June 30, 2003

It's What's Inside That Counts

Obsessed with controlling costs, the storage management field is in danger of missing the point: To manage infrastructure with a focus on data-the lifeblood of enterprise intelligence

by Richard Scannell

Continued from Page 1

The idea of segregating data into values isn't revolutionary. Many companies talk about data classification or similar initiatives. The challenge for corporations has been to:

• Secure the participation of their business partners in meaningful dialog. ("Everything is critical all the time" isn't a meaningful position.)
• Have an IT strategy that shows senior business executives that IT is capable of and prepared to make a shift from a device to a data management perspective. (By having such a strategy, the argument that everything is top priority can soon be disproved.)

In addressing these issues it's necessary to have a far deeper understanding of the value of data to the business — a mere logical diagram of all the devices in a data center and their respective capacity is insufficient. Three critical elements must be developed: (See the sidebar, "Aligning Cost With Value"):

• Occupancy — an understanding of the volume of data at each of the specific categories offered (for example, critical, moderate, or low)
• Architecture standards — a definition of the technologies, policies, and processes that will be used to provide and manage data in a given category
• Governance — rules dictating when data moves from a given category to another (either up or down).

At its simplest, occupancy can described as the single number that defines how much data in the environment is of critical, moderate, or low value. To qualify for inclusion at a given level, we must assign data a value to the business, because by definition the higher the category of storage solution, the more expensive it is to provide. By tying value of data to cost, an appropriate spending model can support the data at each level. Occupancy can be expressed in terms of volume (for example, number of terabytes), or as a percentage. Since it costs more to provide a higher level of storage, by definition, the more data occupying the highest category, the higher the cost to the business. Once IT can articulate the loaded costs of storage and how these differ for various levels, the responsibility is placed back on the business to determine if the spending for a particular data set is appropriate given its value to the business.

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