Recognizing that one person can manage only a fixed quantity of servers and direct-attached storage, calculate the threshold points at which you'll need additional staff to support growth. Your staffing-cost curve becomes a step model, with a big jump each time someone is hired; as you move into the future, staffing costs will likely increase faster than hardware costs.
What could be driving those staffing costs? Assuming some form of direct-attached backup device (DLTs, for instance) each server will need, at a minimum, care and feeding in the form of tape swaps. Since each server has its own internal and/or external RAID, the number of individual devices under management (controllers, drives) increases with each additional server. With each additional component, the overall complexity of your shop increases, and management becomes more challenging.
Direct-attached storage makes sense in a small shop: If you're plotting 100 percent growth over five years, your dozen servers and 2 TB might still be manageable when they blossom into 24 servers and 4 TB. But if you're running 400 servers with the same projected growth, how many more folks will you need to stay on top of 800 servers and their routine maintenance, break-fix and upgrades? Growth is good for the company, but it can be rough on the operations staff.
That's where the benefits of centralized storage come in. All "care and feeding tasks" are greatly reduced, thanks in large part to a reduction in the number of moving pieces. Instead of monitoring RAID controllers in each server, you need only sit on top of your SAN console. Data purge and archive, disk maintenance and other routine activities can be managed as a whole rather than server by server. Centralized backups can save hundreds of staff hours per month (ignoring the additional potential benefits of online backup and increased application uptime).
Centralized storage can also enable more nimble responses to storage requests, improving user (and management) perceptions of your performance. In a direct-attached environment, each server and application requires solid capacity planning for future growth. Unfortunately, despite the best strategy, unexpected storage demands can have your operations staff scrambling to add capacity at a moment's notice. Unplanned activity or an ill-tempered application can choke a standalone storage environment, leaving you with a passel of unhappy users.
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