Cisco IT spends a large portion of its budget on data storage, and storage needs have continued to grow at an annual rate of approximately 74 percent. Rather than continually buy and manage more storage space, improving storage utilization helps Cisco control storage costs.

After improving storage utilization by migrating from a direct-attached storage (DAS) to a storage area network (SAN) environment, Cisco IT made additional gains by undertaking a companywide storage recovery program to recover and reuse storage space already allocated but no longer in use.

This best practices describes in detail how the Cisco IT LAN team recovered storage disk space, including:

  • Identifying the storage management lifecycle to help IT find unused storage
  • Creating metrics for identifying allocated but still unused storage
  • Transforming employee behavior in order to identify and recover wasted storage
  • Tracking the success of the storage recovery effort