Contributing Editorial: Living The Storage Consolidation Dream, Part I

By Jerome Wendt, DCIG LLC

Having once worked at a Fortune 500 company and watched it live the consolidation dream, I knew the reality was not necessarily the dreamy experience that vendors so earnestly promised. Yes, my company reduced its storage footprint, realized a return on investment (ROI), improved storage utilization and increased system availability — all critical components for it to justify a storage consolidation initiative. However my company only began to see some of the hidden intangible costs of consolidation once the process was under way.

A major part of the problem stemmed from expectations set prior to consolidation. Departments, business units, application owners, etc. operated and managed their storage systems in a manner similar to how they managed their servers: In a distributed fashion. Managed this way, each department or business unit often had its own servers and storage so they had the freedom to manage it in whatever manner best suited them. Those units doing development, research or testing therefore could make frequent, ad hoc changes to their storage systems.