TheInfoPro

By Khoo Boo Leong
25 September 2009 | NetworkWorld Asia | Original Article

Regardless of the economic climate, the cost of managing storage and the amount of storage enterprises have to …

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21 September 2009 – One of the things that we get asked about frequently are benchmarks for staffing. In essence, they want to see if their organizations are optimized and how they compare to other companies. In my prior roles, I have been asked for this information countless times but it has always been very hard to come by for a variety of reasons.  We decided to take up the challenge and we recently completed our first Organizational Dynamics study. This initial study, which focused on F1000 storage organizations, had two main components focusing on both the current state and future state. In the current state, we focused on staffing, functional roles, costs and key metrics. In the future state, we asked participants a number of questions about how they view the evolution of their organization given changes in technology.
 
My initial impression of our high level findings was that the results were all over the map. In other words, there appeared to be room for improvement. However, upon closer inspection we started to see trends and clusters. For example, larger shops (those with more than 2PB) tended to be the most efficient based on several metrics, while smaller shops were less efficient. In other words, scale plays a significant role in organizational optimization. Certainly there is room for improvement but each organization is different and various factors, such as capacity, have to be taken into consideration. Other interesting findings included:

• There is significant disparity in TB/FTE ratios–13TB/FTE at the low end to 1,000TB/FTE at the high end. A plurality of respondents has 100TB-149TB per FTE.
• There are substantial cost differences in FTE costs per TB–The range of FTE cost per terabyte was wide, going from $116 per TB to $10,000 per TB.
• Systems and networking architecture groups will remain separate, but combined groups are expected in three to five years for some–Eighty-seven percent (87%) of respondents said their systems and networking architecture groups are separate; 58% said they do not expect the two groups to combine at all.

There were many other findings identified and we also segmented the findings into large, medium, and small shops in order to give a more targeted view of the critical metrics.
 
If you are interested in more information on this subject we are conducting a webinar next week -  The Business Side of IT: Mitigating Operational Staff Cost Challenges and Structural Shifts in Storage Organizations - where we will go through this report.  To register for this webinar, please go here.

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By Kevin Komiega
18 September 2009 | INFOSTOR | Original Article

Apologies for the blog title, but the recent tsunami of Beatles media hype has Abbey Road rattling around in my head. …

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New York, NY – September 16, 2009 – TheInfoPro, an independent research and advisory company for the IT industry, released today its first Organizational Dynamics study for storage organizations. …

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15 September 2009 – Based on respondents to our Networking Wave 6 study, meeting internal customer expectations for sufficient and reliable network performance is second only to network security among the pain points they deal with.  Expectations that their wireless LAN perform as well or better than wired networks is among the new criteria enterprise customers use to judge their organizations IT infrastructure.  Now that the IEEE has formally adopted the 802.11n standard for the next generation wireless standard it would appear that the enterprise networking pros are set to move quickly towards adoption of this standard in an effort to address this pain point.  In response to questions about their wireless infrastructure, Networking Wave 6 interviewees collectively we saw adoption of Next Generation Wireless Solutions top the Heat Index in Wave 6 while nearly tripling in numbers citing having these solutions in use currently to just under 20% of respondents (18%).  In addition, citations for future adoption are indicative of a large pent up demand as an additional 36%, or double the current adoption rate, have 802.11n adoption plans in the next 12 months.  Cisco and Aruba are among the most frequently cited providers of Next Generation Wireless Infrastructure but the competitive landscape is likely to get more crowded given the adoption of the final standard by IEEE.  Future spending citations for Next Generation Wireless solutions moderate but are still strong as 60% of respondents indicate higher spending for such solutions in 2010.

With the advent of 802.11n it may now be time for organizations to consider moving to a totally wireless infrastructure as speeds and capacity might now allow for this cost savings measure that has been long promised but yet to be achieved.

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