Educated storage specialists and technical analysts have often commented on the elegance of NetApp's Unified Storage Architecture. Some of them value the ability to design, build and operate a single storage system using the same on-disk format for simple scalability of entry-level storage requirements all the way up to the high-end; or even back down again when necessary! Others focus on our integrated abstraction layer which enables logical application-oriented storage provisioning & management on top of physically limited storage devices such as mechanical disks or wearout-prone flash storage. This powerful abstraction layer also offers admirable built-in data protection capabilities and an ultra-popular holistic storage efficiency feature set.
Despite all this goodness, a value recognition gap exists between technology elegance and technology purchase criteria. Fortunately this gap is rapidly closing, all thanks to recent business trends resulting in the welcome advent of Storage Viagra.
Accidental IT
Until recently, business and resulting financial realities driving the funding for data storage requirements never aligned well with the appreciated storage elegance from NetApp. Accidental IT meant the often uncoordinated application-driven priorities of various business units within most organizations influenced IT to create silos of dedicated physical infrastructure. Once adequate computing power and bandwidth for said applications was determined, the final infrastructure decision usually came down to the capacity of storage required to keep the application(s) running.
When purchasing storage capacity in support of an application, Accidental IT devoted little if any thought to operating, managing, optimizing, protecting, or archiving the data since that was often tended to by different entrenched departments, where they existed at all. Consequently, price per primary storage capacity quickly floated to the top as the major (if not sole) criteria by which to evaluate bids from storage vendors. Tangible things such as storage arrays, switches, HBA's and associated software licenses were known as the all-important "hard costs" to list and compare.
Enter the Cloud
The lingering recession combined with environmental realities of data centers are now driving the most influential business trend impacting IT in recent memory. Accidental IT is no longer acceptable. Infrastructure planning and optimization now leads most strategic IT discussions, with application requirements often conforming to a designated and shared infrastructure, rather than dictating it.
Operational costs ranging from staffing requirements, service-level agreements, floor-tile consumption & rack power / cooling specifications are finally being recognized as the true long poles in the long-term IT tent. Cloud Computing is the trend driving these new considerations.
Rise of the "Soft Cost"
All of a sudden, technology elegance has recognized value! Aside from lower non-recoverable costs of simpler up-front system design, Unified Storage supports a much wider range of application requirements over low-cost networked storage protocols. Unified Storage also enables the consistent operation and management of the entire data lifecycle (storage, business continuity, protection & archiving) with less staff and physical equipment. A single, feature-rich storage architecture is easier to automate. Storage automation is a key component of agile infrastructure, one of the most compelling business benefits of Cloud Computing. Consistent storage efficiency implementation (such as common RAID, Thin Provisioning, Cloning, Replication & Deduplication functionality which scales throughout the entire product-line across any protocol) instantly reduces operational costs - and keeps them low throughout the entire asset utilization and depreciation period.
How you can benefit
Seizing the opportunity upon us, NetApp has endeavored to reinvigorate an often mundane and outdated Storage RFP process commonly resorted to by Accidental IT departments. Visit www.netapp.com/rfptools to see how you should evaluate your storage vendor(s) of choice against the 7 criteria of storage success for the new business reality, then join the discussion in our brand-new RFP Community! http://communities.netapp.com/community/products_and_solutions/rfp_community
Seven Key Buying Criteria for Shared Virtual Infrastructure:
- Unified Architecture: A multi-protocol architecture along with a unified set of tools and processes greatly reduces complexity and drives down costs.
- Scalability: The ability to scale instantly in multiple dimensions: performance, capacity, and operationally, is essential to meet business demands.
- Integrated Data Protection: It’s not only important how a solution delivers data protection, but how it automates it, so customers can “set it and forget it,” no matter how large they scale.
- Non-Stop Operations: IT administration should be quick, seamless, and completely transparent to users.
- Secure Multi-Tenancy: To reap all the benefits of a shared infrastructure, customers need solutions that provide secure, end-to-end, multi-tenancy across applications and data.
- Storage Efficiency: Storage efficiency requires solutions with a combination of capabilities that maximize operational, organizational, and business efficiency.
- Service Automation: Improved processes and solutions should enable IT to manage everything with the push of a button.
Accidental IT becomes Progressive IT
With the newfound influence of "Soft Costs" becoming suddenly tangible alongside (if not above) formerly exclusive "Hard Costs", a new Viagra era of Storage is surely upon us 
