1. It’s a reality no IT decision maker likes:
the need for storage is expected to grow
at two to three times the rate of IT bud-
gets in coming years.
Some organizations, however, are finding
ways to not only increase their control over
storage growth, but even reclaim up to six and
seven figures in costs from current
storage investments.
What do their strategies have in common?
“The biggest overall issue in storage to deal
with first is visibility,” observes Steve Duplessie,
founder and senior analyst at the Enterprise
Strategy Group, a leading technology industry
analyst firm. “You need to answer ‘what do I have?’
The second issue is ‘why should I have it?’ And
finally, it’s looking at how to change processes to
gain efficiency.”
What strategies in storage control are work-
ing best? How might you benefit from them? To
find out, CIO Digest spoke with several key IT
decision makers to learn how they’re maximizing
storage capacity—and avoiding substantial costs
or turning up storage budget savings that they
can redirect elsewhere.
Improving utilization
Like many of his IT peers, Doron Ytshaki is
astonished at the rate of storage is growth.
He’s chief technology officer for Clalit Health
Systems, Israel’s largest HMO. Over 3.8 million
people turn to Clalit for care at 14 hospitals
How Companies Reclaim up to Seven Figures in Storage Costs
SOLUTIONS FEATURE
20 CIO Digest July 2009
Get Your Money
Out of Storage
By Alan Drummer

2. symantec.com/ciodigest 21
and more than 1,300 healthcare
clinics. At 200 terabytes, the
organization’s data store is grow-
ing quickly, which poses manage-
ment challenges. “Planning is
also a challenge,” Ytshaki notes.
“We try to purchase storage for a
year ahead. We add 16 terabytes
and think it will last a year, but
it’s used up in three months.”
Ytshaki is searching for an
automated tool that will help the
team locate and reclaim unused
disk space and move older, less
important data off primary disk.
“Right now, we manually scan all
the files in our system to age them
and try to move them off to less
expensive storage,” he says. “It’s a
very time-consuming process.”
Half a world away in Singapore,
Lai Loong Fong had similar
challenges—and found strategies
that solved them. As deputy direc-
tor at Singapore’s A*STAR Compu-
tational Resource Centre, Loong
Fong leads a team that manages
storage resources for 22 scientific
research institutes. Just five staff
administer over a petabyte of data
that’s expanding at 50 percent
per year and resides on 20 storage
systems from six major vendors.
To gain visibility as well as sim-
plify and centralize management
processes, Loong Fong sought an
automated storage management
and reporting solution that could
handle heterogeneous environ-
ments. He chose Veritas Com-
mandCentral Storage.
Streamlining management with
centralized, standardized process-
es has reduced administration time
by 25 percent, he reports. Most
importantly, gaining visibility into
the 20 storage systems has enabled
his team to identify and reclaim
30 terabytes of wasted SATA disk
space. At about $8.40 per gigabyte,
that adds up to $258,000 worth of
disk space this is now available.
Increased visibility has other
benefits. “We also have improved
reliability since we are now able to
immediately identify any connectiv-
ity problems with the SAN switches
or any form of failure on any of the
individual arrays,” Loong Fong adds.
“We have a heightened awareness
of our storage environment, and
we’re confident that we can catch
any issues before they become big
problems. This is particularly valu-
able in a heterogeneous environ-
ment such as ours.”
Is thin provisioning a must?
A*STAR is deploying a second strat-
egy to further reduce costs: thin
provisioning.
“You are nuts not to use thin
provisioning,” observes Enterprise
Strategy Group’s Duplessie. “It’s
‘just in time’ and eliminates forced
inefficiencies—like over allocating
or provisioning. Not all types of
thin provisioning are the same—you
need to be smart and careful—but
it’s hard to argue with the concept.”
A*STAR’s Loong Fong agrees. He
plans to use thin provisioning and
utility storage to enable his organi-
zation to give up ownership of its
storage systems to the storage ven-
dors. A*STAR will pay only for disk
space actually used. That will be a
smaller amount of space because of
thin provisioning than it would with
traditional provisioning. “We fore-
see at least a 10 percent reduction
in total storage cost of ownership,”
Loong Fong explains.
To review disk usage and moni-
tor the storage vendor’s charges,
the team will use Veritas Command-
Central Enterprise Reporter. Loong
Fong plans to have the new storage
business model in place by the end
of 2009.
