ENTERPRISES, big or small face continuous storage challenges today. It is estimated that data volumes are doubling annually for the average company, yet industry-average storage utilisation rates remain at an alarmingly low 30 and 40 per cent. With budget constraints and escalating costs associated with data centre space, power and cooling, it has become more challenging for IT personnel to manage storage resources.

The good news is that by adopting a more software-centric service management framework, organisations can manage their storage resources, while controlling their costs.

Improve storage operations

Storage administrators struggle to ensure uptime and maintain service levels in a storage environment that is constantly expanding, changing and becoming more complex. Yet, one of the most effective strategies for addressing this challenge is simple: stop reinventing the wheel.

For years, IT organisations have used enterprise software to automate business operations such as production, distribution, and customer care – and with tremendous results in improved quality and responsiveness. Yet, these same organisations continue to use scripts and cumbersome monitoring-centric solutions to manage their IT storage operations.

A more efficient and effective solution is to adopt a process-oriented approach to automation across the storage supply chain. This approach enables organisations to standardise their storage management processes, implement consistent operational policies, and automate them.

Deliver storage as a service (SaaS)

Integrating storage with business requires a global view of the storage infrastructure, with analysis at the enterprise level and capacity and cost co-related to business groupings. It also requires insight that can translate storage operational metrics into business terms and measure infrastructure against business risk and efficiency.

By mapping storage assets to the boundaries of the organisation, businesses can systematically reduce risk and decrease costly inefficiencies in allocation and utilisation. With an understanding of storage tier definitions and geographic and business boundaries, IT companies can implement chargeback for storage services based on specific metrics.

By providing multiple views, and in real-time business level reporting into the global infrastructure, it ensures critical information can be seen by individuals with various responsibilities. This not only promotes awareness and accountability but it also helps align IT to business objectives.

Proactive management

Clearly, as storage utilisation rates remain low and IT environments become complex, it is critical that IT organisations gain visibility and control across its heterogeneous storage environments to align storage with business goals.

By identifying and mapping resources consumed across all elements in the data centre (including virtualised environments), lost or wasted storage may be reclaimed and forecasts can be made for current and future requirements. At the same time, tiered storage can be enabled to match data to the appropriate storage device according to business requirements.

These tactics can enable IT to decrease costs, simplify IT operations and reduce data centre complexity. By utilising existing storage, streamlining storage processes and providing an integrated view, organisations can gain better control of storage resources in a challenging and complex environment, now and into the future.

The writer is technical consultant manager, pre-sales, Symantec Malaysia.