Are you an IT manager improving quality of storage services while saving money?

I can help you.

How? Let me show you what you can achieve:

Functioning backup procedures always offering data to restore
Replicated data are available in the remote the location almost immediately.
Snapshots running in a snap and providing consistent backups even for databases.
And everything with ZERO or minimum investment.

Do you want it?

Even more?

Storage infrastructure ready for exponential capacity growth during the next few years?
Even with the growing amount of your data you are able to improve SLA.
New investments are directed toward technologies allowing you to be better than a competition.

Does this sound good to you?

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Why you should continue to read?

Because the data are the most important value you have.

You know these familiar situations.

You are responsible for important data. If you will lose them, the company will lose millions of income, credibility or (possibly even) break the law.

You backup all data but you feel that it's not enough. The recovery process takes an extremely long time. Procedures are complicated and include forwarding of service ticket from one team to another.

The most important data are in a huge database whose backup takes several hours. But your SLA allows losing just last hour of data in case of disaster. And you have 4 hours to recover it to the state before the crash.

The vendors are covering you with new technology offers to improve your SLA, but with decreasing RTO and RPO the cost of solution grows exponentially.

But you don't have an inflatable budget. Nobody has it! There are even pressures to save costs.

Save money! Save money! Save money!

You hear it from all sides every day, but on the other side, there are still newer and newer business requirements for new services with continuously growing quality.

The remote offices fight with limited WAN bandwidth.

The backup system is not able to complete all jobs within defined nightly time window and the backups are still running at morning when users start applications already. Such strain of disk arrays increases I/O latency above the acceptable level and your ticketing system is filling by requests demanding resolution.

The managers of important business systems are escalating the situation through your manager.

And the most horrible situation? You need to prepare a report explaining to stakeholders why your company lost the biggest customer.

Do you feel such frustrations?

Do you see yourself in such situations?

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Credit: Rolf van de Wal@pixabay.com; CC0

But the IT world could be beautiful.

Imagine the world where your nightly backup finishes before your user's alarm clock will ring.

Imagine the world where you can offer 15-minute RPO for your business critical data with the recovery time below 1 hour.

Even better: Imagine the world where business critical data (with 15-minute RPO and 1h RTO) are backed up and restored when necessary by database admins themselves. No ping-pong of recovery request between the database and the backup team.

The monitoring status of your disk arrays and backup system is completely green.

Waiting for audit and you are relaxed instead of stressed. Your regular SAP test restore finished successfully within the defined RTO.

Can you see it? Nirvana. Or never-ending coffee break (aka nirvana for managers).

Believe me; it is not sci-fi.

Such a world can exist in your company too. Even without NSA-sized budget.

If your storage and backup system fulfills all required SLAs, fulfills even future SLAs for data availability (coming with new business applications), allows easy scalability,...

Then this offer is not for you.

You don't need my service. Give a bonus to your architects and admins because they are really good.

It costs you money to do nothing.

If you have trouble to improve data availability (or even to keep the current SLA), you don't have an inflatable budget, or you hesitate about possible technology changes, then it is very dangerous to simply maintain the status quo.

Also to use the same complicated procedures, to try to extend capacity and performance with obsolete technology and to keep the current status, in this case, can have direct financial impacts:

drag down the revenue if the infrastructure is not capable of improved data availability SLA for new business applications
direct financial loss caused by data outage (within current SLA)
needless investment to scale infrastructure by brute force with currently used technology

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Credit: Christian Ferrari@FreeImages.com; License

Various areas where I can help you.

Backup/recovery procedures

You need backup/recovery procedures to be revised; removal of unnecessary parts and inclusion of steps assuring data integrity.

I will do the revision for you.

Use all features available

You need to buy an additional license for the existing system to unlock a "life-saving" feature.

I will review capabilities of your current storage and backup infrastructure.

Upgrade instead of buying?

You don't need to buy a brand new system if the old one can be optimized or simply upgraded.

I will analyze tuning and/or upgrade possibility.

Don't expand if not necessary

You might not need to increase the capacity of your network, disk arrays or backup system; You might simply need to optimize data flow.

I will analyze your main data flows and show possible points of troubles.

Is it better to have powerful hw or smart tuning?

