A storage manager's 115th dream

Computerworld - It's an all-too-familiar scenario. IT infrastructure managers are under pressure to cut costs, and since storage represents an ever-increasing percentage of spending, it becomes a prime target for the budgetary ax wielders. It should be easy to find savings here, right? Your storage utilization has been estimated at 24%. You've just sat through the umpteenth in a seemingly unending series of vendor presentations on information life-cycle management (ILM) and the benefits of tiered storage. You are absolutely convinced that there are inefficiencies and cost savings to be had in storage and are anxious to get at them!
Then reality hits. You sit down with your vendor to plan an ILM project only to learn that Step 1 is to buy more storage. But it's OK because it's lower-cost Serial ATA-based storage, and if you just migrate your low-value data to it, then you'll be able to repurpose your Tier 1 storage. This sounds fine, but how do you determine your low-value data? How difficult and costly is the migration? What is the impact on applications whose data is targeted to be moved? This sounds kind of risky. Will the application owners cooperate? What's in it for them? Sounds like a hard sell.
Well, maybe you won't be so aggressive about moving data. Instead, you'll focus on improving utilization. That should be easier. So you begin to investigate the root cause of your 24% utilization. You find that for every used gigabyte of storage, you actually have multiple copies.
You then look at your provisioning process -- maybe you can find savings here. It turns out that storage requests are being padded at each level. You realize that fixing the provisioning process will entail some significant process re-engineering of the change management system as well as an investment in metrics, reporting, and planning tools.
You are beginning to feel like the mime in an imaginary box, except the box isn't imaginary. While there are many frustrations, all is not lost. Within storage organizations, there are many examples of effectively managing growth, reducing data risks and satisfying user demands.
In this column each week, I hope to offer some practical insights and real-world observations into how to address the various challenges of managing and protecting data.
Jim Damoulakis is chief technology officer of GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a leading provider of independent storage services. He can be reached at jimd@glasshouse.com.