EXECUTIVE: Building a Coherent Storage Strategy

1. EXECUTIVE:Building a Coherent Storage Strategy Richard Scannell Senior Vice President, North America Consulting GlassHouse Technologies

2. 0/0 Use your keypads to respond • I am consistency blind-sided by my business groups with requests for additional storage • I have a storage plan for this year, but I don’t really have any insight into where I’ll be in 2-3 years • We have a technical roadmap that considers the next 2-3 years but its not necessarily aligned with our business drivers • I know exactly how information is used in our business and I can show you that the way we manage infrastructure supports that

3. Agenda • Constituting a strategy • Market realities at odds with your goals and why • What you can do to get started • What you should be asking and demanding • Where are the next breakthroughs going to be

4. Constituting a strategy

5. What's in a strategy? • Risk management • Shareholder confidence • Market responsiveness • Corporate goals - M&A, innovation, quality, etc. • Governance (compliance) • Cost management • Best in class “per managed unit” cost • Strategy is about creating alignment between risk and cost • That’s also the best and simplest definition for ILM

6. Good news and bad news • √ Storage is starting to feel more and more like things we’ve done in the past • SRM, backup are “enterprise applications” and require that level of attention • X At the same time, it’s completely different from anything we’ve done in the past due to the persistence of the data beyond the physical disk • √ There is an opportunity to step up to managing the information value chain • X No one is positioning this properly…

7. Market realities at odds with your goals and why

8. Shifts in the market – not really • Modeling tools remain focused on storage technology management instead of information management • Not likely to change – e.g., current focus is the widening spread in customer sophistication – SMB is becoming a focus • Almost no business vertical attention yet – should there be?

9. The reality of the sales process • ILM to a storage salesperson means “I Love Money” • Your value to the salesperson far extends the transaction • Yet… their compensation plan drives all behavior • There is a big gap between when the salesperson declares success and when your customer declares success

10. The inflexibility of your organization • You finally got a dedicated storage group – great – break it up! • New roles • Information analyst – business alignment, risk mgmt, compliance • Storage network admin – connectivity, availability, performance (think technical mgmt) • Storage management admin – capacity plan, provision, report (think process mgmt) • Storage comptroller – cost modeling, contracts management

11. Half-life of data • Data may remain valuable in the future but our ability to access it will be keyed on three discrete issues • Where is it - logistics? • Can it be recovered to primary storage – current storage medium may be antiquated • Is it readable – platform and application refreshes have rendered data unreadable

12. Current budgeting for storage • Organizations continue to budget for storage from a capital perspective and fail to tie front-end costs (capital) to back-end costs (expense) • The ratio of cost of capital to expense is becoming so high, significant pressure is being placed on the “back-end” • If you plan to buy 100TB – you need to think 100TB of managed data for 3 years, not 100TB of disk

13. What you can do to get started

14. From service to cost • Define a service oriented architecture • Discrete “treatments” for information • Select appropriate technologies to provide each discrete “treatment,” leveraging across treatments wherever possible • Be explicit in the operational needs to support those technologies • Derive a cost associated with each treatment

15. 0/0 Use your keypads to respond • Everyone in my business thinks storage is cheap and they never consider the post-production costs • While there isn’t linkage, when I get budget approved for disk capacity it automatically has an allocation for network, backup and software added on. • I have a model that demands that additional capacity is only approved when the information model is mapped to a total cost over the expected life

16. Create an abstraction layer • Map the economics of virtualization • Vertically across varying technologies • Horizontally across “tiers” of storage • Derive a subset – discrete “treatments” of information • Present those treatments to your user community – you control the technology • Take advantage of new technology only to drive economics (assuming performance is as described)

17. Map the real cost of information • For each given application, can you map what the average expected requirements for information will be in terms of performance, availability, recoverability, long term retention • Develop a cost model over the timeline that accounts for primary, secondary and archiving. Factor in technology refresh, increasing human costs, consumables etc • Have a rolling year-on-year “tab” such that even if there is no additional growth there is a clear understanding of on-going costs to manage existing information • Perform actual to plan exercises to refine the process

18. Refresh impact analysis • Each infrastructure, platform and application refresh will orphan some amount of stored data • Determine the impact and do selective destruction and/or recycling of data

19. Put on a road show • Don’t be a victim to the situation • Raise awareness of the realities of the cost structure • Lobby for new roles in the IT dept • Measure and report

20. What you should be asking and demanding

21. Your vendors • They want you to buy off on ILM • That’s about risk and cost • They need to lay out costs over time, not at the point of acquisition • What skin will they put in the game to ensure those cost models? • If they are a “solutions” company, what's stopping them?

22. Your business • How does information create value for the business? • Are there discrete points of inflection in the lifecycle of information? • What regulations apply? What about Corporate Governance standards? • How will you look to use data that is 3, 5, 10 years old?

23. Where are the next breakthroughs going to

24. Wherever you demand… • Orphaned data • End-to-end cost modeling • Compliance automation and monitoring OR • Bigger drives • Higher density • Wider market segmentation

25. Thank You Richard.Scannell@GlassHouse.com