Business Transformation in Action

In a new Q&A published at SearchSOA, Dana Gardner surfaces a part of IT always pushed to the background in every sweeping paradigm change. Yet, no paradigm change could happen without it.

We're talking about storage, that is. The question is: Doesn't SOA ramp up demand for persistent storage? Actually, Dana pointed out, a well-implemented SOA increases efficiencies and improves the way the moving parts of the enterprise interact with each other. Dana makes the point that storage itself has been "service enabled" long before people thought of service enabling apps.

Indeed, the notion of storage area networks (SANs), in which storage devices are pooled and seen as one single storage device across all parts of the enterprise definitely seems to be a precursor to SOA. This may have been the first cross-enterprise technology-sharing venture, and perhaps there's a few things we can learn from the experience. For example, how does a business unit that has invested heavily in massive storage arrays share these devices with other users? Are there any chargebacks in place? How are storage budgets distributed across users?

Ultimately, the storage behind SOA will benefit from greater efficiencies, made possible by extending the service-oriented mentality to both applications and data. As Dana put it: "The biggest payback over time will be the effective use that SOAs make of these newly modernized data services. In effect, SOA makes all the major parts of IT infrastructure and assets work better together, and so the investments in storage efficiency and data rationalization and transformation may be the best examples of how the reduced IT TCO whole is greater than the savings already gleaned from the storage parts."

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