SRM: Investigating direct and indirect cost savings

By Brett Samuel, product manager: SRM at VERITAS Software SA

The economic benefits of investing in a well-managed storage environment are compelling. Successful storage resource management (SRM) deployments will have at their core measurable economic benefits for both the IT budget and the way in which the business manages its data resources. IT organisations must be ready to track and communicate the return on investment (ROI) throughout the design, build and run phases of the project.

Recent research conducted by Giga Information Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Forrester Research, has highlighted the direct and indirect cost savings attributed to specific SRM implementations. For instance, if average disk utilisation jumps from 50% of available capacity used to 60%, the direct cost of storage drops 20% and indirect operational expense drops even more.

From an application perspective, and thus business value viewpoint, there are fewer assets to manage and secure, less contingency planning preparations to make and deferred expenses for additional capacity.

At first, management costs per unit of storage may actually increase, as more effective use of storage appears to make the overhead cost of management increase. But, over time, as the growth of online data continues while management costs remain stable, the value of proactive storage management increases. In addition, Giga found that less data requires less storage, which implies fewer and shorter device maintenance downtimes.

Also, as inactive data is pruned from active files and inactive files are migrated off-disk, there is less data to backup. This may let storage administrators rethink their backup and archive strategies and narrow the window of potential data loss in any failure scenario.

Improved understanding of the storage usage by business applications means that storage administrators can also prioritise application recovery and guarantee adequate storage capacity at a backup site. Administrators can stage the data recovery process either at multiple sites or by business criticality, always knowing the precise resources required to restore the application.

Giga also specified that indirect cost savings are real and contribute to the overall ROI of a storage management project, typically making other processes more effective and contributing to an overall improvement in IT`s business posture.

Examples of indirect cost savings include tape procurement: by reducing the amount of active data on disk, there is less data to backup and, by using snap copies as the source for backup data, tape drive schedules can be better controlled. This may allow for the elimination of new tape purchases.

Additional benefits include improved overall availability, as fewer devices and less data mean fewer failures and less need to develop and test recovery plans, and improved LAN/WAN performance, with less active data online and a better understanding of its critical usage supporting better network management for data transfers. Also, the number of backup servers can be reduced and storage consolidation is simplified through a better understanding of the various phases of data distribution and consolidation.

SRM should be a critical-path selection criterion when buying storage products - if a resource can`t be managed, a business value can`t be assigned to it and management assumes money is wasted. The drastic improvements in storage and storage management should make it straightforward to demonstrate improved ROI, leveraging technology to make the business users more productive.