A Farewell To Storage

Companies considering using managed-storage services must prepare for a major
shift in the way storage management is handled-and be willing to give up some
of the control.

For years, the IT department of multinational polymer fabrication company
Reichhold did its best to manage the entire IT infrastructure for its worldwide
company with internal staff. But about 10 years ago, faced with quickly
spiraling data management needs, the company decided to outsource much of its IT
management to EDS, an outsourcer based in Plano, TX.

At the time, Reichhold chose to retain internal management of its storage
infrastructure, spearheaded by the IT department stationed at the company's
Research Triangle Park, N.C. headquarters. But with operations in several
countries in North America, South America, Europe, and the Middle East, it soon
became apparent that managing all of the company's fast-growing storage
requirements internally simply wasn't efficient any longer.

Because EDS already managed part of Reichhold's IT infrastructure, the
company again turned to EDS to manage part of its storage infrastructure. Today,
EDS hosts and manages all data connected to the company's SAP Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) system, which houses manufacturing, personnel, financial
and other data, from EDS' data center in Sacramento, Calif.

Some of the reasons multinational corporations like Reichhold are considering
turning to a third party to manage storage are similar to those of smaller, more
centrally located companies-fast-growing storage, increasingly complex
compliance issues, security concerns, and insurance against business continuity
and disaster recovery scenarios. But in the case of multinational corporations,
these issues are often more complex, making the case for moving to a
managed-storage services paradigm perhaps even more compelling.

“Multinational corporations have all distributed computing infrastructures,
and that generally presents a lot of issues, like providing consistent service
levels to the different constituencies within your dispersed organization and
dealing with technology biases,” says Tim Thompson, program manager, Global
Offering Management, IBM Global Services, a managed-storage service provider
based in White Plains, NY.

“Other drivers include escalating costs and increasing storage complexity,
which can impact an organization's focus on its core mission,” says Dave
Uhlir, senior director, Management Services, Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara,
Calif. “Trying to plan their business relative to their storage needs is
becoming an increasing challenge, so it's sometimes easier to outsource it to
a company that can monitor it and provision it as needed. That way they don't
have to worry about predicting data volumes,” he adds.

There are also many ways in which multinational corporations can use
managed-storage service providers. In the case of Reichhold, EDS hosts the
company's data on its own servers, at its own data center. Some companies
choose to use managed-storage service providers in another way-by having
third-party personnel present at companies' own facilities, wherever they may
be located in the world, to provide a variety of storage-related services.

The services these providers offer within each of these two paradigms span a
large range. Depending on the service provider and the customer's needs, these
services can include real-time monitoring and management of an entire storage
infrastructure via a remote connection, backup and restore services, e-mail
archiving, data replication or any combination of these offerings. In addition,
most managed-storage service providers offer comprehensive usage and trending
reports and data-lifecycle information.

Full Speed Ahead

With such broad storage-management options and compelling issues, one thing
is clear-the concept of offloading some or all storage management to a third
party is gaining steam, slowly but surely, among multinational corporations.

Consistency and standardization around storage are compelling reasons for
multinational corporations to consider outsourcing storage management. Using a
managed-storage service provider helps customers ensure technology, service and
reporting consistencies, allowing dispersed organizations to gain a global view
of their storage environment.

And for companies that operate in many countries, consistency has also become
more important, thanks to new data consistency standards being implemented in
countries around the world. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
standard, for instance, is an approach to IT-service management based on best
practices collected in the UK It is currently required in the UK and Australia,
and the European community is also moving toward the adoption and certification
of the standard.

Requirements for ITIL compatibility in some countries,Â
but not others, increases the complexity of the storage paradigm,
however, service providers can ensure that the company is compliant across the
board, satisfying all requirements. Another example, is the Statement on
Auditing Standards (SAS) 70, a U.S. auditing standard that governs controls over
information technology and related issues. A global company can be sure that the
data the service provider is handling is secure and meets the requirement, when
a managed-storage service provider is SAS 70 certified.

Compliance with a growing number of regulations, both national and
international, is an important, related issue that is prompting some
multinational companies to outsource storage management. “Compliance has a big
impact on what you store, how you store it, how long you keep it and who has
access to it, and when you're a multinational company, you have to think in
terms of the individual geography and not just one set of requirements,” says
Adam Couture, Analyst, Gartner, an IT consultancy, Stamford, Conn.

Issues around security also can lead multinational corporations to consider
managed-storage services. Multinational corporations tend to have more data
traveling over wide-area networks, with more people in more locations accessing
the data. That can cause concern about who has rights and access to specific
information, which leads to concern about what data is encrypted, how it's
encrypted and who manages the encryption keys. Companies certainly can encrypt
the data themselves, but managed-storage providers offering remote backup
services have the ability to automatically encrypt data as it is moves to the
storage environment, removing yet another burden from the customer.

That's the reason why companies like P&G have enlisted the help of
managed-storage service providers-in this case, HP-to handle their IT
infrastructure. In the case of P&G, HP manages the IT infrastructure for
business processes occurring in many different countries spanning different
continents. If a disaster should take out any of the data centers HP manages for
P&G, the company is protected because of failover capabilities built into
the managed-services infrastructure.

