Bill Williams

Manager of Enterprise Storage Operations, Cisco Systems Inc.

Bill Williams is the Manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Storage Operations team, where he focuses on storage total cost of ownership (TCO), metrics, and operational efficiencies. Bill joined Cisco in 1998 as an ERP systems administrator. In January of 2002, Bill moved to the virtual storage team at Cisco, where he was integral in creating a dedicated Enterprise Storage Systems Team within Cisco IT. During May of 2003, the Enterprise Storage Systems Team won Cisco’s CIO Award. In October of 2002, Bill began studying the total-cost-of-ownership for storage at Cisco, and the following year, he began a consolidation project to lower Cisco’s storage TCO. As the Program Manager for the Network Storage Virtual Team from 2003 to 2004, Bill guided the implementation of SAN storage and infrastructure in Cisco’s datacenters around the globe. Bill holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Legislation ensuring corporate governance and business continuance capabilities has created many new and complex IT management challenges, particularly with regards to host and storage management. The slow-down in capital spending (coupled with recent advances in storage and server technology) has formed a unique opportunity for technology leaders to deploy storage networks and to use storage networking technologies to lower the overall total cost of ownership (TCO), and subsequently increase the corporation's bottom line.

In this session attendees will: learn what concerns are most relevant to today's datacenter managers and IT executives, review the framework necessary for a virtualized datacenter, and understand what steps Cisco has taken towards a service-oriented computing architecture. Attendees will also: learn the benefits of consolidating storage (and hosts) and reducing points of management to increase economies of scale, review the basic components of the TCO, and learn how reclaiming unused storage and CPUs lowers the TCO and decreases the number and frequency of capital purchases.

Optional: Attendees will also learn how to calculate critical financial metrics such as return on investment (ROI) and net present value (NPV) which can be used measure the impact of storage networking investments.