Deduplication: 80 percent
less backup data
But don’t stop there; there are other
ways to reduce storage costs.
Back in Israel, Clalit faced a
challenge shared by many widely
distributed organizations: consis-
tent, reliable backups. At more than
700 of its clinics, servers were backed
up locally to tape drives. However,
reuvenkopitchinski
Founded: 1911
Headquarters: Jackson, Mississippi
Workforce: Approximately 3,000
IT Staff: About 50
Operations: More than 600 beds and
700 physicians
Website: www.mbhs.org
Mississippi Baptist
Health Systems
s
Becky Carruth (right), Director of
Information Services, and Jimmy
Touchstone, Senior Systems Engineer,
Mississippi Baptist Health Systems
July Storage Trends.indd 21 6/26/09 1:22:19 PM

3. 22 CIO Digest July 2009
prasaddurga
the process was expensive and not as
reliable as needed.
Ytshaki and team responded by
evaluating deduplication technolo-
gies. They wanted to deduplicate data
at the source. If that process could
reduce data volume enough, they
could centralize backups over their
256 Kbps WAN to Clalit’s Tel Aviv
data center.
NetBackup with its
NetBackup PureDisk
deduplication technology
met their requirements.
It has reduced the volume
of data that needs to be
backed up by 80 percent.
“For example, if all of our
300 clinics have about five
terabytes of data to back
up, we store about one
terabyte in our data center
because our deduplication
technology is reducing
data at the source—mean-
ing in the clinics—and
NetBackup PureDisk is
also deduplicating at the
target—our data center.”
Backup time is also
much faster. When Clalit backed up
to tape, a number of clinics were
exceeding their seven-hour backup
windows. However, with deduplica-
tion and backup over the WAN, the
backup window is being met easily
“and recoveries are much more
reliable,” Ytshaki reports.
Adds Enterprise Strategy
Group’s Duplessie: “We’ve seen
staggering reduction rates from
deduplication, which vary of
course, but seeing a 5- to 50-time
reduction is right in the range. De-
duplication can and should happen
all throughout the lifecycle of data,
which offers clear benefits. Where
exactly to do it or how depends on
your situation, but the closer to the
point of origin, the better in terms
of overall benefit.”
Archiving unnecessary data
To cut storage costs further, ask
three simple but profound ques-
tions, Duplessie advises:
Question #1: Is data still changing?
Question #2: If no, is the data still
frequently accessed?
Question #3: If no, should I continue
to treat the data the same way?
“These simple questions will
make a huge difference—whether
the data is unnecessary or absolute-
ly necessary,” Duplessie explains.
“Treatment is the issue, and simple
changes in treatment can have big
effects.”
This is true at Clalit. The
Microsoft Exchange databases were
full of old messages that were rarely
accessed. The system department
team tested archiving solutions and
deployed Symantec Enterprise Vault
to archive messages older than three
weeks, moving them from primary
storage to secondary storage.
Since first tier Fibre Channel
disk costs about $10 a gigabyte,
and second-tier SATA storage costs
about $2 a gigabyte, migrating old
data can make a profound differ-
ence. Clalit can potentially move 20
terabytes of email off primary disk—
reclaiming $60,000 in disk space.
Archived messages still appear
to be in user’s inboxes, and users
Founded: 2002
Headquarters: Singapore
Workforce: Approximately 3,000
IT Staff: Approximately 20
Operations: Provides scientific
computing support for 22 research
institutes, consortia, and centres
Website: www.acrc.a-star.edu.sg
A*STAR Computational
Resource Centre
s
SOLUTIONSFEATURE
Save with the Universal Data Lifecycle1
Different data staGes
1. Dynamic Online: Data is transitional
and changing
2. Persistent Online Active: Data stops
changing but remains actively accessed
3. Persistent Nearline/Online Inactive:
Data is non-changing and no longer
active
4. Persistent Offline Inactive: Data is
removed and “bunkered,” or deep
archived
To save money on storage, ask two
simple questions, advises Steve Dup-
lessie, founder and senior analyst at the
Enterprise Strategy Group (www.en-
terprisestrategygroup.com). Ask these
between stages 1 and 2, and 2 and 3:
“Did the data change lifecycle stages?”’
and “Should I do something differently
if the answer is yes?”
