Over the past six months, Kaercher and his IT team have completed the first part of an ongoing project to create a tiered storage infrastructure. The move has boosted data utilization rates to 80 percent, aligned business and IT objectives and created a catalog of storage services that offers business units a straightforward list of fees for storage capacity, data backup, data archive and disaster recovery capabilities.

At a cost of US$150,000, the 150-day project has improved the relationship with the business side immeasurably, Kaercher said during a session at Storage Decisions.

'You can't continue to ask for millions of dollars each year without a reason. All they [the business executives] know is they give us a lot of money to do our job and they don't understand where that money goes. It creates trust issues,' Kaercher said. 'Now they understand where the money is going for storage, and they get an explanation they can use to benchmark us against external service providers.'

Allianz Life, a $14 billion, Minneapolis-based company with 2,500 employees, has about 400 IT staffers. Kaercher's department has 160 workers and oversees three data centers and 100TB of primary storage managed by three full-time employees. That storage supports 50 IBM AIX servers, five AS400 servers and 500 Intel-based servers.

In his approach to the project, Kaercher said there was a notable difference between creating a service catalog and penning service-level agreements (SLA) for the business. SLAs amount to a contract between IT and business units for guaranteed levels of performance and availability, while a service catalog provides business units with a consolidated menu of services and associated costs that they can choose from. Kaercher also performs service-level reviews on a quarterly basis to help manage business expectations.