Mon, July 30, 2007 — CIO — When Marty Garrison became CTO of ChoicePoint three years ago, the storage situation was messy. That’s no small matter at a company that manages 16 billion records, such as background checks and insurance applications, eating up two petabytes of storage—that’s 2,048 terabytes. And growing. Like many IT leaders, he faced lots of data in lots of silos. “Storage had grown organically by project, and it was not managed in terms of cost. So we had eight to 10 SAN [storage area network] infrastructures as islands, none of which could talk to each other. We couldn’t share storage space across islands, and we couldn’t tier our data,” he recalls.

The silos meant there could be no cost efficiencies from bulk purchases, from better utilization of the existing storage capacity or from a unified management approach that would lower staffing needs. So Garrison created a central, common storage architecture and strategy. He removed storage management responsibilities from local Unix administrators and hired dedicated storage experts to manage responsibilities globally. He consolidated the SANs into one, reducing management costs and allowing more efficient data utilization. He pared down the vendors to just a couple for each type of technology. That let him simplify management and buy in bulk, to get greater discounts. When you buy hundreds of terabytes of storage each quarter, Garrison says, “it really does drive costs down.”

He also introduced tiering, which uses cheaper, slower drives for data that doesn’t need the highest level of availability. “Before that, we had done no performance testing to determine service requirements. The staff played it safe and got Tier 1 Hitachi and EMC disks for everything,” Garrison recalls—at nearly double the price per terabyte as Tier 2 or Tier 3 disks. Altogether, he has slashed storage costs by 40 percent, both for the disks themselves and for the management overhead. And he’s not had to significantly grow his staff despite escalating storage requirements.

Garrison is now exploring new ways to keep costs in check, including storage virtualization and single-instance storage. “Now it’s time to go into the next phase,” he says.

You must move to a simplified storage architecture to reduce total cost of ownership, analysts say. Even as the cost of new storage media decreases at up to 34 percent annually, the cost of rising capacity and service level demands can exceed 60 percent, says Stewart Buchanan, a research director at Gartner. “Enterprises need more business discipline in IT asset management of storage,” he says.