ASK THE EXPERTS

How has the emergence of storage in the IT mix impacted the role of system administration and training?
by
Jay Kramer
VP Worldwide Marketing, iStor Networks

Over the last decade, storage has become an ever increasing percentage of the IT budget not only in CapEx for hardware but more significantly in OpEx for the IT professionals to manage storage. Just the phrase "network storage'' portrays two different skill sets that have been combined into one job responsibility: network management and storage management with the career opportunity as a SAN administrator.

Until the emergence of network storage technology this past decade, this position did not even exist. But now it represents one of the most important IT positions within a company. The SAN administrator is responsible for the access privileges, privacy safeguards, security and long-term data protection of the company's information assets. Storage networking has created a need for a whole new skill set, level of expertise and knowledge base in an IT organization.

The interrelationship of storage and networking has consigned a whole new dynamic to IT administration for initial deployment, ongoing change control and configuration management along with performance tuning and troubleshooting.

iStor has addressed this challenge of storage administration three ways:

Intuitive Out of Box Experience

iStor systems were designed with the objective of a simple GUI for a straightforward installation of storage on the network. Ease of use is paramount in taking the complexity out of performing these storage administration tasks. iStor also architected a storage virtualization software package that makes it easy to perform the tasks of configuring storage, setting up RAID storage management and controlling all the changes to the ongoing environment.

Multiple Levels of Training

We provides training alternatives to meet the specific needs of our customers:

Level 1 Overview - Introduction to the GigaStor product family and overview of our GigaStor architecture along with features and capabilities of the product.

Level 2 Technical - Hands-on education on the GigaStor, including how to install and configure the product.

Level 3 Technical - Advanced skills development with the GigaStor and iSCSI for performance tuning and optimization, troubleshooting and resolution techniques.

Best Practices

We provides our customers with additional educational materials beyond high-quality user documentation through other educational avenues such as:

• Whitepapers
• Technical briefs
• Web-based knowledge support systems

These are vehicles designed to endow our customers with iStor best practices and constantly enhance the subject matter expertise at the customer site.

So often we look at price, performance and product features as the primary competitive differentiation for customers looking to invest in a storage product, but quality training and educational services are truly one of the most essential ingredients for achieving a successful storage solution experience.


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