshot function of Microsoft’s latest server operating system was leveraged as a backup tool for their production environment, resulting in a cost savings. Additionally, since their system administrators were already well-versed in Microsoft technology, no additional training was necessary.

Conclusions

The management of any technology will always add to its total cost. In the case of storage, there are many hidden costs that IT needs to help the rest of the company understand. Taos can help its clients take a more strategic look at storage by analyzing their existing technologies and processes, identifying areas of improvement, and implementing cost savings, all with an eye towards meeting current and future company goals and objectives.