You don't need to replace your servers or storage arrays with more powerful ones if bottlenecks can be identified and removed.

I will analyze your log files and try to expose hidden points of troubles.

Don't wait for an accident

You don't know how to prevent known bottlenecks in the future.

I will suggest the metrics your monitoring system should watch.
(Many times vendor monitoring ignores such metrics.)

Time to swap technology?

You don't need to expand existing technology if there is alternative technology offering better functionality and performance and better scalable for less money.

I will suggest what possibilities today's technologies of various vendors offer you.

Don't pay for garbage

You regularly order systems including HW modules and/or licenses you are not using. (Vendor's favorite: quote FC HBAs - each $1000+ - for pure LAN connected NAS array.) You may have thrown away thousands of dollars this way in past years.

I will compare your "shopping list" with your real needs.

Scared of RFP?

You plan a big investment in the technology lifecycle, and you have several vendors' proposals, but you are not able to decide.

I will design evaluation criteria for your RFP. The weighted coefficients will be based on your real priorities of particular features.
(Paired Comparison Analysis)

How you will save money with me?

You know that any IT investment today is in the range from tens of thousands to millions of dollars.

Every point from my service offer can save you up to tens of percent of your planned investment for this year:

You will not buy unnecessary components (HW and/or licenses)
You will buy something different that is cheaper, more scalable, easier to manage and will not become obsolete in 2-3 years
You will buy less because you will upgrade existing systems, reclaim wasted capacity, tune systems and enable optimization features
You will not buy anything at all because after all, you will start to use your systems effectively and efficiently

Every possibility listed above will save you thousands if not even tens of thousands of dollars.

You will get the exact KPI (or list of KPIs) to measure as a proof of optimization after the proposed changes.

I believe you are getting a lot of optimization offers from your current vendors and from companies they would like to be your vendor as well.

Show me packages

What's the difference between my service and competition?

Most of IT consultants are working for some big IT company. Either IT vendor or solution integrator preffering some venor (based on particular contracts and margins). They will claim you them preffered product is the best for your trouble.

My offer is unique because I will not recommend you any particular vendor.
I will recommend to you what to demand, and you will decide what vendor to use.

I will give you table of mandatory and optional features you should have and it is up to your vendor, what technology will offer you to fullfil your requirements.

I'm selling you my knowledge and experiences, not HW/SW.

Still in doubt?

Still not persuaded?

Imagine your storage and backup infrastructure in the current state:

non-stop complaints about unacceptable system response
lack of certainty that you are able to restore data anytime in order to fulfill demanded RTO and RPO
your team spending most of the productive time by restoring data using not-optimized procedures and troubleshooting and communication with customers, leaving no time remaining to work on new ideas
budget too tight for all your planned investment

And now imagine your team in 6-9 months when your infrastructure will be tuned and processes will be without any obstacles or unclear points. Imagine your manager when you show him the improved quality of services and savings in your budget.

You know that such a situation in IT is priceless.

Take the best from A-class players, modify, combine and use for your own advantage.

What packages I offer?

High-level design review

session for gathering your current high-level design, and subsequent review
session for additional questions (if required), and subsequent review
session presenting a final report with Q&A; list of possible improvements and KPIs to measure

RFP evaluation criteria preparation

analysis of current system features
analysis of demanded features
design evaluation criteria with weighted coefficients customized to your needs

Identify bottlenecks

log files analysis to detect bottlenecks
recommendation of which non-standard metrics to monitor
agreement upon the scope of the analysis is needed

We can agree on any combination of the packages above based on your requirements.

Request FREE 30 minute call with me

Future trends - don't miss your opportunity

"Storage performance bottlenecks are moving out of arrays and into the storage network, so Fibre Channel will remain the data center storage protocol of choice for the next decade."

Valdis Filks, Gartner

"NVMe adoption is still in its infancy, however, we are at an inflection point, and we are beginning to see many more models that are starting to become available to the broader market."

Jeff Janukowicz, IDC

"IT leaders need to create a data center as a service (DCaaS) model, where the role of IT and the data center is to deliver the right service, at the right pace, from the right provider, at the right price. IT becomes a broker of services."

David Cappuccio, Gartner