Overview

IT organizations are under tremendous pressure to deliver ever-higher levels of service while reducing costs.  Faced with rapid data growth, most organizations are struggling just to maintain existing levels, never mind fully optimizing the environment. In fact, ESG research supports this assertion: Figure 1 indicates that the greatest storage challenge facing many organizations is simply keeping pace with data growth.[1] Other top responses are related to costs and security.

In order to simultaneously improve service levels and reduce costs, many organizations will look to make investments in technology or services.  There are plenty of technology vendors offering solutions for getting control of a storage environment, but their products typically require dedicated staff to learn, implement, and manage. IT doesn’t need yet another tool; it needs better information in order to make IT decisions that are properly aligned with business need. The better choice, then, is to engage with a trusted services company to discover, analyze, and optimize an existing environment.

SunGard, well known for its availability offerings, has been optimizing storage for enterprise customers through its consulting division. This service is based on a five-step process leveraging comprehensive software solutions and industry benchmarks. The process includes:

• Cleaning up the noise (storage usage/capacity and backup and recovery): This step builds the foundation for optimization. The entire storage and backup environment is discovered and mapped to the hosts (including virtual machines) using the SunGard Discovery Appliance.  Current and trending IO performance and data protection (replication, backups, etc.) are also evaluated to identify problem areas and help establish appropriate service levels.
• Tiering the data: Building upon the information collected in the first step and proven business impact analysis (BIA) processes, SunGard—utilizing data collected in the previous phase—works with the client’s  business and IT teams to determine what data needs to reside on what type of system or media in order to achieve required service levels for the business (typically based on an established RPO and RTO).
• Securing and optimizing the infrastructure: SunGard uses the output of the first two steps to architect a new, secure environment. This includes providing recommendations on how to leverage new purchases and the integration of the existing environment into the new design.
• Keeping it clean and compliant: During this step, SunGard addresses compliance and archiving requirements to determine the best approaches to each. Typically, this includes determining how much of the data is dormant, defining the required retention schedules, and deciding how to best pull archive data off of expensive Tier 1 and 2 systems. It also examines relevant industry regulations to determine if encryption (in flight, at rest, etc.) is required.
• Performing health checks and alignments: SunGard will return every six months to perform an abbreviated version of its Storage Optimization Service (Steps 1-4) to ensure that the environment remains optimized. Any deviations and/or adjustments due to changing technology or business direction (new applications, mergers, acquisitions, etc.) can be quickly identified and corrected. In order to better assess the environment and provide trending analysis for more predictive future growth, SunGard leaves its Discovery Appliance in place, maintaining it along the way, to collect information between visits.

Analysis

This service, introduced early in 2009, is based upon SunGard’s years of experience delivering high availability solutions. Leveraging best practices developed in previous engagements, SunGard’s five step program can help optimize any organization’s storage and data protection environment and ensure it is better aligned with the business. In particular, this service should be attractive because:

• SunGard uses a holistic process. In order to optimize the environment, contextual knowledge is critical—to understand how servers or the network impacts the storage and vice versa. SunGard gets a comprehensive view of the computing infrastructure, including applications, files, servers (physical and virtual), storage networks, arrays, and backups. This holistic approach doesn’t end with the infrastructure, either. Based on its years of experience, SunGard is able to demonstrate how the existing and future environments rank amongst others in the same industry. This benchmarking allows organizations to determine where they stand in terms of service delivery maturity, compliance, risk management, and data management. From there, they can see what must be accomplished to close the gaps.
• It not only optimizes, but also drives tighter business alignment. A critical component of SunGard’s storage optimization service is ensuring that the resulting optimized infrastructure actually provides higher levels of service to the business. This goes beyond creating the appropriate tiers of storage and replication strategies for certain applications to ensuring that the storage environment will support relevant industry compliance, archiving, and security issues. And because SunGard is very aware that these environments are in a constant state of change, its optimization engagements are not one-time deals: every six months, SunGard returns to ensure the environment is still aligned with business need and to advise where corrective action is required.
• Enterprise storage and data protection investments should be commensurate with their value to the business. SunGard documents current total cost of ownership (TCO) including hardware, software, personnel, maintenance, and other associated infrastructure services as well as the resulting mitigation level it provides to reduce outages.  SunGard is conscious that outages can result in escalating costs associated with lost productivity, SLA penalty payments, and loss of revenue (transactional and/or due to lost customers).   When architecture options are analyzed, their ROIs are compared against their ability to reduce financial exposure (business case).
• An optimized environment will reduce OPEX and CAPEX. Organizations that continue to buy more storage to fix every problem will waste a great deal of capital and, subsequently, operating resources. By fully discovering the environment in terms of storage and host/application, organizations can find their true storage utilization rates. Armed with this information, they can begin to reclaim unused storage or tag it for the next refresh, defer new storage purchases, and make intelligent decisions regarding storage tiers. All of these actions can dramatically reduce storage spending while optimizing the environment will ensure that purchases are only made when truly necessary.
• SunGard has no agenda. SunGard is not trying to sell software or hardware at the end of an engagement. This allows SunGard consultants to be real advocates for the customer that assist with the questions that arise from new technology acquisitions such as determining the best features versus functionality, to creating and reviewing RFPs/RFQs. SunGard’s independent status should become more relevant to those organizations trying to get an unbiased opinion and is reflected in its growing list of customers.

The Bigger Truth

Data continues to grow unabated, independent of economic conditions. This growth creates significant problems for organizations of all sizes. To further complicate the situation, IT staffs are overburdened as they simply try to maintain current operations; finding time to evaluate and re-architect the environment is virtually impossible.  Bringing in additional technology or software can be problematic as it requires already overworked staff to integrate, learn, and manage a new solution.  A third party with the proper experience and methodology needed to get back on track is certainly an attractive proposition.

SunGard’s Storage Optimization Service is well suited to assist organizations struggling with their storage infrastructures. By leveraging this five step program, organizations will be able to get control over the storage infrastructure and reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. The ability to benchmark or rank an organization’s storage environment against several metrics should prove to be useful for tracking improvement. Its name, however, does not do the service justice. The end result is more than just optimized storage infrastructure; it actually enables IT organizations to deliver higher levels of service and be more tightly aligned and responsive to the business. More importantly, that alignment extends beyond the day the new infrastructure is designed and implemented through to a bi-annual health and alignment check.