Managed StorageAdapt your storage capacity to the demand of your business and pay as you use

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VolumE 3 IssuE 1 2009

managed storage – adapt your storage capacity to the demand of your business and pay as you use. 3Introduction. 3Customers challenge huge growth in storage requirements – the consequences 4storage on Demand – The service management concept enables fast storage provision and cost transparency 5Technologies and solutions to support efficient storage management 7- storage Virtualisation 7- Virtualisation of tape storage – Centricstor Virtual Tape 8- File level virtualisation – Centricstor File services 8- Continuous data protection – CDP 8- Block level virtualisation 8- Information lifecycle management 9- link service levels to Costs 9- Consolidate Requirements and standardise 9Benefits of a managed storage Concepts 10Cut storage Costs With Cost-Effective service Definitions 11

CONTENTS

3

All businesses rely upon effective and timely delivery of information to succeed. More often than not this information is acquired through efficient use of the data held, making it critical to their success. The ability to be able to continuously access and exploit data in this manner is therefore crucial. Equally the data needs to be well managed to prevent potential data loss for example, through the use of appropriate data protection features.

The management of data backup and recovery in-house is becoming an increasingly expensive exercise as the volume of data continues to grow at ever alarming rates. To more effectively manage and fund this requirement, an increasing number of companies are working with external service providers for backup and recovery who then create and monitor the backup service for them.

This service, Managed Storage, enables a company to have a clear understanding of the cost of data management, as well as being able to focus resources on core business activities. Also, Managed Storage means companies no longer need to maintain a team of storage professionals, to handle the complex operation that today’s sophisticated data storage infrastructures require.

Managed Storage services provide efficient assignment and utilisation of storage capacity, transparent accounting and cost effective business continuity, enhanced by an SLA-based transfer of service delivery for the operation of storage.

From analysis and planning up to set-up and management of the storage infrastructure in the data centre, Fujitsu offers:

Analysis of existing storage infrastructure in regard to cost reduction and data availability

Conceptual design and implementation of individual storage systems

Flexible provisioning of storage operations management, both remote and onsite

Optimised availability, data security and proactive services with 24x7 Managed Storage operation

Innovative solutions help companies improve the efficiency of flexible and agile infrastructures. Service Management enables cost transparency, remote and centralised control of the entire storage infrastructure, which data centre leads to the smooth running of the dynamic data center.

managed storage – adapt your storage capacity to the demand of your business and pay as you use. Introduction.

Storage management costs

Own operations

Managed Storage

Costs

Time

Sharing operational resources for the operator’s various customers

Tailor-made SLA for the various requirements

Resources are invoiced according to usage and are not simply overheads

System (HW, SW)

TCO=

∑

Storage Management

Monitoring

Operating

Training

Maintenance

Accounting / Billing

Documentation

Savings potential: 30% in contrast to one’s own operations

FIGURE 1

source: Fujitsu

4

There are many reasons for the growth in data and the consequent need for greater storage capacities. One of the main drivers is e-mail. Another is the increase in statutory obligations to archive data – ranging from the Principles of Data Access and Verifiability of Digital Documents (GDPdU) in Germany to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US. These result in compliance requirements that enterprises must observe in ensuring audit-proof archiving of all business documents.

Additionally, data protection is becoming more and more important. Replication of data and robust procedures for recovering it following total failure results in yet further demands upon the storage infrastructure. An added factor is that ever-shortening backup and recovery times are demanded.

The surging volumes of data and the requirements for storage and protection is a headache for many IT managers, with fear of system failure and loss of data, the main cause. Ensuring reliable protection of data and applications, and the maintenance – or indeed, improvement – of agreed service levels are therefore still key challenges for those responsible for management of storage within the data centre.

A further consequence of the growth in data is the increasing amount of storage equipment to be managed. A company attempting to deal with this growth by continually adding new equipment will soon run into problems when it comes to the management of increasingly complex storage infrastructures. That is why consolidation remains a critical issue for companies forced to create more storage space for more data without excessive investment in new equipment. The answer to this problem requires new concepts and technologies.