“If administrators ask these ques-
tions,” Duplessie comments, “they can’t
help but make simple changes that
might have big effects. For example, if a
rational person asks ‘if data is now stage
3—persistent and inactive—should I
treat it any different than it was in stage
2?’, they will most assuredly say yes. They
may or may not realize that moving the
data to a new tier or class of storage is a
good idea—but they will certainly realize
that they should no longer be backing it
up every day or week, or shipping it out to
the DR site.”
1
Enterprise Strategy Group, “A Methodology for
Driving Total IT Efficiency: The Universal Data
Lifecycle,” www.enterprisestrategygroup.com.
Lai Loong Fong, Deputy
Director, A*STAR
Computational
Resource Centre
s

4. symantec.com/ciodigest 23
can retrieve them with a double
click. As a result, archived users
stay within their mailbox quotas
and have stopped using trouble-
some PST files. Clalit plans to roll
out Enterprise Vault to the rest of
its email accounts and implement
an archival solution for SAP data.
Simplified storage saves lives
Just about every organization would
like to overhaul and upgrade its
storage—but how can the invest-
ment be justified?
Mississippi Baptist Health
Systems, with more than 600 beds,
is the largest private general hospital
in Mississippi. It was able to make a
significant investment in a storage
infrastructure by demonstrating
that the new design has the potential
to save lives. In addition, archived
patient information can be retrieved
in minutes instead of hours and the
new infrastructure, unlike the old, is
ready to scale and be compliant for
years ahead.
“A few years ago, we had hun-
dreds of servers in our data center,
and each had its own storage,”
recalls Becky Carruth, the hospital’s
director of information services.
“Ninety-five percent of our stor-
age was wasted. We didn’t have
redundancy or scalability. Backup
systems were siloed and retrieval
was slow. But in a few short years,
Jimmy Touchstone and other senior
network engineers have been able to
plan and deploy a storage make-over
that has been very successful.”
“We’re in the life-saving busi-
ness,” explains Touchstone, a senior
systems engineer. “We must get
the information to caregivers at the
speed of ‘right now’ because the
decisions they have to make may
save a person’s life.”
Mississippi Baptist worked with
Symantec Partner IBM and Syman-
tec to develop a comprehensive
storage make-over that could be
implemented in phases. The first
phase moved Tier 0 and Tier 1 data
to an IBM System Storage DS8300
enterprise disk storage system.
Medical imaging data was consoli-
dated on an IBM System Storage
N5200 disk storage system.
Phase two enhanced backup
and archiving. It consolidated five
backup libraries and three backup
software tools onto an IBM System
Storage TS3500 tape library with
hierarchical storage management
(HSM) software. “We now have one,
big, high-speed storage environ-
ment, and Veritas NetBackup and
Symantec Enterprise
Vault allowed us to
get our archive into
it,” Touchstone ex-
plains. “The TS3500
just holds data—our
compliancy archive,
including electronic
medical records
(EMRs)—protected in
a 256-bit encrypted,
write-once-read-
many (WORM) for-
mat. That means we
can ship tapes offsite
securely for disaster
protection.”
Tape vs. disk saves
The team made a
strategic decision to
make tape, not disk,
the foundation of
the archive. They upgraded the
tape library to high-performance
IBM System Storage TS1120
drives. The speed of those tape
drives make all the difference
according to Touchstone. “We’ve
seen archived medical studies that
used to take from one hour to up to
24 hours to retrieve for a caregiver
go down to a minute or a minute
and a half,” Touchstone says. This
type of speed can make a big differ-
ence in a department like surgery.”
Using tape instead of disk saved
money, Touchstone reports. “Anoth-
er storage vendor’s proposal to use
disk would have cost $900,000 more
than the approach we took to lever-
age tape with the IBM hardware
and Veritas NetBackup solution,” he
explains. “What’s more, by deploy-
ing NetBackup and Enterprise Vault
with the IBM tape system, we’ve
been able to consolidate not just one
archive solution but every one the
hospital uses. Four are in the system
now, and I’m working on the fifth.
We have 100 terabytes on tape, and
the retrieval speed is virtually the
same as if it were on disk. And my
administrative time for the system
is only about two hours a week.”
How did the team sell such a
comprehensive make-over at a
non-profit hospital? “It was broken
up in phases so we could get it
done during different fiscal years,”
Carruth explains. “And we were
able to show that if we spent this
much right now, down the line we
wouldn’t have to re-engineer this
solution. It was a long-term invest-
ment in a scalable foundation that
wouldn’t have to be forklifted later.”
