Intelligent Business Research Services (IBRS) analyst, Kevin McIsaac, has just finished a storage audit for a customer and spoke with Computerworld about what he believes is a good approach.

"By an audit, I mean not to simply come in and look at the hardware you have on the floor," he said. "You do need to know the hardware and servers, but you also need to drill into that hardware and know how much capacity is assigned to your servers. Of the capacity assigned to the servers, how much is actually used?" he asked. "The other thing is to have a look at the data or used capacity on those servers. Next is a step almost nobody does -- ask what kind of data it is. I like to talk about it in terms of storage service levels."

For McIsaac, this means breaking down the data into different categories based on the service levels the organisation expects to achieve or receive.

"Which service levels do you care about? Not I/O per second and all that technical mumbo jumbo that the technical guys tend to get lost in," he said. "It is what the business cares about -- hours of availability, recovery time, recovery point, and you need to understand if it is archive, transactional, read only, or things like streaming video.