Coupled with the exponential growth in required storage capacity is the fact that the average disk utilisation is often very low. Often companies are using less than 50% of their available disk capacity. Where does that come from? Fundamentally this has resulted from the need to ensure service availability with limited resources to effectively manage the environment. Consequently over configuration and in some cases, inaccurate sizing has led to this position.

Customers challenge huge growth in storage requirements – the consequences

5

storage on Demand – The service management concept enables fast storage provision and cost transparency

Managed Storage on Demand is the provision of defined storage volumes in different storage categories according to cost transparency targets, cost optimisation, pay-as-you-go pricing, while supporting the customer’s growth strategy. The result is a high degree of storage availability and economic efficiency. Fujitsu provides on-line and backup Managed Storage solutions at the petabyte capacity. Companies expect clear cost reductions, more transparency and greater flexibility when such capacities are provided to meet ever-increasing requirements.

Managed Storage provides the services needed to use storage capacity as required. The services are suitable for running on any system platform from main providers, such as Fujitsu or partners like EMC and NetApp. The focus is on the best and most efficient and secure operation of storage infrastructure.

This also includes tasks such as Backup and Disaster Recovery as well as optimised structures for data storage and archiving according to compliance regulations. The service also covers all the services required to set up, extend and consolidate storage architectures, from

analysis and planning to setting up and transferring to standard operations. As a result, customers can benefit immediately from current advances in storage virtualisation and consolidation without having to establish internal expertise in advance.

Managed Storage enables uninterrupted monitoring and administration of heterogeneous storage environments in the customer’s data centre. Centralised monitoring and management is key for efficient Managed Storage. This is possible due to a combination of storage management tools with Remote Services. For example, trained storage experts in the Service Center, monitor numerous storage systems around the clock. As the administrators are responsible for several systems and customers, they only cost a fraction per storage system in comparison to a company handling just their own operations. Such economies of scale result in considerable cost savings yet the service quality remains at a high level.

Managed Storage also has a positive effect on risk and service management. The service provider can also deliver archiving according to legal regulations or confidential data-handling as defined

in the SLA. Data security and defined recovery times in the event of a catastrophe have the highest priority. The management of non-structured information is a Managed Service which can be greatly automated by using specific software. This service for Information Lifecycle Management offers a data archive structure which is based on business processes and the urgency of information, documents and system plans. Managed Storage can more efficiently operate individual infrastructure components.

The entire out-of-the-box service approach gives customers an opportunity to order storage and storage management as a complete service from one source. To the IT manager storage becomes another commodity which can be purchased based on SLAs, without having to worry about the operational details. Storage can be invoiced pay-as-you-go via volume rates (Gigabyte per month) and via different SLA storage categories. This simple view is underlined by intelligent financing concepts which soften the costs of technical innovations or increased utilisation.

Managed Storage offers a comprehensive set of services which will be provided during two phases.

Implementation Phase

Operational Phase

The IMPLEMENTATION PHASE splits into three transitional phases which contain different service elements. The Consult, Design and Build service elements describe how to support customers in assessing IT technologies and align them with their business. They also describe the IT consulting role, integration of new IT infrastructures and transition/transformation to a future mode of IT operation.

Consult

The Consult phase analyses the customer’s requirements and its current infrastructure resulting in advice and target concepts.

Design

The Design phase is defined as developing a technical solution which fulfills the customer’s business needs and requirements as well as an appropriate service concept. In addition to the Due Diligence phase, assumptions are verified before entering into the bid phase and the ultimate contract must have clauses that allow for renegotiation if assumptions could not be verified.

Build

The Build phase is defined as installation, integration and migration of the technical concept. This phase succeeds the Due Diligence and Planning Transition service element and aims to implement the processes, policies, interfaces and configuration management database. It also ensures a formal handover to operations and acceptance testing with the customer.

Deploy

The Deploy phase is defined as the introduction, continuous modification and subsequent removal of authorised products and services across the customer’s estate.

