Chapter 7. Options for Operational Agility

As IT organizations strive to deliver networked storage solutions for their users, operational agility becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. With the efficiencies and increased possibilities of networked storage comes a wave of new architectures, new methods , and new rules that can leave any IT organization with expertise and functionality gaps. These voids in the knowledge base impact attempts to capture or retain organizational and operational agility related to networked storage.

The ability for organizations to react quickly to internal and external forces determines success or failure. Take, for example, the cost of downtime to Amazon.com or the need for remote backup applications at the NASDAQ clearinghouses. While these are obvious examples, the broader implication is that companies regularly need to roll out business- impacting applications or meet the growing storage demands of business units. The ability for any IT organization to react quickly and predictably to those requests varies depending on expertise and storage functionality.

In this chapter we discuss strategies for creating effective operational agility and provide specific examples as useful tools to understand when and how these solutions should be implemented. We discuss all facets of storage outsourcing and what costs and organizational impacts this may have. This leads to an exploration of the marriage between network service providers (NSPs) and storage with a specific focus on the need for remote storage services. Understanding alternative delivery methods, we examine all the ins and outs of effective service level agreements (SLAs) for internal storage provisioning and delivery. Finally, we cover the benefits of operational agility on streamlining application deployment. Streamlining is enabled with the ability to transition storage between systems and to effectively capitalize on incumbent corporate data assets.