Over the next two years, Kaercher's team plans to expand the project to create a virtualized infrastructure of pooled server and storage resources that can offer SLAs across end-to-end systems, dynamically allocating those resources on demand.

But the effort didn't start out smoothly. Kaercher said much of his initial strategy reflected where his department had been 'and not where we're going.'

'We had this very defeatist attitude. There was lots of hindsight but no foresight,' he said. 'There was no thought about where we were going to be in two or three years and how do we map our storage road map to the needs of the business.'

Most of the business alignment and technology rollout was performed with internal resources, with about half of the $150,000 spent on consulting from Glasshouse Technologies Inc. in Framingham, Mass., to drive documentation and processes.

To align storage services with business unit needs, Kaercher said he first had to evaluate the plans of six business units and their needs. Kaercher assigned 'service delivery managers' from his IT department to define service levels for each business unit based on the applications they use. For instance, some applications, such as transactional databases, were considered Tier 1 and automatically needed to be replicated between two data centers 35 miles apart; other applications, such as print and file services, were Tier 2 and didn't require added redundancy.