Operate and Maintain

The Operate and Maintain phase is defined as the proactive monitoring and assessment of the customers’ storage infrastructures' health to manage the operational integrity, stability and security of systems within industry guidelines. Maintain is defined as reactive and proactive support of the customer in maintaining the operational status of Managed Storage products.

All services of the Managed Storage offering are structured in service elements, which have been designed to meet the ITIL requirements and definitions.

The following figure shows the service elements which are the building elements of Managed Storage.

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Maintenance& Support

CapacityProvisioning

Monthly chargingConsulting

Comprehensiveand objective

consultingservicesidentify

companies’specific storage

needs

A storageconcept that is

tailored tocompanies’

requirements

Smooth handoverto operationto support

efficiently theoperation

Design Integrationand Transition

On Demand

Local BusinessReflection

Proactive

ITIL –Based

Mulit-Vendor

Reactive

Remotedata collection

Remote

Variable charging(GB per month)

Accounting

CapacityManagement

StorageAdministration

Monitoring

ServiceManagement

ManagedStorage

FIGURE 2

source: Fujitsu

7

The Managed Storage solution provided by Fujitsu has three key value propositions:

Reduced cost

Greater agility

Better quality of service

In order to achieve these strategic aims, Fujitsu exploits many market leading tools, processes and technologies, coupled with proven, yet innovative, storage architectures. Fujitsu aims to provide an SLA-based, service oriented solution for the future.

The following outlines just some of those components that are brought together to provide a Managed Storage solution, which is cost-effective and agile, while continuing to improve service quality and stability.

To support efficient storage management the Fujitsu approach combines technologies and solutions from partner organisations as well as its own. The Company’s storage products are easy to manage and support a variety of provisioning technics and some of them even allow application service level management. Alongside is further information about Fujitsu storage virtualisation solutions.

Storage Virtualisation

Storage virtualisation provides an abstraction layer between the physical storage and server. One of the key benefits in this concept is the ability to manage the server layer or storage layer independently from each other. For example the physical hardware in the storage layer can be replaced or upgraded without changing anything in the server configuration. The abstraction layer will manage the mapping of the server request against the available physical storage.

With this layer established it is also possible to optimise the storage interface. For example the actual data can be placed across the physical devices to optimise performance or can be mirrored for data recovery. All of this is carried out in the storage layer and is potentially invisible to the server layer.

An excellent example of this is CentricStor VT (Virtual Tape), which offers an abstraction layer between server and physical tape storage. The server thinks it is writing to tape and can have as many virtual tapes as required to meet concurrent demand regardless of the physical media that CentricStor VT is managing.

This enables easier management of tape backup from the perspective of the server. The performance is greatly enhanced by having the backup actually going to disk prior to being staged to tape. The actual delivery to tape is also optimised as the data can be streamed efficiently which optimises the utilisation of tapes.

FIGURE 3.

Technologies and solutions to support efficient storage management

Consulting

■ Business CaseAnalysis

■ IT Assessment■ Architecture

Consulting

Design Build

Managed Storage

Storage Integration ServicesDesign and implementat optimal Storage infrastructure

Operational Services7x24 proactive management and

maintenance of Storage

Transformation BusinessProject Management

Operation BusinessSLA Management

TOPICS

ManagedBackup

Operate / Maintain

■ Service Management■ System Monitoring■ Storage Administration■ Capacity Provisioning■ Infrastructure Optimisation■ IMAC/D■ Maintenance and Support

■ Due Diligenceand TransitionPlanning

■ Detailed Solution Concept

■ Migration and IntegrationConcept

■ Proof ofConcept

■ Transition■ Solution

Staging■ Rollout■ Storage

Integration■ Storage

Migration

ManagedOnline Storage

SystemManagementCenter

Storageon Demand

source: Fujitsu

8

Virtualisation of tape storage – CentricStor Virtual Tape

CentricStor VT (Virtual Tape) provides intelligent data protection for all enterprise backup data. This unique Dual Target storage solution exploits the best of disk and tape in a seamless manner by storing all backup data policy-based and autonomously on various storage mediums. This makes the tape fit for ILM (Information Lifecycle Management). CentricStor VT offers superior connectivity with True Tape Virtualisation (TTV) and enables outstanding TCO reductions by consolidating all backup storage devices. The powerful CentricStor Grid Architecture (CGA) features unmatched scalability and unmatched disaster resilience for each class of data center.

