Storage managers too busy for storage management
Storage managers too busy for storage management
Oct 19th, 2004: Most managers are too busy to carry out the most important data storage management activities, according to a recent survey carried out in Australia this month.
It found that 'storage strategy' and 'storage architecture and design' were thought to be the most important storage management activities by 156 personnel in 97 large and medium sized Australian organisations.
However, in response to the question about how much of their management time was dedicated to these activities, 'storage strategy' was ranked seventh and 'storage architecture and design' was fifth.
These came behind a range of tactical functions that took up most of their time and resources.
Philip Belcher, the managing director of StorageTek for Australia and New Zealand, which carried out the survey, said: "It is a classic case of fire fighting in the way of fire prevention. Storage managers today are spending most of their time on tactical functions - managing the myriad of activities required to keep a modern storage environment running smoothly. Very little time is spent on strategic aspects such as strategy setting, designing robust storage solution and setting policies to govern the management of these solutions.
"Ironically, there are tools, policies and automation techniques available to reduce the workload for these intensively tactical areas. The catch is, it takes time to do the strategy and planning to create the environment in which this can occur, and most data storage and IT professionals are just too busy to do it."
The survey also revealed that there is a very low adoption rate for modern and sophisticated storage management tools, which could explain why so many storage managers spend their time on tactical activities.
Two in five respondents said that they used performance management/monitoring tools to assist with storage management; one in five used storage management automation tools, but only one in six used more powerful storage resource management tools.
Lack of time/resources seemed to be less of problem compared to organisational commitment.
Belcher added: "On the surface, these results suggest a lack of recognition by upper management of storage management's strategic importance. But a more likely explanation is that storage managers themselves are approaching things the wrong way. To gain organisational commitment storage managers need to speak in business language rather than in techno babble.
"Perhaps they should approach storage as a strategic issue affecting the delivery of business processes. If storage managers talked about service delivery, instead of terabytes and megabytes per second, then they wouldn't be as reliant on managers up the line translating their requirement into business terms."
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