Storage Gurus Offer Their Best Big-Bang Bets

We are drowning in data with no relief in sight. According to Gartner, this growth--as much as 60 percent or more annually--is driving hardware, software, associated maintenance, administration and services costs. But with 2011 IT budgets seeing more restrained growth--barely 7 percent, according to Forrester Research--storage has become the poster child for doing more with less.

NETWORK COMPUTING posed the following question to a distinguished group of storage experts:

"An organization's CFO has just gotten an 'A penny saved is a penny earned!' tattoo and slashed all operating budgets. What is the one new storage expenditure that organization should invest in in 2011, and what argument(s) will help convince the CFO this is a good use of the organization's resources?"

Here's what the experts had to say about keeping your storage boat afloat in 2011.

Joe Clabby, Clabby Analytics: The easy answer is anything that improves storage utilization rates (thus improving return on investment) while cutting down on storage management costs (thus lowering operational costs due to labor). So storage management software with these characteristics would be my choice.Deni Connor, Storage Strategies NOW: Backup and recovery and disaster recovery software. There's nothing better to protect the assets of a business and keep it surviving in case of a disaster.

Rob Enderle, Enderle Group: We seem to be entering a period of increased government regulation and oversight, particularly with regard to insider trading, suggesting the best investment to get ahead of the curve would be a Documentum-like content management solution for discovery and compliance. It is vastly less expensive to get ahead of a discovery request if the solution is in place than it is to implement one after the fact and deal with missing or lost documents and an inconsistent retention policy. Content management in 2011 will likely be one of the best storage investments you can make if you are thinking strategically.

Mike Karp, Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC: This question seems to come around every year, and every year the justification for it is the need to "do more with less." All the misuse of ROI analysis in the storage business notwithstanding, this is the classical example of the proper use of ROI in IT decision making. This is, after all, a business analysis and not a technical one.

That being said, my 30 years experience indicates not one but two "gotta haves" when it comes to storage.

First, invest in a proven data reduction technology. Due to an abundance of redundant data in most data centers, deduplication and compression offer immediate payback. In extreme cases, these technologies will pay for themselves in months rather than quarters, with savings coming from deferred hardware purchasing and by eliminating the need for additional headcount, even in the face of a significantly increased data corpus. The second strategically important storage investment has to be in automated management software. Such software fulfills its function with little (and, in some cases, with no) need for human intervention, with the result that things happen more rapidly, more accurately and with no risk of operator-induced errors that cause system downtime.Charles King, Pund-IT Research: Offhand, I'd say that a proven deduplication solution like EMC's Data Domain or Avamar (or both) should be at the top of the list because they allow companies to both reclaim space on existing arrays and institute practices that help ensure storage resources are used optimally. Without dedupe, that CFO's organization will buy additional storage next year, no matter how pretty its CFO's tattoo might be.

Sergis Mushell, Gartner Research: Cloud storage for e-mail archive/archive in general.

Mark Peters, Enterprise Strategy Group: The answer is automated tiering. Since it is now becoming more available from more vendors (all the main ones will add it and/or improve their offerings in 2011), there's every reason to feel comfortable adopting it. Why? It finally allows the storage hierarchy--which we've all seen as a triangle or pyramid for ages--to become a dynamic reality with the right data in the optimum place at the right time. Concerns about "not wanting to lose control" or "lack of granular perfection" are probably exaggerated and should in any case be balanced against:
a) The massive potential TCO benefits;
b) The fact that many systems have been operating with this kind of capability quite happily for years, plus you can invariably keep an over-ride if you really want;
c) There's just no practical or affordable way in today's growing, fast-moving and increasingly virtualized world to keep up with the necessary changes manually; and
d) Frankly, anyone that operates anything like RAID lost a real knowledge of "what's where" ages ago. And, finally;
e) Because the CFO will be able to understand the benefits and will love you forever (or at least for a while).

Rich Ptak, Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC: The argument against swinging the budget ax is simple: Mindless budget or cost reductions make you feel good and can target apparent high-ticket items. The problem is, it makes no difference between things that are expensive but provide far more return (revenue generation, competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, efficiency of operation) than any low-budget alternative. A simple analogy: Remote, offline storage is cheaper than online data stores. It also means that it takes a lot of time to find and make use of the data when it is needed. If your response time to customers is too slow, bye-bye customers. Or, a data security system and processes can be expensive to implement and maintain. However, if a shortcut, less expensive system is used and fails, resulting in a data breach and exposure, the costs will far exceed any savings from using the cheaper system.

The far better approach is to follow a program of cost optimization--i.e., analyze the cost of infrastructure, services, etc., based on their contribution to the success of the business. Fully automated cost data tracking and relationship mapping management products exist today that allow you to directly link data center and enterprise costs and expenses to the services delivered. A review of processes and workflows with cost and relationship tracking will uncover systemic, embedded inefficiencies that unnecessarily increase the cost of operations.