Tips to Write a Better Storage Strategy

If you asked Michael Jordan why he was so successful, he’d probably tell you because he spent four hours each day to practice shooting free-throws. The fundamental basics are everything.

“You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.”

- Michael Jordan

This can be extended to all things and planning your storage environment is no exception. It is obvious as a storage administrator that you consider important parameters like device performance, storage consumption, total cost of ownership etc. to write a storage strategy. But have you given thought about basic things like understanding data growth or the importance business of data? They do have a large impact on day-to-day storage operations and thus the business. In this post, I will touch upon two points that you can consider in your storage strategy blueprint.

Analyze Your Data in More Ways than One 

Data forms the crux of your storage. So, before you draft your storage strategy you need to go through your data with a fine-tooth comb. You should have a basic understanding on where your data comes from, where it will reside, which data will occupy what kind of storage etc. It has been widely believed that in most enterprises, 80 % of data is not frequently accessed by business users. Since that is the case, then why is there a need for data to reside on a high performing storage arrays? Normally, only 20% of data is regularly needed by the business and is considered active. This allows you to place your 80% data on a lower cost solution that provides enough performance and reserves your high performing storage for active data.

Another overlooked factor is the business value of data. An employee leave balance record normally is not as important as quarterly financial projection. Understanding your data significance can help you assign storage accordingly.

The last step is understanding the life cycle of data. Information which is critical today may lose its importance in the long run. A regular audit on the data lifecycle will help you understand what data needs to be archived. In turn, allowing you to save storage space and budget. Having a good understanding of your data landscape will help you plan your future storage requirements more accurately.

Collaborate with Your Business Units Frequently

As a storage expert, running out of disk space is not an option, so staying on top of storage capacity is truly your top priority. But you may not be able to achieve this unless you frequently collaborate with the business units in your organization. With a storage monitoring tool, you can accurately predict when you will run out of free space, but that might not be sufficient. Why?

Here is an example: Consider you are planning on 50 TB of data growth for your 5 business units over the next year, 10 TB each. This is based on evaluating the previous year’s storage consumption for each business. Then your company decides to acquire a new company which needs an additional 30 TB of storage. Based on this scenario, you will be forced make a quick storage purchase, which will affect your limited budget.

By having a better understanding of the business unit’s plan, you could have made a plan to accommodate the additional storage requirements. In fact, in larger organizations, legal and compliance teams play an important role in shaping the storage strategy. These functions largely rely on storage teams to meet many mandatory regulatory requirements. Frequent collaboration with your company’s business units will equip you with the knowledge on how data is expected to grow in the future. This will allow you to understand your future storage needs and plan your budgets accordingly.

These are just a couple out of many aspects that contribute to a successful storage strategy. The two points above are subtle ones that can be easily missed if not or not fully understood. What are the other important factors that you take into account when mapping out your storage strategy? What are the common pitfalls that you faced while drafting a storage strategy? Share your experience.