We are getting near to the end of defining the 32 types of costs associated with storage ownership (TCO). I am sorry describing these 32 has taken so long in this blog approach, please feel free to download papers and other materials from my blog library area if you cannot wait for me to finish this discussion.

Cost item #29 is the risk (and cost of risk) due to management errors and poor capacity planning. Here is the rationale to these costs - Up to 25% of IT outages can be attributed to storage problems in-general. Of the storage-related outages, about 20-30% can be attributed to poor management, lack of processes and procedures in storage administration. Simply put, about 5-6% of all IT outages might be attributed to storage management, the people and processes around the storage infrastructure.

Taking a hard look at people and operational processes, the right level of capacity planning could reduce IT outage time and overall business risk. In an extreme case, one could calculate the hour-per-outage factor for the enterprise and multiply that number by 0.05 to help justify investments in storage area management tools, IT best practices and processes (ITIL is a good place to start) and capacity planning methods and managements.

SAM software, best practices and defined operating procedures can reduce these storage-related outages, and provide improved up-time (different than the data path or storage sub-system uptime). Optimizing the storage management team, reducing duplicate functions, establishing clear roles and responsibilities and MBO will help in total management effectiveness.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS