'Hello!' from the the Storage Management Group

[The_STN_Guy]

Welcome to the Veritas Storage Management technical blog.  My name is Rob Soderbery and I run the Storage Management Group at Symantec, leading a team of engineers developing the Storage Foundation and CommandCentral Storage product lines. This forum is designed to feature ideas, opinions and solutions from the technical community within the Storage Management Group.  You will hear in this blog from a variety of contributors, including architects, engineers and product managers all looking to provide you with information you may find helpful.   Many of the users I speak with are wrestling with thorny storage and data management problems.  Just this week I spoke with a leading electronic banking firm looking at how to transform their storage environment.   I had a chance to speak with the storage management team leader, the server architecture leader as well as their boss -- the executive responsible for all infrastructure within the company.  One of the interesting topics we discussed was what demands were facing the storage team and how they needed to change the way they operated and ultimately the way they measured themselves. It was clear they were facing many issues -- storage growth, cost pressure, the need for availability and the need to get out of a tactical, firefighting mode.   We zeroed in on three specific challenges that if they could overcome, they could deliver on the expectations of the company.   First was the need to deliver on SLAs to business owners, who were concerned with the RPO, RTO and availability of their particular applications.   Second was the need to deliver continuous improvement of storage operations against key metrics, including OPEX, CAPEX, utilization and operational metrics such as time to provision.  Finally, they needed to incorporate new technologies, particularly to support server virtualization and new types of user content.  We had a great discussion about how they approached these challenges, the role of process and technology changes, and how the Veritas storage management products could help. In this blog we are targeting hands-on information for users that find themselves in a similar position.  I hope you will find it interesting and helpful as you look to tackle today's pressing storage management challenges.  Enjoy!