1.3 Driving Towards Operational Agility

The rise in current and anticipated storage spending is evidenced by increasing customer requirements as well as the clamoring among storage vendors for market share. Much of the spending increase can be linked to customer requirements to maintain a highly available storage infrastructure that meets today's business continuance requirements. Few CEOs are willing to consider the possibility of a sustained data storage service outage within their company, and they sign checks to protect against these risks.

But too often, the infrastructure investment in storage focuses primarily on protection and business continuity. While a worthy objective for existing or new data storage deployments, this singular focus on risk prevention accomplishes only part of the long- term goals ”to establish an effective and nimble data storage infrastructure. IT executives and implementers need to recognize that the storage spending on risk-prevention mechanisms must be coupled with operational agility mechanisms. Only through this combined defensive and offensive approach will a company be able to navigate the chaotic growth and change of data storage infrastructures .

Cost savings and return on investment can be difficult to measure for risk-prevention approaches. The impact of sustained service outages is frequently defined in lost dollars per hour or a similar metric. But can anyone really anticipate the costs of a full-scale disaster that wipes out a data center? On the offensive side, however, more easily measured metrics help justify the spending on upgraded and new data storage deployments.

Planning for a more agile enterprise, IT executives have a variety of parameters at their disposal to measure and justify expenditures. Application efficiency, capacity efficiency, simplified training, management, and maintenance, deployment time for new applications, and new storage capacity ”these productivity considerations link to real cost savings within the IT budget. By including an offensive approach to a storage strategy, IT executives can couple risk prevention with operational agility to build a more robust, flexible data storage system.