Wanted: Managed storage service supplier

Storage Networking World - If there were ever a question about the increasingly important role storage is playing in today's IT environments, consider the case of Howrey Simon Arnold & White, LLP, an international law firm with headquarters in Washington.
Earlier this year, CIO Brian Conlon decided to consolidate the company's 160 Windows-based servers and direct-attached storage arrays in its 10 global offices. That consolidation plan also included four headquarters-based IBM RS/6000s. All of this infrastructure is now centralized in an AT&T-owned network operating center 50 miles west of Washington.
The centerpiece of the new architecture, according to Conlon, is a 20TB Sun Microsystems StorEdge 9980 SAN. Previously, each office had different levels of storage capacity on small Hewlett-Packard RAID arrays. But, as many users find, this wasn't an effective use of storage. "Some offices had capacity left over, while others were asking for more each month," Conlon says.
Four clustered Sun Microsystems V880 Fire servers and 80 Windows servers are connected to the Sun SAN through redundant Brocade Silkworm switches -- two 11000s and two 3800s. Servers running applications that require higher performance, such as the financial database, are connected directly to the SAN.
"Pretty much everything is redundant," Conlon says, including dual T3 lines and a multicarrier Internet connection that links the data center with Howrey's offices.
Total savings: $200,000 per office per year, plus a more secure and redundant environment that virtually eliminates data center downtime, which can add up to $2 million in revenue per day.

Find the talent
Not wanting to manage the SAN internally, Conlon set out to find a managed service provider, which as he discovered, is not so easy.
"We increasingly want IT to focus on tools and utilities to make us profitable, or make themselves more efficient. We do not want them working on things outside of their core competency," Conlon says.
Since Conlon had relocated to an AT&T facility, it was there that he began his talent search. Although AT&T does offer managed storage services (see below), the company was unable to present Howrey with a proposal that specifically documented those services. Conlon also checked into EDS and Sprint/Dell, as well as other providers. He found that many didn't manage storage infrastructures unless the storage systems were in their own facility.
That's why Conlon was surprised when Sun responded to his query with a comprehensive, 36-page statement of work, detailing how the company would handle everything from patch administration and performance analysis, to proactive optimization based on service levels. The proposal also promised a