Darin Stahl

Info-Tech defines "best practice" as a process or procedure that consistently produces superior results. Benchmarking against peers and referencing a gold standard such as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) are proven methods to identify possible points of change. However, just because something is widely adopted doesn't mean it's the "best practice" for a specific situation.

Best Practice Vs. Common Practice

"Best practice" does not mean "best" for every organization. Instead of careful benchmarking against peers to isolate the strengths and weaknesses for a given process or practice, frequently what passes as the pursuit of best practice today is identifying only what's commonly adopted. On this basis, referencing common adoption as the acceptable criteria could mean that driving gas-guzzling SUVs is a "best practice." And remember what your mother told you, "If Jimmy jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge, too?" Of course these examples are a bit far afield, but it's a useful jumping-off point for IT leaders to consider the following real examples of best practice versus common practice.

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1. Chronic Storage Shortages
   IT professionals everywhere are facing storage growth issues. As backup windows shrink and application performance degrades, they're seeking solutions to end the crisis.
• Best Practice
  Moving from direct-attached storage to a storage area network, but understanding that data growth and manageability are issues that must be addressed beyond SAN technology. IT leaders who turn to information life-cycle management solutions and processes improve the efficiency with which data is managed. Establishing appropriate classification, security access, and audit levels for all information stored will ensure alignment of data management policies with business needs.
• Common Practice
  Blindly buying additional disks to resolve the storage crisis seeking only to move storage to cheap, commodity arrays. This approach results in end users and applications simply increasing storage requirements. Within 24 months, IT is once again looking to solve the same storage crisis.
2. Server Consolidation
   In the past, growing infrastructure through the deployment of ever-more distributed servers was the name of the game. The resulting server sprawl triggers a server consolidation trend.
• Best Practice
  Bringing mission-critical data and applications into the data center where it can be centrally managed, updated, backed up, and controlled. Reducing the number of data centers to just a handful and creating a duplicate or outsourced data-recovery facility to improve organizational resilience, smooth costs, and support agile business objectives.
• Common Practice
  Moving multiple applications onto larger server hardware and consolidated storage platforms located within one physical data center or server room. This approach tends to overwhelm aging server room environmental systems, exacerbate backup and recovery infrastructure shortcomings, and increase disaster recovery planning risks and costs.
3. Storage Consolidation
   Consolidating storage in a SAN or network-attached storage (NAS) is a critical strategic prerequisite for server consolidation, boosting availability and disaster recovery across the server infrastructure, and ultimately moving toward an efficiently managed utility infrastructure.
• Best Practice
  Treat storage consolidation as a strategic investment that will impact the entire data center infrastructure. Focus on how a SAN will eliminate inefficient storage silos, improve availability and disaster recovery, provide better utilization and reduced long-term storage capital expense, and enable server consolidation and virtualization. Return on storage investment will be measured in all of these areas.
• Common Practice
  The trigger for storage consolidation is a pressing operational issue, such as looming or present failure of backup and restore processes or a server refresh involving virtualization. This considerable investment is viewed via the lens of solving this single tactical problem (as in, we will need a SAN or NAS to fix backup or to make virtualization work). It's more difficult to cost justify the investment in terms of a single problem rather than a wider set of issues and opportunities.