Storage optimization: we’ll help you build on what you have to meet the new demands

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By Alicia Johnson

Have you played the board game “Sorry!”? You advance each of your four “pawns” around the board until you get them safely into the home square. The catch is that if another player lands one of their pawns on the square occupied by one of yours, they get to crow “Sorry!” and send yours back to the start. Kids love it.

CIOs do not. For them it’s too close to real life, in which experts point out the shortcomings of their prior investments, highlight the coming challenges and offer solutions that send them back to the start. There must be, they think, a way to build on what they already have to solve tomorrow’s problems. In the storage game, they’re usually right. We can optimize storage systems to better meet the booming demand for more capacity, better access, faster retrieval, and better data protection while preserving the organization’s storage investments. That’s what I help storage managers do.

We emphasize the technology in Information Technology, but it’s the growth of information that threatens to overwhelm IT. It’s estimated that the total amount of digital content of data existing in 2010 was about 1 zettabyte (1 trillion gigabytes), but it will to grow to about 35 zettabytes by 2020. And more than 90 percent of that will be unstructured data like video, images, and the grist of social media mills like Facebook, Twitter, and, well, blogs that represent the emerging sources of most information. CEOs want IT to turn this information explosion into fuel for their business, so each organization must look at the options available and develop a strategy to take them from where they are to where they need to be.

My session at HP Discover 2012 presents some of the alternatives available to optimize your storage systems. I’ll discuss technologies and best practices, present pros and cons of each, offer guidelines and provide the information you need to help select the best alternatives for your organization. These techniques and best practices apply regardless of which vendor provides your storage systems. And they are all about leveraging your investment rather than starting over.

There’s no single path, because there’s no single starting point and no single destination. But the goal is to meet tomorrow’s data needs without being sent back to the start. My colleagues and I at HP Technical Services Consulting have helped hundreds of customers save millions of dollars through storage optimization. Come find out how to get started.

Read more about simplifying storage complexity and the HP Storage Efficiency Analysis.

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Alicia Johnson is an HP technical services consulting complex engagement manager. She manages a strategic consulting team focused on all aspects of the consulting services portfolios. She is a subject matter expert in data migrations, custom services assessment, and storage tiering. She has more than 13 years’ experience architecting solutions for information lifecycle management, storage and services consulting. Prior to her role at HP, Alicia was Director of IT for Vega Vista, Inc., and a consulting manager for Bain & Company, Inc. She is a frequent speaker at events like HP Discover, with more than 10,000 attendees. Alicia represents HP as a member of the Storage Networking Industry Association.