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Contributed article by Ron Smith, vice president of sales and marketing, iWave Software

2013: Storage Gets Some R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Let's face it. If you're a storage administrator, sometimes you feel like the Rodney Dangerfield of your organization. You're a core part of the IT team, sure, but you haven't gotten the respect that those working on bleeding-edge technologies like cloud and big data get. However, you're a critical part of the team, and you make these technologies hum.

Storage becomes a respected part of business critical projects in 2013

Storage is the critical path for big projects within the enterprise, including those cloud and big data projects. The database team can't get enough of it; the cloud team needs it in 45 minutes or less; and application developers are beating a path to your door, because they feel their requests are the most important.  We know storage is a complex beast, but do they?

Their requests very well may be important, but you have to work each storage request separately, taking them in order and by priority, to ensure that one fulfilled request does not cause something else to break. You want to expedite delivery, but you're drowning in storage requests and your pleas for additional staff haven't paid any dividends.

There's a huge gap between the amount of storage and the available resources to manage it. Each group wants its storage requests fulfilled quickly and won't tolerate days' worth of delays as you work through everything. In order to meet the requirements of end users who demand near real-time services, you're going to need to do something. Storage automation is that something.  There's been a lot of focus on automation throughout the entire data center - at the server, operations and network levels - and the time has come for storage to join these ranks.

End users are given the illusion of control

Automation strikes fear into the hearts of storage administrators, as they don't want to give up control of their environments. But when you control storage offerings through role-based access and policy-driven services that you define and maintain, you can easily serve storage up to end users while resting easy.  What's in it for you? You can delegate mundane provisioning, reclamation and management tasks; get impressive service level agreements (SLAs) on management dashboards; and become associated with strategic corporate projects, not just operations.  So, let end users order their storage within the boundaries and parameters you set. Their storage requests are processed quickly, but you remain in control of the entire process.

Storage gurus get the respect they deserve

Automation tools will help you become more efficient and offer better SLAs to your internal end users, and you'll become even more of a strategic team member responsible for executing critical business projects.  Storage automation gets you the respect you have rightfully earned.

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About the Author

Ron Smith is vice president of sales and marketing for iWave Software. A former rocket scientist, Ron holds a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Purdue University and a Masters of Business Administration from The University of Houston. He has more than two decades of experience in selling and marketing commercial and government software products, and he has deep experience in storage and data center operations.