Managing storage is just what your organisation needs

It is widely accepted that today`s companies spend significantly more money on managing their storage infrastructures than they do acquiring the technology itself.

Although the actual numbers are up for debate - with some claiming the management-to-acquisition ratios to be as high a 10 to 1 - Gartner Group (conservatively) estimates it to be 3 to 1.

Whichever way you look at it, the reality is that storage management costs are too high, and are climbing.

The root causes of unmanageable storage environments are the architectural and organisational complexities that have evolved over time as storage demands increased and storage technology grew more powerful.

It`s a vicious cycle - as storage technologies became more affordable, it also became more feasible to build larger, more complex infrastructures. Now these storage infrastructures demand a lot from both IT organisations and company IT departments, requiring advanced skills and tools to manage.

The bottom line is companies have to change their approach to storage management, otherwise costs will continue to skyrocket.

Storage management responsibilities become distributed throughout the enterprise because IT professionals have an understandable sense of ownership over their applications and servers.

However, this approach has led to disjointed practices that contribute to enterprise-wide inefficiency and an increase in workload.

For example, the database administrator was taught early to protect the device that runs the data applications and have adopted procedures to do just that. And even though the storage administrator provides fully mirrored LUNs (logical units) for a database application, the database administrator traditionally will re-mirror those LUNs to protect the application.

The result is that the storage administrator will then perceive this application to be twice as large as it really is - a tremendous amount of capacity will therefore be wasted.

Today, technical barriers and traditional organisational structures no longer pose an insurmountable challenge. It is entirely feasible for companies to bring storage management costs under control by implementing a consolidated storage management strategy.

A step in the right direction is to realign and automate workflows by consolidating responsibility for all storage management - SAN, NAS, DAS, secondary and archive backup systems and applications under an experienced storage administrator or team.

With consolidated storage management, any company can quickly reduce storage management costs and gain insight into, and control of, all the components of an enterprise-wide storage environment.

Also, choosing the right management tool that works across multiple platforms and recognising the different roles of the IT department, and streamlining it, will undoubtedly drive down costs.

The benefits of consolidated storage management include:

* Reduced capital expenses by helping enterprises plan more effectively, reallocate existing resources and postpone or eliminate new technology investments;

* Reduced operating expenses through streamlined and automated management processes; and

* Improved application and data availability.