Outsourcing

From 2003 through 2006, as ITOs adopt a storage service delivery model resembling that of traditional outsourcers, accurately measuring storage services and metrics will be a critical success factor in ITOs not only gaining credibility, but also in justifying (and making an informed decision about) whether a storage and storage management sourcing strategy should be employed. ITOs can use three categories when determining measurable metrics. The initial set comprises alternatives to the traditional ROI/total cost of ownership senior management mandate and is primarily an internal benchmark of (current and future) capabilities that quantify how the strategy is providing value. The second and third sets, technical and operational, are more strategic because some of these measurements are not possible with some storage vendors . However, ITOs should keep the measurements simple, limiting the metrics to those that are the most important to the business. Often, using network-based SLAs (for example, web hosting) as a framework and mapping them to storage services provides a good starting point. The three categories available to ITOs are:

• Internal benchmarking This includes storage managed per administrator, percentage of storage utilization, days storage in inventory, data life-cycle multiplier , data availability, and mean time to recovery.

• Technical measures These include storage availability, storage latency, data migration/exit clause, diagnostic, capacity utilization, performance, resource utilization, and mean time and maximum time to recover/resolve.

• Operational measures These include maximum time to notify, moves/adds/changes, project-specific SLAs, and vendor responsiveness.