The human factor

10 February 2006

A look at the human factors involved in storage management.

Storage has a people problem. According to Horison Information Strategies, annual storage growth rates are rising at over 50% to 70%, yet the capacity that any storage administrator can handle is only rising by 20% to 30%.

Imparting knowledge

Automation may be one key to bridging the people gap in storage, but organisations also need to invest much more in storage education. Certification of technical skills is a critical element in that effort, some storage executives believe. Just compare the 30% to 40% increases we have seen in the certification of security personnel with the low level of activity in storage certification, says David Foote, president and chief research officer at HR consultant Foote Partners.

The skills shortfall is growing says Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies. That situation is underscored by the fact that no university yet offers a degree in storage or storage management, he adds.

But education should not only be focused on the storage professional. Companies are placing more demands on the way employees handle information, something that has led to a mentality of 'if in doubt, keep it - and keep it for ever'. That has caused vast growth in the numbers of emails, PDFs and office documents that users now want to store - not to mention storage-hungry personal files such as MP3s and photographs.

This calls for users to be taught what they need to - and what they are allowed to keep - and for that process to be policed.

At the same time, there is still an acute - and growing - shortage of storage specialists.

According to cost of ownership specialist ITCentrix, the staff element is the largest single cost of storage - no matter whether the infrastructure is based on direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN). With DAS, over three-year storage, the staff costs represent over 80% of the total cost of ownership. But even with NAS systems and SAN systems, says ITCentrix, the people cost still accounts for around 40%the total.

Indeed, in most environments, the storage systems cost is often less than 30% of the overall spend - and that can be written off after five years, says Peter Coleman, MD of Infinity I/O, a supplier of storage networking education. In contrast, personnel costs are ongoing and only ever on the increase. "Its not just about managing more for less, its about managing more with less," says Coleman.

Automation is the only answer that conundrum. "Automating storage can dramatically reduce the cost of staffing and increase production tenfold," says Coleman. A survey of 200 IT managers by Protocol Market Research found that by using better tools in the planning and implementation of new storage applications - a stage that consumes up to 50% of staff effort - companies can save 25% of their storage personnel costs. Similarly, they could reduce effort spent on moving and migrating data - which currently takes up 20% of personnel effort - by around 40% if they automate the process. Other areas are ripe for further automation, including critical functions such as information archiving and back-up.

And user experience backs that up. As part of its move to a SAN, UAL Loyalty Services, the portal for United Airlines and United Cargo, found that their storage provisioning time dropped from 12 days to just four hours using management software from CreekPath Systems.

Even though they are shooting at a moving target, organsiations and the industry have got to tackle the issue. "It's the 'perfect storm'," says Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies - Storage management falls further behind while the value of data and the digital data stored grow exponentially.