File level virtualisation – CentricStor File Services

This approach abstracts data at the file level. The CentricStor FS (File Services) system is developed specifically for facing the need to store increasing amounts of unstructured data. CentricStor FS is a disruptive technology, i.e. an innovative scale out storage system that delivers file services at high speed and reliability levels at low cost. It provides unprecedented scalability in terms of storage capacity, throughput and response time. Regardless of its size administrators need only manage one file system, making management and administration as easy as possible. This also allows for higher levels of storage utilisation. Provisioning new storage components and setting up CentricStor FS is a simple process. It complements a Dynamic Infrastructures strategy by virtue of it using pooled resources, which are assigned to services as needed.

Continuous data protection – CDP

Multi-layer data redundancy is the key virtualisation technology for CDP. Continuous data protection and continuous remote replication (as it combines EMC RecoverPoint) enables any-point-in-time recovery to protect data against loss or corruption. It leverages an underlying infrastructure built on time and event-addressable storage to return any application, database or file system to any previous point in time or process instantly and easily.

Block level virtualisation

Various products from different storage and switch vendors (such as EMC Invista) provide virtualisation solutions that run, for example on dedicated appliances or in integrated solutions with intelligent SAN switches. The main purpose of these solutions is to allow any storage to be allocated to any application, making them key enablers for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies.

FIGURE 4

Data center 2Data center 1

Dual save

Cache mirroring – automatic failover

Tape library A Tape library B

Server Server Server Server Server Server

CentricStor Virtual Tape Appliance

source: Fujitsu

9

Information Lifecycle Management

Information Lifecycle Management provides means of managing data through its lifecycle. As data ages the access requirements also change. This is a business and policy driven profile. However, data needs to be retained for a specific period and its rate of access reduces over time. This makes it necessary to keep the current data on high performance or highly available disks. Data of less business value can be staged to lower performing, and lower cost disks and ultimately to tape.

This process allows data to be placed in the hierarchy of storage in a way that optimises the entire lifecycle storage cost. This is generated by policy-based, service oriented data management. In conjunction with storage virtualisation, the presentation of the data to the server remains completely unchanged. Yet the cost of managing that data can be significantly reduced.

Link Service Levels to Costs

With the exploitation of virtualisation and Information Lifecycle Management, it is possible to profile the performance and availability characteristics of data, and then target what technology will be used to actually hold the data. Operationally this can be coupled with such features as time to deliver and speed of recovery, therefore, enabling a far more mature quality of service.

Hence with Managed Storage the management of the storage service is realised through business oriented Service Level Agreements relating the cost of the service to the service provided as opposed to the underlying infrastructure.

Consolidate Requirements and Standardise

A Managed Storage service is heavily focused on the delivery of proven standardised best practices. Therefore the alignment with ITIL and optimisation of those processes through centralisation and remote administration models is a key component of Managed Storage.

In addition to this, the ongoing management of the physical infrastructure can be further improved through consolidation and virtualisation as well as the classification of data into cost effective tiers.

FIGURE 5

Conventional Systems

58% Utilisation20 File Systems

4 Management Consoles

CentricStor FS

90% Utilisation

200 TB

1 File System1 Management Console

40TB 60 TB 30 TB 70 TB

source: Fujitsu

10

Greater cost transparency and reduced operating costs

Billing of storage by usage

No cost of providing temporary or permanent reserve capacities

Guaranteed high availability, defined performance and comprehensive security

Enhanced quality and agility due to ITIL-compliant operating and service processes

Rapid analysis and rectification of problems due to integrated remote services

Better monitoring, control and assessment of storage requirements

Freedom to focus on core competences and business segments

More transparency

With Managed Storage from Fujitsu, customers benefit from contractually guaranteed costs and additional capacities that can be supplied on demand at any time. Refined reporting ensures precise proof of the services performed. Usage-based billing means customers can, likewise, charge their business units based on actual consumption. This clear definition of responsibilities pays off. Acting as a single point of contact, Fujitsu, creates clear-cut competencies for all storage issues and ensures rapid communication channels.

