Storage Special: Consolidation

Modular storage—the key to effective storage consolidation

How do companies keep pace with growing volumes of information and demand for always-on, instantaneous access, while the resources to manage that information are not even close to increasing at the same rates? Will adding more storage systems solve the problem? The answer to all these issues, says Sudhakar Rao, lies in consolidation of existing storage systems into a more manageable storage architecture

In order that businesses remain competitive they are increasingly relying on information to make day-to-day as well as strategic business decisions. However, just amassing data and information is not the answer, the key lies in transforming this information into knowledge. Therefore, information has become the most valuable asset in any organisation today. But although the amount of data that is being stored and the amount of time it is kept online is perpetually growing, resources to manage the growth in data and information are not growing. This presents a considerable challenge for companies striving to exploit information for competitive advantage and storage administrators tasked with storing, managing, and protecting that data. Adding to the challenge are competitive pressures, market globalisation, customers, partners, users, and technological advances, which are all changing the way enterprises do business and use technology. With information becoming the key to success for businesses, the amount of data that is being collected (about 250 MB per person, per year) and electronic transactions are increasing rapidly, and many companies are losing ground in the race to turn available data into valuable business knowledge. Indeed, for some companies, storage requirements are doubling or tripling every three to six months.

Need for non-stop access to information

Beyond just pure growth in data storage requirements, non-stop access to information by external and internal users is becoming more important than ever. While it is widely acknowledged that unscheduled downtimes are unacceptable, companies are realising that performance is equally becoming more and more important. Recent studies indicate that an average website visitor shall wait only for six seconds for a response after the request before turning to another site.

Problem of storage (in)capacity

To meet increasing storage requirements companies need to add more capacity to their existing storage infrastructure. But unfortunately, when they increase capacity, they do not have the resources that are needed to manage these storage systems. Existing storage administrators either have to become much more productive (manage many more terabytes) or many more administrators will have to be hired. For example, according to IDC, storage administrators have to become 60 percent more efficient every year just to keep up with the growth. If the average administrator is responsible for 2 TB of storage and nothing is done to make them more efficient, it is estimated that there will be a need for more than 1.35 million administrators by 2004. Even supposing that there were enough administrators to go around, we should remember that they are expensive resources.

Need for consolidation

Adding to the storage management challenge is the fact that storage resources can be widely distributed throughout an organisation and can be server-based or external. Internal or server-based storage, as the name suggests, is storage that is located within a server. External storage encompasses all disk storage systems located separately from the server system. When storage is widely distributed throughout an enterprise, managing it is difficult. For example, if storage is a mix between internal and external and spread throughout an organisation, how is information shared? How are storage procedures standardised? Here’s the challenge. How do companies keep pace with growing volumes of information and demand for always-on, instantaneous access, while the resources to manage that information are not even close to increasing at the same rates? Will adding more storage systems solve the problem?

The answer to all these issues lies in consolidation of existing storage systems into a more manageable storage architecture. Storage consolidation holds the promise of not only supporting increased storage needs but also simplifying operations and improving resource utilisation and efficiency. By consolidating or re-centralising storage companies can benefit from storage being used more efficiently, maximisation of server capabilities, increased open floor space, lowered management costs, reduced storage devices, reduced software licenses and decreased hardware and software management costs.

Storage consolidation is centralisation of storage and allowing it to be shared by multiple hosts. It takes the shape of multiple servers attached directly to a single storage system or consolidation of the existing storage onto a SAN (Storage Area Network).

Modular storage systems

But the type of storage system that can be considered to be a candidate for consolidation is largely dependent upon the existing storage architecture of an organisation. Generally most organisations use widely distributed storage architectures, which are a mix of server-based and external storage systems. In such cases, the most ideal candidate for storage would be modular storage systems, which offer organisations buy-as-you-grow options. They scale from less than 1 TB to well over 20 TB, compared to monolithic storage, which can scale in excess of 70 TB. Most modular storage systems allow components to be removed or added without bringing the systems down. Many of the features that were previously only found on monolithic systems are now available on modular storage systems.

Vital attributes

But while considering buying a modular storage system organisations need to consider some vital attributes of the modular storage system that are key to storage consolidation projects. Since information and data volumes are perpetually growing, modular storage systems have to be scalable. It means that the modular storage system that is considered for consolidation should not only meet existing storage demands but also storage demands of the future. Generally, when higher capacity is considered performance takes a back seat. But a strategic consideration while looking for scalability of a storage system is that performance should not be compromised as the solution scales to higher capacity. The bottomline: Scalability from a storage system should be sought on two parameters—capacity and performance.

Apart from providing the required scalability coupled with performance, the modular storage system should be able to support a variety of hosts. It is because most organisations have a mix of platforms and operating systems supporting various mission-critical applications. In order to avoid some of the mission-critical applications not being able to connect to the centralised storage or for that matter the storage system not being able to support some future applications, it is imperative that the modular storage system implemented should provide the widest connectivity possible.

Further, the modular storage system should be able to provide maximum terabyte capacity per footprint. This is the method used to estimate the amount of real-estate space a storage system requires. Environmental constraints form an important parameter that is considered in storage consolidation. Factors like power consumption and floor space become an important parameter during storage consolidation. Therefore, while choosing a modular storage system, the amount of data that can be packed within a specified floor space should be taken into consideration.

Besides, one should understand that storage consolidation is more than replacing old storage systems with new ones. It involves moving data from old systems onto new ones. Therefore, data migration becomes an important part of any consolidation strategy. For a successful consolidation project careful data migration planning must be undertaken. Prior to the implementation of any new storage system a careful analysis of the existing storage environment needs to be done and specific plans need to be drawn in order to implement a storage consolidation system. A successful plan will ensure that the migration project is accurate and efficient, reduce the frustration involved with the migration of data between dissimilar environments, and decrease the risk of data loss or corruption during the migration process.

Therefore, it is clear that in order for an organisation to avoid the complexities of managing increasing data and information growth in storage systems, it should go in for consolidation of the storage system. Consolidating storage resources with modular storage systems can help meet the challenges of efficient management of rapid data growth and improving an administrator’s productivity, without impacting availability and performance. Consolidating onto modular storage systems can simplify operations, reduce TCO, and improve productivity and resource efficiency.

The author is technical consultant with Hitachi Data Systems. He can be contacted at sudhakar.rao@hds.com