Stevenjones
Doron Ytshaki, Chief Technology
Officer, Clalit Health Services
Clalit Health Services
s
Founded: 1911
Headquarters: Tel-Aviv, Israel
Workforce: 33,000
IT Staff: 450
Operations: 14 hospitals, 1,300
healthcare clinics, 3.8 million
members
Website: www.clalit.org.il
July Storage Trends.indd 23 6/26/09 1:22:40 PM

5. 24 CIO Digest July 2009
Adds Touchstone: “An IBM filer
holds our medical imaging stud-
ies. What keeps us from having
to add more filers is the ability of
Enterprise Vault to take a huge
medical imaging study, create a
stub of it, and move it off to tape
so the software thinks it’s on the
filer when it’s on tape. When it’s
needed, it’s brought back to the
filer where the software can read
it. That’s a cost-efficient strategy.
Every time we avoid having to
purchase another filer, we’re sav-
ing another $350,000.”
Set a retention policy, then
delete and reclaim
Another way to reduce storage
costs is to establish a retention
policy and to delete old data. The
Screen Actors Guild – Produc-
ers Pension and Health Plans
(SAGPH), based in Burbank,
California, is about to do just that,
and it has
plenty of old
data. SAGPH
processes
over 700,000
pension and
healthcare
claims a year
and covers over 40,000 actors
and their dependents.
“We’re about to publish
our records retention policy,”
says Kevin Donnellan, chief
information officer at SAGPH.
“Coming up with it has been
a very involved process that
included polling all the busi-
ness units. Until now, we’ve
kept all records indefinitely.”
The new policy establishes
retention periods ranging from
six months to 12 years, depend-
ing on the type of information
in the document. The retention
period will be automatically
enforced by Oracle Universal
Records Management (URM),
software which applies policies
to content in file systems, content
management systems, and email
archives.
“As our retention policies go
into effect, they could enable
us to delete as much as 10 to 15
percent of our data store a year,”
Donnellan projects. “That means
we could avoid purchasing two to
three terabytes a year, at $25,000
per terabyte. Payback will be in six
months. And having a retention
policy that is consistently enforced
across all record types will dra-
matically reduce our exposure
to legal and compliance risks.”
Standardize and centralize
backup to reduce costs
Another way that SAGPH reduced
storage costs is by streamlining
backup procedures. Ten years
ago the organization backed up
individual servers using local
cartridge drives. Backup admin-
istrators were spending 16 hours
each week managing backups, and
the system wasn’t scalable.
In 2002, Donnellan and his
team standardized backup and
recovery on Veritas NetBackup,
which centralized management
of backup and recovery across the
organization’s HP-UX, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, and Microsoft
Windows operating environments
and provided needed scalability.
Forty percent of one IT admin-
istrator’s time became available
for more strategic tasks, worth
$293,000 for the years 2000
through 2008.
The ultimate strategy:
start from scratch
When you need to think in innova-
tive ways about how to solve your
storage challenges and reduce
costs, Duplessie offers a simple tip:
walk away from your infrastruc-
ture. Think outside your boxes.
Start with a clean slate.
“Re-evaluate your assumptions,”
he explains. “Go to the white board
and draw up a workflow as if you
didn’t have all the ‘junk’ you re-
ally have. How would you draw up
data treatment policies if you were
starting from scratch? Try it. It’s
enlightening.” n
Alan Drummer is creative director
for content at NAVAJO Company. His
work has appeared in the Los Angeles
Times, San Francisco Examiner, Create
Magazine, and on The History Channel.
michaelbrunetto
> Veritas CommandCentral Storage
> Veritas CommandCentral
Enterprise Reporter
> Veritas NetBackup
> Veritas NetBackup PureDisk
> Veritas Backup Reporter
> Veritas Storage Foundation
> Symantec Backup Exec
> Symantec Enterprise Vault
Storage Sanity Checks
s
Founded: 1962
Headquarters: Burbank, California
Workforce: 200
IT Staff: 20
Operations: Processing pension
and healthcare claims for more
than 40,000 members
Website: www.sagph.org
Screen Actors Guild –
Producers Pension
and Health Plans
s
Kevin Donnellan, Chief
Information Officer, Screen
Actors Guild – Producers
Pension and Health Plans
SOLUTIONSFEATURE