More cost-effectiveness

The flexible provision of storage services as part of Managed Storage means companies are able to reduce costs and workload. Managed Storage providers support multiple storage devices for many customers, enabling them to leverage economies of scale, which translates into direct OPEX savings for the customer. At the same time, there is no need for a company to provide its own storage personnel and know-how.

More quality

ITIL-compliant service and operating processes smooth the way to greater reliability and quality in storage management. This helps minimise risks and maximise security, which is particularly significant given the general sensitivity of customer data and the special importance of protecting the entire data of customers. Integrated consulting and SLAs ensure increasing quality levels throughout all storage operations. This means companies benefit from new technologies and developments while enhancing the quality of their own services through innovations and process improvements at no extra cost or effort.

More freedom

Companies can relieve employees of routine tasks by adopting a managed storage approach and purchasing. This means free resources can be directed to core activities and the achievement of company ambitions.

Benefits of managed storage

source: Fujitsu

11

Poorly defined enterprise services cost money by making it difficult to match and meet service requirements at a predictable cost. This creates an unlimited liability for costs or results in underperformance. That’s why it’s best to take a commercial product management approach to realign costs with business demand.

Key Findings

In theory, storage service definitions commit enterprises to spending whatever is necessary to sustain service levels. In practice, accountability is confused, at best.

There is a clear financial relationship between the business demand for storage capacity and the cost of maintaining storage service levels. This relationship is rarely reflected in enterprise financial planning and cost allocation.

A rethinking of this relationship is long overdue to develop a more satisfactory business relationship between the storage team and the business units that ultimately consume and fund their services.

Recommendations

Take a product management approach to service definitions and pricing to better communicate the business value of storage and the return on investment.

Align costs with business revenue, especially in archival services, where the focus must shift toward the longer term. Audit the applications to ensure that they use the appropriate storage services.

Link decision-rights to storage funding, involving all other stakeholders, such as compliance and security officers, in a consultative role.

Use capacity metrics within storage service levels to relate costs to the quantity of data being stored. Set a price for services, even if you do not charge back your costs.

Analysis

Data storage definitions, or the lack of them, typically imply one of two things:

An enterprise will spend whatever it takes to meet service levels when storing growing quantities of data.

The storage team must do whatever it can to meet service levels within strict budgetary constraints.

Information Technology Library

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library recommends that services be defined in business language, so a more positive and universal statement is:

Data will be stored in a way that meets business objectives at an appropriate cost.

FIGURE 1. GARTNER TCO AND SERVICE LEVELS

Capital

Labour

Service Level

High

OptimalTCO

High

Low

Cost

Performance

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

OptimalService Level

Cut storage Costs With Cost-Effective service DefinitionsGartner RAs Core Research Note G00159799, stewart Buchanan, lars mieritz, 15 August 2008

source: Gartner (November 2006)

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Link Service Levels to Costs

Gartner has documented the relationship between costs and service levels in its analyses of the total cost of ownership (TCO). This research is even more relevant now that organisations are reconsidering the trade-offs between costs and service levels. Service-level arbitrage is not an IT decision. It’s a common best practice for IT to offer different levels of service that enable business users to make this decision.

The longevity of data makes funding challenges more acute for storage than for other infrastructure services, often forcing storage teams to confront financial management issues ahead of other IT service delivery teams. Long-term data retention is not about technology choices, as much as it is about budgeting and planning periodic technology updates and data migrations. This is doubly difficult, because storage services are often remote from business users and enterprise managers, who have little understanding of the implications of these services on enterprise financial management.

