The Storage Economist

I have written several times about calculating the cost of labor as part of the storage TCO. A new dimension was presented to me this week in Hong Kong (working with a banking client here this week), and they discussed problems related to labor that had to do with repetitive labor, boring work assignments and the resulting attrition that was the result.

A high turn-over of the storage engineering and management team resulted in numerous indirect costs to the bank:

•    Exit process of the old employee
•    Transfer of knowledge or skills to the remaining team
•    Recruiting costs
•    Hiring costs
•    Re-training
•    Time and effort to bring the new person up to speed

The manager that I was meeting with expressed frustration with the tasks assigned to new hires, most of them from college or trade schools, and the low retention rate and re-training costs. As we discussed his observations, a few key points that were not surprising came out:

1.    College or Trade school graduates want to do exiting tasks, like develop advanced programs/video games
2.    No one really wants to sit in front of consoles and do basic care-and-feeding
3.    Storage automation should do the most repetitive work, and leave the humans for other functions (troubleshooting, hot spot analysis)
4.    Doing more with the same people is more than just with a head-count number. Managers want to do more with the same people, avoiding the circular problem of hiring, losing, replacing, retraining etc.

So, as we reviewed the automation they did or did not have, it became apparent that there are many areas where this IT director can  and should make investments to take some management tasks and push them into automation. Now, there is an aspect related to overall maturity that will determine if a customer can really take on these new advanced skills, but assuming they can, some of the tasks to take away and look to automate are:

1.    Basic storage provisioning
2.    Chargeback reports
3.    Capacity planning
4.    Hot spot analysis
5.    Workload re-allocation
6.    Backup , Restore operations
7.    Quota management
8.    Data migration
9.    Performance tuning
10.  And there are more….

So the trade-off is between higher levels of maturity, advanced management tools and skills vs. the loss of storage admin that leave due to a (perceived) stagnant work environment. You can make the comparison for yourself.