According to Yankee Group findings, heterogeneous storage management is a financially strategic approach to significantly lower operational costs.
The Yankee Group research is a two-part study, which provides a market survey and an in-depth look at customer case studies.
The Yankee
Group’s quantitative market survey polled 289 storage decision makers from North American companies with 500 employees or greater. These customers represented a broad range of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, education and government. All survey participants were required to have a strong role in storage management decision-making.
“”A heterogeneous storage management strategy helps customers avoid vendor lock-in, which often increases maintenance and operational costs,”” said Jamie Gruener, senior analyst, the Yankee Group. “”Third-party software that centrally manages multiple hardware platforms helps customers improve efficiency by reducing system downtime, improving labour productivity and avoiding the purchase of new hardware.””
Some of the sites the Yankee Group studied experienced a marked decrease in labour costs associated with storage operations, reducing the time necessary to handle routine storage management and vastly improving the ability to manage complex storage environments. The average internal rate of return for these customers was 81 per cent, indicating that the same dollars invested elsewhere would have to yield greater than an 80 per cent return to provide similar value. Based upon analysis of acquisition and ongoing lifecycle costs against the cost benefits the Yankee Group found the average ROI to be more than 200 per cent in three cases provided by Veritas Software.
The Yankee Group market survey portion of this study focused on storage management issues such as financial justifications, budget challenges, and customer perceptions about the value of heterogeneous storage management.
The Yankee Group’s results revealed:
- Storage systems will be a significant portion of IT budgets this year, averaging 22 per cent of the IT budget;
- More than 50 per cent of respondents believe heterogeneous storage management is an integral part of their storage management strategy. In fact, the Yankee Group survey results found that 35 per cent of storage decision-makers view heterogeneous storage management as crucial to how they run their storage environments today, and an additional 17 per cent plan to shift to a heterogeneous storage management environment this year; and
- Approximately 60 per cent of enterprise storage managers believe that heterogeneous storage management decreases storage management costs. And nearly two-thirds believe that heterogeneous storage management decreases the number of tools necessary to manage storage.
Key findings from the Yankee Group’s market survey are in line with industry trends indicating that data storage is one of the fastest growing and most mission-critical components of the IT environment for most enterprises. Organizations are trying to manage increasing amounts of data, ensure continual availability of systems and provide higher levels of service, while IT departments struggle with growing operational complexity.
The Yankee Group is a communications and networking research and consulting company based in Boston. This study was intended to help businesses understand the opportunities, risks, and competitive pressures of developing, deploying, and consuming products and services.
Results may vary. The ROI calculations are dependent upon IT configurations, company financials and other costs specific to each customer site.
