I’ve found that in many cases it is not the technical people being unwilling to maintain their infrastructure but more to the fact there is so much pressure from commercial and legal entities within companies that every change or action that could potentially have a technical side-effect needs to be reviewed, discussed, assessed and re-assessed and signed off before it is considered to be acceptable. Then this change, no matter how minute, needs to be executed in “low profile time windows” which, in a 24x7x365 economy, don’t exist anymore.

Rule # 1

The risks you take by not maintaining your storage environment increases proportional to the amount you try to avert by not doing it.

By this I mean that hardware degenerates or becomes faulty and new software defects are found on a daily basis. By not keeping up to date every CIO exposes his or her company to unacceptable risks.

Rule # 2

By not maintaining your environment you will encounter unplanned down-time. The time to recover is proportional to the time the environment is outdated. Rest assure: “It will feel that long!!!”

Both hardware and software evolve to a point they either have problems working with out-dated versions. I’ve seen environments where brand new equipment was installed next to 14 year old hardware and software and was still expected to work together. A software defect was encountered which impact the new hardware however the fix resulted in an interoperability problem which could not be resolved on the old environment. The ramifications were that both environments needed to be separated with all the administrative nightmare scenario’s you can think of.

Rule # 3

If equipment is depreciated from a business perspective replace it. If it is depreciated from a technical perspective replace it.

The technical and financial depreciation should be in line with each other. If one of them isn’t you will feel the consequences sooner or later as you can deduct from rule #2.

Rule # 4

Keep  it simple stupid. Stability is achieved with simplicity.

The increase of flexibility if hardware and software creates exponential complexity. Just because features exist, that would allow architects and administrators to think up the most impossible infrastructures, doesn’t mean they actually have to be used. As with writing books, more is less.

With these basic rules in mind lets get started.