The company's prior operating model had left it with old, out-of support DAT or DLT autoloaders on every creaky Wintel server in the shop. The firm's final design gave it a roughly three-to-one server consolidation, with all data storage moved to a Fibre Channel SAN with centralized backup. Instead of buying 400 autoloaders for the new boxes, the company built up its existing SAN (which until then served only the mainframes and a small subset of midrange environments) and improved its reliability and performance. The savings realized from not buying hundreds of new autoloaders paid for the lion's share of the company's new DASD. Other savings resulted from reduced physical-plant requirements.
Moving the SAN out to all the systems not only freed up floor and rack space, but also reduced power and HVAC demands. As a bonus, the smaller footprint meant the crowded data center didn't need to be expanded.
Any company running a large 24/7 transactional system on distributed systems should centralize storage using a SAN. The savings from avoiding downtime or loss of data easily makes this move cost-effective. For sites with deep pockets, the added bandwidth of Fibre Channel over iSCSI may be worthwhile, yielding faster queries and more transactions per minute. In a smaller environment or at a site with 9-to-5 application needs, a NAS system usually makes more sense (see "ROI/TCO Examples,").
It may sound too good to be true, but it's exactly what your management wants to hear. Vendors, industry studies and those in the trenches have all come back with the same advice: A well-implemented SAN or NAS requires fewer person-hours than conventional direct-attached storage. Depending on your inclination, this can reduce head count, improve service and increase storage per administrator.
Rather than laying off people, you can temper staffing plans to reflect the efficiencies of centralized storage. The same number of folks you have managing 2 TB in your direct-connect world may be able to manage 4, 8 or 13 TB down the road as you grow in a centralized environment. Break down your staffers' duties to the task level to determine where they'll save time and you'll have the metrics you need to project future savings.
Let's start with some basic concepts and apply them to a conventional storage environment. Drives are cheap--and since price per unit will only get cheaper, we can plot a flattening curve for hardware costs associated with your planned growth in storage. Salaries, however, are expensive. We tend to want high-quality people managing our environments, so we compensate accordingly. Unlike hard drives, good employees aren't getting cheaper.
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