The benefits of centralized storage management really come out as the size and demands of the enterprise grow. The bigger your shop, the more demanding your customers and clients, and the more convoluted your existing storage schemes. Therefore, the more you can benefit from centralized storage.
The technology is cool, but money matters more. Emphasize revenue gains, increased service levels, happy customers and reduced expenses. After all, these are the benefits of storage centralization, regardless of which method your company chooses.
Joe Hernick is an IT director with a Fortune 100 company. He has 12 years of consulting and project-management experience in data and telecom environments. Write to him at [email protected].
Let's compare the costs and benefits of traditional distributed storage with those of a SAN. We'll do this for two companies. One is a small shop with a 15/6 production cycle; the other is a midsize, 23/7 enterprise.
To keep things simple, we're assuming comparable growth rates, hardware and staffing costs, and reliability stats for both. The main expense difference is the "cost" of system downtime: The bigger shop incorporates a larger hourly figure for outages, reflecting a larger hypothetical client base.
All numbers are conservative. For instance, only 10 percent of the "soft" benefits have entered into the ROI calculations. (The numbers would quickly tip in favor of SANs if you weighed these benefits more heavily.)
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