Respond to Business Change

Storage costs once were considered so trivial that service levels were deemed unnecessary. Enterprises protected their data service levels as effectively as possible at any cost. Service levels were seen as limiting business expectations.

More recently, the challenge for storage teams was to match business expectations with funding to deliver against them. Service levels increasingly are used to manage rising business expectations. It can be difficult to deliver these expectations while lowering acquisition, power, cooling and facilities costs.

Now storage teams are under increasing competitive pressure from outside their organisations, and external services rely more heavily on pricing propositions. As a result, services are more frequently structured to communicate their value propositions. Thus, service definitions are an increasingly important form of business decision support for IT sourcing decisions.

These trends are starting to have an impact on traditional vendor relationships, as described in “IT Procurement Best Practice: Leverage Services to Buy Products More Competitively.”

Financial Best Practices in Service Design

To deliver the right services at the right price on the right terms, you must understand your customers’ needs. Beyond this, there is no right or wrong answer to defining storage services.

Apply Storage Service Best Practices

The following guiding principles help test the appropriateness and practicality of your definitions:

Consult budget holder, stakeholder and user needs.

Provide service names that are meaningful to users.

Give the customer a choice of options and costs.

Use metrics that are comprehensive but easy to understand and measure.

Minimise dependencies on vendors, products and additional services.

Best-in-class service definitions demonstrate the business value of a service. A good example of a business-focused server level is for a patient’s radiological records to be available in the doctor’s office within two minutes of the time the patient checks in.

It is not always possible to be this specific in a service description, but it helps to use more-business-oriented designations than “platinum through bronze.” Create metrics that explain the unique proposition of a service and its efficiency.

When defining storage services, you must know your customer and your competitors. The budget holder can be much harder to find than many other stakeholders, such as system administrators, application architects and security, legal and regulatory compliance officers. However, these stakeholders rarely pay for storage.

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Decision Rights Follow Funding

Storage teams often see the system or database administrators they deal with as the data owners. In practice, it is these administrators’ customers, the application owners and business units, that have final decision rights. IT organisations rarely generate the revenue that pays for storage and IT. The guiding principle, therefore, is “no representation without taxation.”

Determine who is financially accountable for data – for example, who is prepared to pay more to stop data from being purged or migrated to another medium.

Follow the chain of command up through the organisational model until you reach the source of revenue or profit center that ultimately can pay the bill.

The storage team cannot re-engineer enterprise finances, but it must match storage demand with funding for its services. Chargeback is one of the few available ways to align demand with funding by recovering operating and capital costs.

Refer Decisions Back to the Budget Holder

At a storage device level, business data is simply a collection of binary 0s and 1s. It’s an old storage joke that 0s don’t matter; we need to keep only the 1s. This illustrates that storage teams rarely understand the business significance of data.

Many different stakeholders focus their requirements on the storage team, but only the budget holder pays for them. Often, it appears that many budget holders have spending authority, including a project manager or an IT manager. However, their budgetary authority traces back to a point-of-business origin. Ensure that agreement is reached all the way back to this point, typically within a line-of-business and revenue generator.

Storage teams must improve at sharing the accountability for storage services with their vendors.

FIGURE 2. THE SERVICE DELIVERy STOCK VS. SERVICE DELIVERy TOwERS

Business

Application

Platform

Network

Storage

SLAsInstead of the traditionalunwieldy service stack,service management is

increasingly beingsimplified in midsize

enterprises by turning it on its side to improve

business alignment andcustomer relationships.

Business

Appl

icat

ion

Plat

form

Netw

ork

SLAs$$$

SLAs: Service-level agreements

Stor

age

source: Gartner (June 2007)

14

Simplify the Supply Chain

Where IT services are business applications, some storage services, such as file serving and archiving, enjoy more-visible application storage if the business applications are recognised as applications in their own right. Otherwise, all storage services risk being lost at the end of the internal IT supply chain.

