Agencies throughout the federal government are under steady pressure to move forward with infrastructure simplification initiatives. In recent weeks, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have issued reports that call on agencies to accelerate initiatives to use new industry best-practices and harness new information technologies to transform their operations. As agencies respond to rising pressure to consolidate infrastructures and implement new more agile business processes, the role of storage technology - and its ability to support these new environments in a secure but flexible manner - is receiving more attention among the senior ranks of IT professionals.
- According to a Larstan Business Reports survey of 142 IT professionals from 37 federal government agencies, 86 percent of respondents reported that the role of storage solutions is growing in importance because of the aggressive implementation of E-Government initiatives.
- And yet, respondents also made it clear that the storage infrastructure underpinning government operations today does not support the strategic direction that government is taking. Less than a third of the respondents, 32 percent, believed that their agencies' existing storage infrastructures are positioned to support the E-Government mandates from OMB.
According to industry analysts, the acquisition costs of storage technology - the physical components and software licenses - represent between 12 and 20 percent of the total cost of ownership in a storage system. "The balance of the cost is consumed by the integration and management efforts associated with making those resources available to business applications," says Marc Farley, president, Building Storage, Inc.
To mitigate these integration costs, a new approach to managing storage in a more strategic manner is being examined by the federal technology community.
Analysts and government IT professionals agree that momentum over the past several years has been building to move away from Direct Attached Storage systems - which are architecturally inflexible and difficult to manage in a distributed computing environment - toward open Storage Area Networks that can serve a variety of enterprise applications in a more flexible manner by harnessing the power of virtualization and automation.
...IBM Responds to New Strategic Storage Imperatives
By using storage virtualization and storage automation technologies that allow storage networks to function as "virtual storage pools," IT professionals in the federal government can provide continuous, managed access to application and end-user data. These strategic management systems for SANs allow IT administrators to make storage resources available (provision storage) dynamically when and where operational developments warrant.
These were among the features unveiled last week at the GigaWorld Conference in Orlando Fla.- where IBM announced its TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning. This offering from IBM automates and simplifies manual storage capacity provisioning, making it possible for organizations to reduce the amount of time and resources required to provision storage capacity as storage demands grow or shift across the organization.
The approach IBM is taking ties individual storage provisioning tasks into a series of flexible, automated workflows. This results in a fast and repeatable method of provisioning storage resources and reduces the possibility of human error. Agencies can customize these workflows to accommodate their own unique needs and business policies as well as build in manual checkpoints for monitoring the provisioning process.
"With IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center with Advanced Provisioning, traditional manual tasks that require up to 50 steps and take days to complete can now be reduced dramatically," says Laura Sanders, vice president, IBM TotalStorage Open Software. "By consolidating cross-discipline processes into simple workflows, enterprises using the solution can increase efficiency and help save time and money while moving toward an on demand storage environment."
For more information on the Strategic Storage Strategies in the Public Sector, please visit www.larstan.net/1/StrategicSectorPublicStorage.
NOTE TO EDITORS:
This report was produced by Larstan Business Reports, an independent reporting agency based in Washington DC. The research cited in this report was funded by IBM. Information herein is available under "fair use" terms to editors and reporters with attribution to Larstan Business Reports as the source of data and analysis.
Quelle: Business Wire, 24.05.2004
