Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 8

The Business Case

Continuing the blog posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA), this post focuses on the business challenges on why analysis of our storage platforms is important and how it might help us discover inconsistencies in storage environments eventually saving millions in CapEx and OpEx.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT — Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT — Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

It is important from a Business Standpoint that each aspect of this Storage Analysis project yield us the necessary results to help us make savvy business decisions related to our Storage Estate. While we do so, we still want to verify the analysis does not cost us our valuable CapEx dollars, which are more or less not available in 2009.

Some of the important business requirements, decisions & outcomes related to storage analysis are highlighted below:

1. Initial purchase and setup fees (CapEx dollars) for analysis software; if possible let’s keep this zero for storage analysis.
2. Ongoing cost (OpEx dollars) for analysis software; this constitutes your training, upgrades, engineering expense, etc. Let’s keep this zero as well for storage analysis.
3. With the given above scenario’s how does the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) look like now?
4. Let’s add a twist to this, let’s make this Storage-Analysis-On-Demand. You only pay for what you analyze.
5. No ongoing cost on a monthly basis, no setup fees, no upgrades, no CapEx dollars. Too good to be true, let’s find the solution now, how we can achieve this.
6. May be SaaS is the way to go (Software as a Service), no firewall issues, no security, no licenses, no upgrades, no deployment.
7. From an ROI (Return on Investment) standpoint, you should be able to reclaim your Storage right now, not 6 or 12 months later when the financial situation changes.
8. If you have multi site datacenters with single digit or double digit PB of Storage, you know how painful it is to deploy an enterprise wide Operational Tool (Time, effort, people, testing, training, meetings, outages, VMware, supported/unsupported, service packs, etc, etc).
9. Lets add another twist to this, no licensing cost for deployment, no charges per port, no charges per report, no charges per array, no charges per TB of raw data for licensing, no upgrades, no windows licensing, no VMware licensing, no infrastructure software licensing, rather a flat fee per TB to analyze a multi PB environment.
10. Minimum cost to deploy, may be all the storage & host related data can be collected for our environment from a single server

Do we have a Storage Economics Practice setup within our Storage environment to consistently increase our utilization, efficiency, reclamation and lower our outages & cost?

The above are some of the key points you should consider before you make a judgment to deploy any Storage Analysis software in your environment.

Experience

This is a fact…..

A MNC (Multi National Company — two digit PB storage), by successfully implementing a Storage Reclamation, Efficiency & Utilization project have managed to reduce their CapEx by 80% in the first year. They are planning to reduce their CapEx by 50% year after year.

Another MNC, by automating certain storage process for (storage) report creation reduced 20 man days to 2 hours a month for management reports.

How much CapEx and OpEx savings does that equate to?