Managing this supply chain can be inefficient and can add management overhead to support incidents and problem management, as well as capacity and continuity management – to every IT management discipline. An increasingly common alternative is to run the service towers in parallel, making each more directly accountable to business users for their service levels and costs.

Networking is often the first area to lead by offering a blanket service-level agreement (SLA) to cover all standard business uses. A similar approach can work for storage area networks, but data persistence makes storage capacity far more problematic. The challenge is to keep the level of detail simple but effective when linking service levels to business funding.

Help Budget Holders Align Costs with Revenue

An important financial-management directive from the CFO or finance director is to help the lines of business match spending with revenue. This can mean different things for different kinds of storage, but the reasons for defining storage services include making the costs more visible, predictable, manageable and clearly defined.

Chargeback often is proposed as the best way to recover operating costs and manage demand. This is true, but storage teams must be realistic about what can be achieved. They need business unit recognition that storage is an IT service in its own right, as well as business unit support for how it is charged back.

Charging budgeted costs back to the business does not, by itself, change the size of the storage budget in line with business demand. Unless the costs are significant, the business units may not see the management of the costs as a priority. However, few organisations can afford to continue investing in data storage without improving the way they account for this investment.

Address Capital and Operating Costs

When data storage and IT costs are only a fraction of the costs that are allocated to a line of business, they become a low priority for the business. Storage costs are 100% of the storage operating budget, but they’re never 100% of the business operating budget. Capital costs still are overlooked in some storage operating budgets in enterprises of all sizes.

Storage teams typically are allowed to recover only their budgeted costs from the business units. Capital expenditures still require enterprise budgetary approval. This effectively makes the storage team responsible for forecasting and managing business demand.

A mechanism is needed to establish a workable relationship to align funding with demand. This mechanism must handle new storage requirements and business-as-usual growth.

Cover Business as Usual Growth

Business units rarely are committed to operating within the storage budget. Their business development activities, such as data analyses, often result in a growing demand for storage. If storage teams run out of budget, then there must be a mechanism for making the capital funds that are managed by the lines of business available for the storage team to invest. A basic approach is to offer service levels only for budgeted and forecast storage. Service levels can’t be maintained unless there are back-to-back SLAs with the business to finance the expenditures needed to deliver them.

Consolidate Requirements and Standardise

A project management office (PMO) typically oversees enterprise spending on new projects by helping prioritise those that are likely to profit the enterprise. PMOs can help to combine multiple business cases and to consolidate business funding to pay for new storage capacity requirements. When negotiating a major vendor contract, use your negotiating leverage to make it easy to order capacity upgrades on favourable terms. The PMO can help forecast upcoming project requirements for capacity before purchase orders are raised.

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Stop “Reinventing the wheel”

Some storage teams estimate that more than 70% of their time is spent on modelling, designing and budgeting for new project requirements, many of which never reach production. It can be far more efficient to create a standard menu of storage services and costs that is based on a standard architecture, instead of starting over again and reinventing the wheel by designing or redesigning the infrastructure for each project.

Charging projects for this planning service can result in a lack of consultation with business stakeholders. Inadequate or inappropriate storage service choices, made without good decision support, can cost far more to put right. Offering standard storage services reduces the need for these consultative projects. Resources can be redirected to improve the quality of storage services.

Take a product design approach to standard storage services, and provide decision support within your service definitions. Although this approach is more efficient, you still must spend time “selling” these definitions to users to understand their requirements. If you’ve done this work before for countless projects, then you already have an idea about how to standardise storage in ways that make it less expensive to acquire and run. Give the decision makers a choice and the support they need to make that choice.

Storage Service-Level Examples

Define and explain measurements as simply as possible. Some external service providers engineer their services down to cost, not up to specification. Deceptively simple metrics often are backed by long, detailed descriptions of how they are calculated in the contract. This is unnecessary when the measurements are simpler.

