An increase in online data transactions and the
strengthening of data compliance rules means the average company’s
data mountain is doubling every two years.
The usual DIY approach to clutter is to use smarter filing and
build extra storage. In the data universe, this translates into
management tools, storage area networks, discs and tapes. But the
headache of building and managing storage solutions is becoming too
much for some chief information officers, who are turning to IT’s
“clutter-busters” to manage the mess.
According to analyst firm Gartner, the growing complexity and
scale of the data storage task is increasing the appeal of
outsourcing for organisations of all shapes and sizes. The storage
service market worldwide is growing at 6% a year and will represent
a market of £15.9bn by 2009. Storage management services are
growing at an even greater 9%, and a key driver for growth is the
appetite for “pay-as-you-go” storage on demand.
The storage services industry has matured to offer many
different propositions, from hosted, managed “everything” to
back-up, archive and administration services, or
“pay-per-gig-per-month” purchases. But although outsourcing choices
are plentiful and getting cheaper, they are not a shortcut to
working out what storage your business needs and what delivers the
best value.
“Regardless of whether you in-source or outsource, the CIO has
to figure out what is needed by his customers and how that is best
delivered,” says Jason Rabbetts, UK managing director of storage
services company Glasshouse. “What we usually find within
organisations is that storage is defined as a bunch of
technologies, rather than a service.”
Adam Couture, vice-president of storage at Gartner, says it is
the discipline to do the sums and put the policies in place that
companies seek from outsourcers. “There is nothing an outsourcer
can do that a company cannot do for itself,” he says. Whether a
firm decides ultimately to keep storage in-house or to outsource,
he recommends a good first step is to “simply organise your data
storage better”.
Couture cites how Cisco profited from such a clean-up exercise,
called “Bytes Back”, a programme that consisted of “incentivising”
database administrators to allocate fewer bytes to storage. The
networks supplier spent £40,000 on management tools for identifying
over-allocation of storage and cash rewards for more accurate
apportionment. “Cisco got £1m back,” says Couture.
CIOs who hire outsourcers are encouraged to focus on four
aspects of their storage: policies, people, technology, and
business alignment. Businesses are mature in their knowledge of
technology, but fall down when it comes to policies.
“Most have some policies, but they are not written down or
understood,” says Rabbetts. And with business alignment, not many
companies have worked out the basic storage metric of how much it
costs to store 1Gbyte of data at a particular level of storage
criticality, he adds.
This lack of clarity occurs because the sum is more complex than
picking a storage medium and divvying up the data across it. The
calculation also requires working out the optimum medium for
different classes of data and recognising that data shifts between
different classes during its lifecycle.
“Being able to show how data moves between these classes and the
difference to the bottom line is a pounds and pence proposition,”
says Couture.
This is the reason why introducing or improving information
lifecycle management is a key stage at which the specialist
services of outsourcers are sought. As well as ensuring a company
stores data in the most cost-effective medium, specialists can
ensure an appropriate level of access and retrieval. A firm can
thus avoid common mistakes, such as storing all its e-mails on tape
in a safe but dusty vault off site.
“It will be on the back foot when it receives a request from
authorities to look at all e-mails between Fred Smith and Joe
Bloggs,” says Andy Maurice, head of consultancy with records
management provider Iron Mountain.
E-mails need to be stored on spinning discs that provide a
retrieval capability, whereas one-off snapshots of data, such as
operating systems or database back-ups, can safely be consigned to
magnetic media.
Specialists can also advise on what data to store. “Generally,
organisations store a lot more information and records than they
need to,” says Maurice.
Requirements for keeping data records and access vary greatly
between industries and even different parts of an organisation. For
example, personnel departments need to retain staff data for two
years after they have left their employment, property deeds have to
be kept in perpetuity, and pension data needs to be kept until the
person dies.
Shifting liability from the CIO to the service provider and
reducing risk within the data protection quagmire is another
rationale for outsourcing. “Service providers have to attest to
their systems and policies meeting compliance requirements in the
US,” Couture says.
“One director said of his company’s decision to outsource its
e-mail archive: ‘If we’re found to be not compliant, who am I going
to sue? Not my CIO’.”
