Tiered Storage School: Table of Contents

Tiered Storage School

Lesson 2: Aligning your business with storage tiers
The key to a successful tiered storage strategy is defining the requirements of your business data. Before you can design your new storage tiers you need to understand your application catalog and how your business uses it. This requires looking beyond the traditional IT metrics of RTO and RPO. Focusing on a broader set of key business drivers will allow you to use your storage tiers to offer the appropriate service levels to your business units while reducing overall costs. Lesson two of Tiered Storage School helps you align your business goals with your storage goals, by classifying your data. This key step starts with a discovery process to inventory your existing storage infrastructure and catalog your application data sets. Real-world examples illustrate the key concepts of application data groups, data classes and service level metrics.
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Lesson 3: Designing a tiered storage architecture
A properly defined storage architecture will give you the ability to justify spending levels for your existing catalog and future provisioning. Once you have gathered your requirements and properly classified your applications you are ready to design your storage tiers. Lesson three of Tiered Storage School assists you in storage tier design. This webcast covers tiered storage architecture, using real-world examples to illustrate the addition of new storage tiers and service level configurations. It also includes an example gap analysis and action plan for tiered storage implementation.
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Lesson 4: Justifying your tiered storage strategy to management
Now that you have designed a tiered storage strategy that matches the needs of your business, how do you justify it to your senior management? What steps should you take in the short term? How do you move forward to your desired state? How do you justify short term capital spending to reduce long term costs? Lesson four of Tired Storage School will help you make your case to management. It maps tiered storage impacts to the strategic agendas of the CEO, CIO and CFO, focusing on business benefits such as improved service levels, reduced risks and lower costs. Greg and Mike also provide practical tips on preparing your case and timing your requests -- and tactical advice on how to move turn a crisis into an opportunity.
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