Paquet says, "The storage management organization is the most critical component of any storage management solution." In other words, what jobs storage administrators do and how they relate to other business units of their corporation is more important than the storage devices. Here's why, according to Gartner:

• IT organizations that don't have a dedicated storage management team will experience at least a 50% increase in storage-related costs;
• Every dollar spent on storage hardware results in $3.50 spent on personnel costs;
• Aggressive capacity management will reduce storage acquisition and management costs by 30% to 50% through 2004; and
• Storage management projects that don't provide dedicated staff to the project are two-thirds less likely to achieve project goals and ROI targets.

				Three ways to organize storage
				Source: Gartner, Inc.

The message is clear: Gartner is telling CEOs and CIOs that storage should be viewed as a competitive weapon. Of course, that leads to the question of how best to organize a storage department. That's the question, Paquet says, he's asked most as a Gartner analyst.

Paquet lumps storage job functions into three models (see "Three ways to organize storage" sidebar): The System Administration Model (SAM), the Storage Technician Model (STM), and the Storage Management Model (SMM). The SAM represents how companies without a dedicated storage department take care of their storage chores. Under this model, IT system administrators jump in when needed to do the storage heavy lifting projects and also manage the routine day-to-day storage tasks. Though the system administrators are responsible for all the storage jobs, no one owns storage. A company gravitates toward the Technician Model as they accumulate direct-attached storage (DAS) devices. DAS tasks are well defined, but again, the people doing these jobs don't reside in a separate storage department within the IT organization.

With the recent movement toward SANs, companies are starting to create a separate storage department within IT, which Gartner calls the SMM. Under the SMM there's a consolidation of tasks within this storage group. This is also the model responsible for project management, interacting with the company's business units, creating internal SLAs, budgeting and implementing new products and storage technologies. In other words, the SMM owns storage and isn't only responsible for making sure that the storage tasks get done, but - and this is where the savings Gartner says will come in - that storage is performing at the highest level possible. For example, newer technologies that may save money are actively being investigated, and there's constant communication with the company's business units regarding their storage needs and levels of service.

More career opportunities will open up as companies form separate storage groups within their IT departments. These new positions will have a much larger management component and require the ability to see storage as a big picture item. It's an exciting time to be in storage.