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Storage Insight:Debunk the datastorage mythsThe HP IT Insights Series—Volume 4

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Brochure | The HP IT Insights Series—Volume 4

HP Experts like Darrell James debunk the myths about storage in the modern enterprise.

Of all the obstacles standing in the way of building a better IT infrastructure, misinformation may be the most daunting. To help you separate the facts from the hype, the experts from HP Technology Consulting have created this informative eBook. It’s designed to provide the immediate insight you need to make the right decisions about some of the most important IT issues your enterprise will ever face.

Uncover the truth about the evolving role of storage in your data center.

Myth #1:

To keep up with insatiable demand, organizations simply need to add and provision storage as needed. There’s no need to consider how that procurement might impact IT service.

Insight:

It’s a common situation: with storage needs growing so fast, IT departments simply add more to keep pace with the business need. And it’s understandable. Data volume for many clients is exploding exponentially.

But this short-term cure is a recipe for long-term problems. When storage is added without a strategic plan in place, the environment becomes increasingly more complex and harder to manage. Over time, backing up, restoring, and protecting data becomes more challenging. Archives become excessively difficult to access—something you may need to do to respond to a lawsuit, for example, or to fulfill regulatory requirements. Securing data becomes more complex as well. These challenges all add up to a significant rise in administrative costs.

If your need for storage is chronic, examine your process and policies, and ask some tough questions. For example, it’s likely that not all of your data needs to be kept forever or accessed quickly. Are you organizing and prioritizing your data into tiers of importance? Do you have business rules in place that allow certain types of data to expire after a pre-determined length of time? Managing your storage in these ways allows you to re-utilize a good portion of the storage you already have, offering cost “take out.”

Do you truly have a clear understanding of what it is you are storing and where it lives in your architecture? Most companies, large and small, believe they have a better handle on this than they actually do. Often, as they start to truly assess the situation, they realize that while some of the architecture is documented, some of it is kept locked in a key employee’s head.

Also, the collection of items being stored now is a more complex equation. Beyond typical documents and data, companies are now keeping large multimedia files, massive amounts of unstructured data, digital images, and more.

By asking smart, penetrating questions about your storage situation, you’ll get a better sense of how to tackle your future requirements strategically. Ultimately, you’ll need to:

By making these three adjustments, you should be able to alleviate a majority of your challenges. This will pave the way for a transition to storage best practices and its focus on four key areas:

GovernanceTechnology Process Organization

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Understand what you have in your current environment, and how data is being used.

Develop a strategy that takes into account not only purchasing new storage, but also reclaiming existing capacity. You need a clear process for provisioning—and re-provisioning—your storage.

Reassess the data being stored to determine how critical it is to your business. This will help ensure you make storage purchases that match your requirements.

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Myth #2:

Everything having to do with storage is on our radar and under control.

Insight:

Many companies believe their data storage situation is straightforward: they add storage, they provision, and they move on.

But there are likely storage initiatives lurking in your company that aren’t obvious. For example, certain IT projects—such as cloud and virtualization—are dependent upon data storage for their success.

Cloud computing and virtualization can have a significant impact on storage. When they aren’t taken into consideration in advance, results can be frustrating.

“I did everything right when I set this up,” an IT staffer may lament, “and I was promised certain virtual machine densities and levels of performance. But nothing is working as it should, and now my users are screaming.”

In such cases, the cause may well be that the storage infrastructure wasn’t able to absorb the new requirements, and now it’s causing a massive bottleneck.

These days, storage is a vital part of most every IT initiative. Even if you don’t have a formal storage initiative underway, be alert to what else is being implemented within the company. It’s quite possible your colleagues may not realize how their projects will impact other parts of the infrastructure.

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Myth #3:

As a data storage professional, I can address the needs of my organization successfully if I just simply manage the infrastructure and keep It functional.

Insight:

The role of most IT professionals is fundamentally different today than it was even five years ago. This is true for storage professionals as well.

Back in the old days (a little more than a decade ago) of open systems storage, there was no specific storage role. After the turn of the century, Storage Area Networks (SAN) became prominent, and storage teams began to take shape.

Around 2005, with the advent of a variety of arrays with very different profiles, storage administrators became attuned to matching the right platforms with the right data. To that end, they began to interview the user community to get a better sense of how storage was being used. And they refined the concept of tiered storage as a best practice in support of what we called information lifecycle management.

Some in IT still see their roles through the lens of pre-2005—in other words, as needing to manage technology infrastructure by a narrow set of requirements like capacity, resilience, and redundancy. But the model has changed, and like it or not, recent technology developments—cloud computing, virtualization, big data, and others—have completely up-ended these considerations. Now scalability, business impact, manageability, etc., must be factored into how those tiers are built.

Being able to service the needs of your business is more critical than ever. A storage failure can seriously tarnish a company, or even put it out of business. On the flip side, a successful storage strategy could give a company a competitive edge in key areas such as customer service, data analytics, and business efficiency.

Here’s the bottom line: IT people should be part of the core team developing business strategy. At some point, nearly everything central to the business flows through IT (and most of it gets stored).

Take time to understand the industry shift to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) delivery model and avoid working in isolation. Instead, work proactively with your company’s business leadership, IT colleagues, end users, vendors, and regulators. By collaborating with HP Storage Consultants and your stakeholders, you’ll be able to build, refine, and align your storage delivery strategy.

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Myth #4:

If I buy, test and train on the latest and greatest storage technology with the best service contract, I will get the best results.

Insight:

When we encounter this way of thinking within troubled environments and evaluate the root cause, we typically discover that the technology itself is rarely the problem. While the technology might not be working as hoped, it’s usually because, at the start, the wrong technology was selected to address the need. Typically, this points to a failure of governance or architectural standards, human error (which might be a procedural or policy issue), or lack of expertise (which might point toward an organizational issue).

Upfront analysis of all of the service components and their alignment within a client’s storage “service” will help prevent failed implementations. For example, make sure the solution meshes with your architectural standards. Interview end users to make sure your solution meets their objectives. And dig deeper: are there procurement, business, or regulatory requirements that need to be taken into consideration? The team pushing for a deployment may not have an understanding of these areas.

If you’re struggling with something you’ve implemented, revisit fundamental questions with a fresh perspective: What is the company’s expectation of the solution? Who is the consumer of the solution you just put in place? Exactly why does the technology not work for you? Was it deployed correctly? Were the people installing or using the implementation properly trained? Do they have the right skills?

These lines of questioning may seem straightforward, but in the pressure to get an application deployed, it’s not unusual for these probing discussions not to happen in the planning process.

Ultimately, buying storage technology is not only about buying spinning disks that meet some functional requirements or fares best in a comparison spreadsheet. It’s about solving a business problem as it relates to storage, and understanding how the solution will play out in the foreseeable future. That’s why achieving a successful rollout—or a candid assessment of a rollout gone awry—requires a thoughtful and thorough investigation.

Brochure | The HP IT Insights Series—Volume 4

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Explore the other installments of The HP IT Insights series:

Volume 1: IT Trends: 8 ways to stay ahead of the IT evolution

Volume 2: Data Center Insight: 6 ways to prevent mistakes that have cost others millions

Volume 3: Cloud Insight: 6 essential facts for defining a successful cloud strategy

Visit hp.com/go/ITinsights

Brochure | The HP IT Insights Series—Volume 4

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© Copyright 2012 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

4AA4-4958ENW, December 2012

Brochure | The HP IT Insights Series—Volume 4