“Business continuity and disaster recovery were the primary factors that
tipped the scales in favor of outsourcing Reichhold's SAP-based storage, notes
Christophe Petit,” global IT manager, Reichhold, Dijon, France. “What really
drove the decision was a big storm that occurred in North Carolina some years
ago, where we were running out of power and in a situation where our entire
company could go down because our corporate headquarters wasn't capable of
providing the power to supply our SAP servers, which houses critical data,” he
says. “That factor, combined with other needs like the amount of data we had
to keep track of and store, led us to the decision of finding a partner that
would be able to provide support and services at any time, in a location that
was safe.”

Not a Slam-dunk

Although there are many compelling reasons for outsourcing, all or part of a
multinational corporation's storage infrastructure, there can be mitigating
factors.

Companies considering the managed-storage services approach have to be
prepared for a major shift in the way storage management is handled -and be
willing to give up some of the control.

“The bigger the company, the more organizational silos there are with
infrastructure both on the server and storage side that tend to be segmented,
and that can be a big integration challenge,” says Sun's Uhlir. “It may
take a fairly major infrastructure remodeling, particularly if you're looking
at an organizational change where the storage infrastructure will cover only
several lines of business instead of the single line of business it used to
cover.”

Another downside of outsourcing any part of the IT paradigm is loss of
control, because the outsourcer generally makes technology decisions on the
company's behalf. Managed-service providers tend to standardize on one set of
tools and technology because doing so keeps costs down, and service providers
are already proficient in using that set. Standardizing on tools, however, can
stifle innovation, although it can be a reasonable trade-off.

“You may have other technologies from other vendors that may give you more
of a competitive edge. But, because the outsourcer has standardized on tools and
technologies, you may not have access to them or you will pay a premium for
having the outsourcer implement them. It's about weighing your priorities,”
says Gartner's Couture.

At Reichhold today, the IT team has shrunk significantly due to the change in
storage management, but Petit believes the trade-off has been well worth it.
“Our IT department's role in storage is changed because we don't need as
many resources to manage our storage capacity, but the system is now much more
flexible and faster,” he says. “Every month we tell EDS to add a certain
amount of storage capacity to keep our servers running correctly, and it's
done very quickly. If it was done internally, we would have to place a purchase
order to buy it and take our system down during a weekend to add the storage.
This way, I can give my approval within five or ten minutes by e-mail, and I
know that within six or seven hours our servers will get increased capacity.”

Cost is another factor. Although offloading storage management may seem like
a money-saver, that's not always the case. Turning to managed-storage services
can certainly allow a multinational corporation to reduce its IT staff, thereby
saving money, but the service itself doesn't come cheap. In the end, it's
often a wash. That's the case at Reichhold, although Petit says the decision
was never about cost reduction.

Choosing Your Managed-storage Service Provider

If going the managed-storage services route seems to make sense, the first
decision is what to outsource. Should you outsource everything related to
storage or should you pick and choose?

In general, most companies would benefit from offloading backup, recovery,
archiving and replication, opine experts. But beyond that, many companies choose
to be more selective. Some companies may choose to outsource only these
functions, while others may prefer a more comprehensive approach. “The route a
company goes really depends on which functions are considered core and which
aren't,” says Couture.

The next decision-which managed-storage service provider to choose -often
falls to someone fairly high up in the organization, such as a business unit
CIO. Companies providing managed-storage services fall into several categories,
making the executive's decision complicated. In addition to pure outsourcers,
such as IBM and EDS, there are a host of other vendors that offer both managed
and hosted storage services. Prominent examples include Arsenal Digital
Solutions, based in Cary, N.C.; Unisys, based in Blue Bell, Penn.; Iron
Mountain, based in Boston, Mass. and GlassHouse Technologies, based in
Framingham, Mass.

Another category of suppliers known as managed hosting providers is working
hard to make inroads in this space. One example is Verizon Information
Technologies, based in Tampa, Fla., a company eager to use its network
infrastructure to gain market share in the areas of both managed storage and
hosted storage. Verizon Information Technologies, which gained its technology,
worldwide reach and expertise through a verger of the former MCI and Verizon,
has offered Web hosting for years, but recently, introduced storage services.

“We want to start expanding and owning the edge,” says John Tomljanovic,
director, IT Solutions Product Management. “We can manage the customer's SAN
(Storage Area Network) devices and the entire storage infrastructure. And if you
don't want to do it yourself, we will host it from our data center and manage
it that way.”

Although the growth of managed-storage services in the multinational world is
slow, it's steady and in many cases, can make a great deal of sense, depending
on the company's internal culture, requirements and expected growth.

“These service providers are better equipped to manage large amounts of
data very efficiently. They have trained people, tools and processes down pat.
So unless you've got a world-class organization, chances are that they will be
able to do it more efficiently than you can,” says Gartner's Couture.

By Karen D. Schwartz in Maryland,
USA

vadmail@cybermedia.co.in

Republished with permission from Global Services

(www.globalservicesmedia.com)