Networked Storage

Organisations are exploring ways and means of consolidating enterprise storage. We look at some of the points involved vis-a-vis networked storage. By Dominic K

The amount of data stored by organisations worldwide has grown and Indian companies are no exception to this. The increased use of enterprise-wide applications such as ERP, CRM, and financial packages, and overall organisational growth have all combined to drive the generation of large amounts of data in enterprises.

Networked storage at India Inc has always been an area that has not, historically, received the attention that it deserves. This is due to various reasons like lack of budget, improper planning, more emphasis on other aspects of IT (security, applications), and lack of higher management buy-in.

Enterprises across verticals are moving from Direct Attached Storage (DAS) environments to SAN or NAS environments, from direct-attached tape to centralised automated tape libraries, and from native OS backup commands to intelligent backup software. Indian companies will need to optimise their storage infrastructure and create strategies to enhance business processes and operational efficiencies.

Some of the best practices by which we can reduce our storage cost and improve ROI include analysis on parameters such as:

Storage requirements

An enterprise must consider its storage requirements based on usable GBs or TBs available after implementing a particular RAID level. This factor will define the basic storage requirement for a the particular enterprise.

However, the calculation of storage requirements should be accurate. Storage solutions available now have the ability to perform storage subsystems-based virtualisation.

Virtualisation at the storage system level is the disassociation of capacity from its underlying physical disk restrictions to create large pools of storage available to multi-vendor hosts. These pools of virtual capacity can be configured as virtual disks and presented to any or all connected hosts.

This implementation of virtualisation allows more efficient use of storage capacity, with simplified management, and an overall reduction in costs. A good thumb rule will be to configure out a mix of RAID 5 and RAID 1 for storage requirements. Thus instead of configuring everything in RAID 0+1, it would be a good idea to mix and match based on performance requirements. This further optimises the required usable capacity.

Deploy a SAN

SANs are usually capable of serving a lot of servers. For each additional server deployed on a SAN there is the additional cost of dual multi-pathing software, FC cables, and FC switch ports.

Availability

It is a good idea in most of the instances to deploy a SAN or NAS based architecture in a No Single Point of Failure (NSPOF) configuration.

Point in time copies

Point In Time (PIT) copies have almost become an integral part of the storage landscape. These copies can be full copies—clones or partial copies like snapshots. While planning for PIT copies it is important to calculate the amount of primary data that needs to be copied.

So, it’s not necessary that the total usable capacity required is twice the primary data. There are efficient implementations of PIT copies available which need up to 30 percent of reserved space for PIT copies. In fact we can also have virtually capacity-free snapshots. Products and solutions are available with the help of which data is automatically migrated from expensive enterprise disks to more affordable disk-based reference information storage. This will control cost also assist in maintaining full data accessibility.

Chalk-out clear strategies

Indian enterprises needs to train dedicated Storage Administrators similar to trained database, network and system administrators a few years ago. And these personnel should work to create storage management strategies.

Companies should also look at effectively organising and deploying employees who work with these strategists as it is the most fundamental requirement for a strategy to succeed.

NAS

SAN/IP SAN