Any confusion in business departments about data protection or
compliance rules is compounded by the storage manager’s tendency to
be cautious and over-order storage for critical applications.
Over-allocation is an understandable but expensive habit that can
send costs soaring.
“A database administrator might order 100Gbytes of storage,
while the storage administrator does the same,” says Couture.
“Before you know it, an organisation has allocated four times more
than it needs.”
This is eliminated when an outsourcer steps in because bills
suddenly become very transparent. Browser access to a dashboard of
tools enables easy checks on how much storage is being used per
application, and a comparison with predicted and past usage.
Dashboards also provide an alarm system for identifying a
profligate application or department, or even an underlying
technical problem.
The advantages of outsourcing are well articulated by
third-party providers and users with limited IT resources, but
there are attendant risks, particularly for the larger outfit.
Daniel Sazbon, vice-chairman of the Storage Networking Industry
Association, says, “Competing standards mean storage is nowhere
near the commodity status that suppliers like to portray.”
This leaves any company undergoing a merger and acquisition
vulnerable when it comes to integrating storage, with the risk of
being locked into an unsuitable outsourcing deal.
Lack of buying power to source the necessary staff and skills
may be another reason companies turn to third parties. “Once upon a
time, storage management came down to removing a spindle from a
disc or removing a back-up tape once a day,” says Ross Macallister,
head of IT governance at Atos Consulting.
Today, storage is a broad discipline that encompasses operations
and back-up, but also capacity planning, architecture and data
protection. Once the decision is taken to outsource storage
requirements, it may be the point of no return, warns Sazbon.
However, one storage component that everyone agrees on
outsourcing is back-up. Managed back-up service providers are
predicting 100% year-over-year growth. “Back-up is the unwanted
step-child of IT,” says Couture, and it is the task that is most
often allocated to junior personnel.
But it is even more worrying if it is not, says George Grant of
the National Housing Federation (see case study), who talks about
the amount of senior time expended on the task. Liberating key
personnel was a key reason for the federation to outsource
back-up.
If back-up is the current comfort zone of outsourcing, storage
on demand, for which users pay a fee per gigabyte per month, is the
future. Already users are buying storage as a commodity and paying
between £1 and £20 a month for a gigabyte.
Price depends not just on volume consumed, but also on correctly
forecasting consumption, although usage tends to stabilise over
time and makes forecasting easier. Gartner predicts this utility
model of storage will account for 70% of managed service providers’
business by 2009.
But whatever storage piece and whichever way they choose to
source, it makes a lot of sense for CIOs to get on top of their
byte consumption. “Where a lot of CIOs miss a trick is not having
an understanding of how data contributes to the business,” says
Macallister. “And if you are under pressure to reduce costs and you
cannot make that link, life can get very difficult.”
Case study: National Housing Federation
The National Housing Federation represents 1,400 housing
associations, and uses and stores vast amounts of data to provide
advice and best practice to its members.
Dealing with daily back-up is labour-intensive, says George
Grant, head of technology alliances for the NHF, “and it is also
one of the most boring tasks”.
For this reason, NHF outsourced the back-up of storage to
InTechnology. The NHF is a saving about £8,000 a year, and there
are other advantages. “It liberates senior people from doing the
most mundane of tasks – that is often the hidden cost of storage,”
says Grant. NHF now farms out its archiving too.
The price of the service makes third-party archiving a
no-brainer, says Grant. “You are literally paying pennies for a
gigabyte of storage because it is hosted on lower-grade discs and
tapes.” Retrieval has also been straightforward, he says.
Ensuring access to, as well as secure storage of, data is a key
part of any storage strategy. Again, NHF found outsourcing can make
this easier as long as you specify the service level agreements
correctly. “You do not have to worry about data formats or media –
a browser is the simple means to retrieve it.”
InTechnology conducted a storage audit and talked through
aspects of compliance and information lifecycle management. It was
the impetus for NHF to do some data cleaning. “We had to look at
who was dealing with what and tell them to clean out their
stuff.”
Grant believes storage on demand is the way forward for all
NHF’s needs and anticipates the day when it is used for all storage
– not just back-up.