Aligning IT with business goals is a key requirement for an agile IT infrastructure, and this is a challenging task for many CIOs. An IT backbone is an ecosystem of hardware, software and apps. Two things that top the list of CIOs challenges arecreating a computing power that can run demanding apps and storing the data that is created. If we look at the key components of an IT infrastructure, storage is the vital element that secures enterprise data. Data in all formsfiles, images, appsare exploding, and hence even during the recession, investments on storage become a necessity.

An IDC report Expanding Digital Universe says that the information growth through 2010 will grow at a CAGR of 57%. And Asia Pacific, excluding Japan, will grow 30-40% faster. What this growth denotes is that it is equivalent to approximately 3 mn times the information in all the books ever written. As per the report, organizations, including businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, and associations will be responsible for security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of at least 85% of the information. What makes the situation more complex and somewhat uncontrollable is the nature of the digital information that is generated. Over 95% of the digital information consists of unstructured data. Hence, managing storage and giving a structure to unstructured data will be the key growth driver.

Storage RoI?
TCO and RoI are closely interlinked, and it has become the essential vocabulary in vendors solution offerings and in most cases it acts as their USP. But if we look at the CIO community, the term RoI evokes mixed responsesome are totally confident about the tangible benefits, and others a bit cautious on providing benchmarks on the savings in relation to the quantum of spend that went into IT purchases. If we contrast this to a storage deployment, due to its macroscopic nature, more CIOs are looking at ways in arriving at a storage architecture that gives them optimal results and cost savings.

Effective storage architecture hence needs to factor in a lot of best practices so that economics can be achieved. Storage economics is all about creating a fine balance between storage spends and actual requirements so that one arrive at a greater RoI due to the optimal use of assets. Experts aver that there are proven strategic and tactical investments for storage infrastructure cost reduction. These range from technology components to organization and staffing changes, and even include methods of provisioning storage capacity to end users. As new technologies become available, smart organizations will follow the principles of storage economics to evaluate them not just for their technical prowess, but also for how well they can support business performance and particularly efforts to economize.

Road to Storage Economics
At a macro level, to arrive at better storage economics one sure way is to adopt a service oriented approach. This approach will enable enterprises to achieve greater storage manageability and cost savings in terms of capacity planning, administration, and a whole lot of storage related jobs. Why is storage economics important? Experts say that it is important because it attempts to align operational and technical dimension of the storage infrastructure to a corresponding financial viewpoint. As storage prices drop from 15% to 30% every year, it is easy to develop the erroneous belief that a lower cost of acquisition will result in a lower cost of ownership. Storage economics methods and practices provide measurable techniques that can expose the true costs of storage decisions and help IT leaders make plans to systematically reduce these costs over time.

Experts say that the road to better storage economics can be achieved by taking a comprehensive view of the existing setup. To start with the first principle is to be aware that the cost of storage includes more than price. One report by a leading storage vendor identified that there are thrity-three types of costs that compose TCO. Of these, not all are equal in relevance to an organization and some are more strategically important to bear, reduce, or eliminate than others.

The second principle, therefore, is that an organization must determine which are the relevant costscosts on what to focus, to measure, and to control. The third principle is that there are economically superior storage architectures. Too frequently, organizations fail to recognize that business performance and the ability to reduce costs over time are features of any technology. Some technologies have a well documented edge over others in controlling and lowering TCO. Over time, new and better technologies will be introduced and the specific technologies that build economically superior storage architecture will change, but the principle will remain constant.

Hence, organizations must evaluate new technologies for what they can contribute to business performance and, specifically, to cost reducing performance as well as considering their technical functionality. The fourth and final principle of storage economics is that organizations should use money as one measurement for storage improvement. Once an organization has identified which costs are most strategic to control, it must develop an economic measuring system to quantify current costs and track progress in reducing them.

Clearly, an informed approach based on the existing pain points and investing in areas that will lead to better TCO management and RoI is the right choice. This approach also creates a cohesive storage environment leading to an optimal storage backbone.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in