You can achieve considerable cost savings if different tiers of storage are parceled out to business units on a pay-for-use basis.

Running storage as a centralized service has been touted as a good way to reduce costs, simplify storage administration and aid in compliance, but most companies are still far from parceling out storage to different business units in the way an electric company delivers electricity to homes.

Going from a distributed to a centralized storage infrastructure, which is needed to dispense different levels of storage services throughout the company, typically entails a multiyear effort that requires overcoming people, process and technological issues. Not all CIOs and IT managers are ready for such a radical change and, in some cases, it takes a revamp of the entire IT organization to make it happen.