Think strategically, not tactically, to
achieve full benefits of storage consolidation.
As storage growth rates continue to climb, issues such as rising
power consumption, inefficiencies stemming from storing duplicate
data files and the lack of budgeted expenditures for data storage
are negatively impacting network storage environments at companies
around the globe.
Analysts generally peg the annual storage growth rate at 50 percent,
and they expect it to maintain that pace at least through 2010.
Legal requirements mandating longer periods of data retention and
the boom in video and other rich media content are among factors
fueling the growth.
In a recent Storewiz survey of hundreds of network administrators,
system managers and other IT personnel, 82 percent of respondents
said their companies do not have the budget for storage expenditures
in the current quarter. Nevertheless, 74 percent say they remain
interested in reducing the size of stored data and management time
by at least one-third.
Controlling Costs and More
With fewer IT dollars to spend, many organizations are looking
to manage growth while also controlling expenses through strategic
storage consolidation strategies. Storage consolidation is the
pooling and provisioning of shared storage resources, and it is
proven to help organizations dramatically reduce the maintenance
cost of proliferated storage and more fully utilize existing storage
assets, thus decreasing the need for new storage expenditures.
In a storage consolidation white paper, IDC analysts also argue
that consolidated storage improves the quality of services that
IT can offer.
“Efficient and flexible storage systems have a direct impact
on key business indicators,” the analysts wrote.
“Top-line
revenue is enhanced when IT can provision storage quickly to applications
that support new product offerings, better supply chain management
and quality customer care. Consolidated storage systems reduce
indirect costs, which are well known to be onerous in IT infrastructure
investments. These systems are designed to provide the availability
and scalability that keep enterprise business systems up and running
through periods of growth and retreat.”
The Storage Pool
Networked storage is the primary architecture for consolidated
storage. Networked storage pools storage across servers, allowing
applications to share capacity and breaking the direct relationship
between servers and storage disks. IT managers can provision or
reserve storage for a particular application or server from their
management console and redeploy that capacity in a matter of minutes.
Organizations can further refine their storage consolidation strategy
with virtualization. By building an abstract layer above the physical
storage, virtualization creates a shared pool of storage that is
presented to the operating system, applications and users. By sharing
storage resources among applications rather than reserving empty
storage space on a server for an application that may never need
it, administrators can dramatically improve upon the typical 40
percent to 50 percent capacity utilization rates that typify most
IT shops.
To date, however, most organizations have taken a highly tactical
view of storage consolidation. Solutions have been implemented
to address very specific areas of concern — such as reducing
the number of Microsoft Exchange servers with attached storage
or trimming their total number of storage arrays. While such consolidation
represents an improvement and will result in some savings and efficiencies,
the benefits are limited to those particular storage silos.
The Big Picture
After achieving the initial benefits of such targeted solutions,
organizations need to adopt a more strategic approach to achieve
the full benefits of a consolidated storage architecture. That
means developing strategies that view the IT environment as a whole
and encompass all elements, which can be broken down into three
broad categories:
- Physical devices. This includes servers, arrays
and all networked storage hardware. Most experts agree that this
is the logical starting point in any consolidation plan.
- Application data. This includes Microsoft
Exchange, databases, Web content, file data, archive and compliance
data, production applications — any system requiring the
storage of data.
- Management tools. Many tools are used to manage
different arrays and servers, and they all have their own interface
and learning curve. Consolidation here is designed to reduce
the number of tools the organization must license, deploy and
learn how to use.
There is no end in sight to the ongoing expansion of data storage,
and it places an undeniable strain on IT budgets. The cost of managing
and supporting storage continues to be at least twice the initial
capital expenditure, and managers are under increasing pressure
to improve capacity utilization while bringing down skyrocketing
data center energy costs. Storage consolidation can help address
these issues, particularly if it is incorporated as part of a long-term
strategy rather than a one-time fix to a tactical problem. Because
data growth is an enduring issue, organizations would be wise to
look at storage consolidation as a continuous process that requires
strategic planning and ongoing attention.
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