What is Storage Management?

From a business perspective the primary goal of Storage Management is to match the value of the applications and data that use the storage, to the appropriate storage infrastructure.

By "appropriate" we mean meeting the requirements at the right price point, where the requirements are expressed in terms of performance, availability, resiliency, disaster recovery, security, auditability etc. The value of an application and data will change over time, so the storage infrastructure must be flexible to cater for the evolution of a business as its priorities change and the application portfolio evolves.

Our Approach - Storage Infrastructure Strategy Approach (SISA^TM)

The vision behind SISA is to identify classes of applications that have similar storage infrastructure requirements, and match each class to a storage tier that provides the functionality/capabilities for the right price point. Having classes of applications, and policies defining which applications fall within each class, we are able to drive standardisation in the design and allocation of storage infrastructure. 

The number of tiers of storage will be a balance between the cost savings from having an appropriately sized and costed storage tier, and the potential cost overhead that each additional tier has from a management perspective. A smaller organisation may only warrant having a disk tier and a tape tier, whereas an enterprise sized organisation may have a business critical tier, a business important tier, an archive tier and a tape tier.

To accomplish this the SISA^TM application and data centric methodology has five key phases:

1. Collection and analysis of business application and data information.
2. Identification of application classes and their policies.
3. Development of a statement of requirements for:
   1. The overall management of the storage infrastructure.
   2. Each storage tier to deliver to the requirements for its respective application class or classes.
4. Development of the High Level Technical Architecture
5. Detailed Design and Implementation

The most important phase to get right is the first one - the assessment of the value to the business of the applications and its data. RHE gather information from three key information sources within the business:

• The existing application portfolio from a technology requirement and value to the business perspective.
• Information regarding the overall environment, including growth rates, data profiles, existing infrastructure.
• Detail on future business initiatives that will impact and mould storage infrastructure requirements.

 Key Benefits to our Customers

• The customer gets the right price of storage based upon its expressed requirements.
• Because future requirements and the overall environment are taken into account, our customers have more confidence that their storage will be architected to scale and gow with the business.
• RHE is product agnostic and will recommend based on functionality at the right price point
• A holistic approach that recognises that storage infrastructure provides a service to the business, and must therefore match the demands of the business applications and data as its primary focus.
• They work with a trusted adviser who can assist with their technology roadmap.
• We understand that storage infrastructure includes also backup/recovery, disaster recovery and the network - our customers obtain cohesive advice on all aspects of their technology needs.