Scale Service Levels with Capacity

An important but problematic service level is the dependency of provisioning on customer capacity planning. It makes no business sense to commit to buying and provisioning an unlimited quantity of storage within hours or days. Instead, provisioning response times should be tiered in proportion to the amount of capacity being requested, small requests can be satisfied within hours, midsize requests in days and large requests in months. This structured approach helps reduce the amount of spare storage capacity the organisation needs to retain on-site to meet the service level, although someone still must cover the cost of unused capacity.

Know when Throughput Is the Most Important Storage Capacity

Storage throughput (megabytes per second) can cost significantly more than capacity (megabytes per month), especially where archiving policies have been automated. It sometimes can make sense to charge for performance instead of capacity or for a combination of the two.

Storage throughput problems can be notoriously expensive to troubleshoot as a result of investments in tools, time and skills. Where costs are built into the architecture to sustain data rates and to eliminate troubleshooting, it can make more sense to recover them as a fixed charge, rather than to allocate fixed costs as a percentage of variable consumption.

Response time, or latency, is important for data intensive systems. It is a more accurate indicator of storage speed than data transfer rates in megabytes per second, but harder to understand. The number of input/output (I/O) operations per second is another technical metric. These metrics can be resolved into a simpler end-to-end service speed measurement of bytes per millisecond.

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Link Recoverability to Storage Capacity

A common service level is the recovery time objective (RTO). Unless the quantity of data to be restored is known, the cost of achieving the RTO is unknown. The technology needed to recover a petabyte in an hour costs significantly more than recovering a gigabyte in an hour. This is because local/remote snapshots and replication can quadruple the need for high performance storage at many times the cost of tape backup. Recovery times should, therefore, include capacity and should take the form of gigabytes per hour. This becomes a measure of data availability in the event of recovery or recoverability

Advise on Maximum Permissible Data Loss

The recovery point objective (RPO) determines how frequently backups and/or data snapshots must be taken. In business terms, the RPO represents the maximum permissible data loss. Although storage teams are often reluctant to say this, it helps business users understand why they must pay the price for higher levels of protection against the loss of historical data.

Plan Archiving Costs and Retention Periods

Building archiving service levels into your storage services can help enforce enterprise policies, but it reduces the

visibility of archival costs and service levels. If revenue alignment is important, or if archiving costs present a significant budgetary challenge, then it may be time to rethink the way they are charged back. Where archiving costs can be planned for the lifetime of the data, charging for them monthly may be inefficient, even inappropriate.

Align Archiving Costs with Revenue

A fixed fee encourages a set definition for the data’s life cycle. Take the example of a transaction-driven business. If it is a business objective to align costs with revenue, then the revenue that is earned from the transaction should be used to cover all the costs of the transaction, including the storage of transaction records for a number of years. This makes the storage team responsible for planning long-term retention costs. Costs also align with the period during which the revenue is recognised, rather than levied monthly against future transaction revenue. Otherwise, if the number of transactions were to slow down during a recession, then the business may not generate enough revenue to fund the transactions’ retention.

Charging a one-off fee for retrieval can be linked to a service definition. Take the example of a service level to make a patient’s radiological records available in the doctor’s office within two minutes of the time the patient

checks in. If you know the average and maximum size of these records and the regularity of patient consultations, then you can recover some or all the cost of archiving from a retrieval charge, which can be factored into consultation fees.

Measure the Cost of Service

Gartner frequently is asked for storage cost benchmarks per gigabyte. Worryingly, few customers ask what these costs represent, beyond descriptions such as “Tier 1” or “backup.” Cost benchmarking is a more exacting discipline.

Some customers expect storage service levels to become commoditised, but greater standardisation of service definitions is needed before this can happen. Otherwise, a low price can represent little or no service.

This situation also presents an opportunity for service providers to differentiate their services through pricing. Internal and external service providers can communicate their value propositions through the way in which they price their services. The right metrics can improve the success of a service.

When it comes to cost reductions, our advice is simple: find out what these reductions really represent. Knowing what you’re paying for is the first step in reducing costs and in ensuring fair value. Otherwise, you could be trading cost savings for greater risk or lower value.

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