To Have and to Hold

Gartner says IT organisations also should evaluate the potential cost benefits of a SAN approach in managing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of storage. Gartner says recent data from a new Gartner Measurement product, TCO Manager for Enterprise Storage Management, confirms enterprises exceeding 12 terabytes of usable storage through 2004 will find greater storage TCO per gigabyte from the implementation of SAN technologies.

"SAN total costs initially are higher than DAS [direct attached storage] and SDAS [shared DAS] storage costs, but the SAN costs steadily decline as the online storage capacity increases," says Craig Stanley, research director for Gartner Measurement.

That was a conclusion also reached by utility venture ActewAGL as it sought to cope with rising costs and overheads associated with the management of its information needs. IT manager Phil Kingsman says having data storage and backup associated with each application and the hardware running it was also causing ActewAGL to lose flexibility in adapting to new storage requirements.

"Due to the diversity and considerable quantity of servers at ActewAGL we were undertaking a general server consolidation program. Our past practices and the requirement to purchase storage with every new server meant that there was an under-utilised element of storage that was proprietary for each server. We wanted to simplify the management of storage and hence reduce the associated costs," Kingsman says.

The solution was to design and commission a SAN, which aims for full redundancy. Kingsman says ActewAGL has now aggregated all storage into one site, making it much more manageable, and at the time of writing was in the process of formulating its storage policy.

However, Sue Kennedy, manager Information Security at Edith Cowan University, which also has a server consolidation policy and is starting to move to a SAN, says that while most major systems will automatically archive to the SAN, the real problem remains getting individuals to use it for their personal storage needs. She says ideally the university will in future also move to a document management system to help with that problem.

Analyse Hidden Costs

Considering cost drivers is one of the best ways to understand what is important to the organisation. BearingPoint's Hillard says before defining a storage policy it pays to work out those hidden storage costs.

In the course of the data management side of his consultancy, Hillard says he has discovered that organisations that fail to lay down principles for managing structured information often end up with numerous data marts scattered throughout the enterprise, whose cost is never aggregated. "Starting from a cost driver, the hidden costs of storage is a very powerful way for a CIO to try and push change through," he says.

It is not enough to define data management and knowledge management principles for the organisation unless these can be "sold" to the rest of the organisation. Being able to point out the true hidden costs of storage to those responsible for many of those hidden management costs makes a powerful selling point, he says. Thus armed, the CIO can go on to work out the business imperatives.

"There's going to be some things which are most important to you. A single view of the customer might be the single most important thing to you. Or managing customer files might be the most important thing to you. And that will then drive where you put your focus in realising those data management and knowledge management principles," Hillard says.

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