Most of today's talk about storage is 'techie talk'. Rarely do we hear about (human, customer) management issues. In a world of a thousand details, it's easy to lose track of the forest. Sometimes we have to remember to step back and look at the big picture.

In the world of storage, along with death and taxes,  there are some givens: hardware prices go down, salaries go up. Only a few years ago the TCO for storage was 4 to 5 times its acquisiton cost. Today it is 6 to 7 times. Why? Hardware costs go down (acquisition) and salaries go up (TCO is really the cost of keeping what you've bought). How many people are talking about reducing the human costs of providing a first-class storage utility for your customers? Not many.

Today in North America there is a well established paradigm for managing the human costs of providing first class service to your customers - self-service. Give your customers what they want, when they want it, 24x7x365 by letting them serve themselves, getting what they need when they need it. Storage resources can be self-service too. The technology exists to let your users provision themselves (with the guidelines you have established), use work flow to get authorization for the expense and ask for appropriate exceptions to policy. Self-service storage is self-managing storage. Self-managing storage lets you and your team move on to deal with more important matters.

Who wouldn't want to provide their users with better service while lowering their operating costs? I sure would.

Thursday, June 07, 2007 9:48:51 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)      Comments [0]  Management