6 Ways to Reduce Data Storage Cost
Content
Six Ways to Reduce Data Storage Costs and Complexity
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
Table of Contents
Storage Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Uniļ¬ed Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Flash-Based Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 Storage Management Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 Backup and Recovery Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Scale-Out Storage Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
2
It’s every IT professional’s dream: Reduce the complexity of data storage while getting a tighter handle on skyrocketing storage costs. But for decades, that’s been easier said than done. The reasons why, are well-documented: Market researcher, International Data Corp. has predicted that data storage will increase globally by a factor of 44 times over the coming decade. The sheer magnitude of that growth of data storage inevitably has been translated into higher spending on primary and backup storage, and a more diverse, complex environment. But this mountainous growth in data storage only tells part of the story. Storage has become increasingly indispensible in IT architectures as organizations of all sizes, industries and geographies look to find ways to manage that storage for business benefit and competitive advantage. Although, it’s clear that doing so requires adding significant capacity to storage infrastructure, actually being able to manage that data – back up, archive, share and even reconstruct it for a host of applications. This adds huge levels of complexity to storage hardware, software and services. Toss in requirements such as the explosion in unstructured data; security; compliance mandates; disaster recovery/business continuity, and support for rich-media formats including social media, and it’s no wonder that IT organizations are struggling to come up with new ways to reduce complexity and confront ever-tighter storage budgets.
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
3
Dealing with both complexity and cost requires new ways of thinking – and new technologies – in storage hardware, software and architecture. Here are a few ideas to help IT decisionmakers overcome these problems. 1. Storage Virtualization. For storage administrators, storage virtualization has become the holy grail of storage solutions to reduce complexity and costs. Virtualization – creating virtual “pools” of IT resources by using state-of-the art hypervisors that manage the creation and administration of virtual machines instead of physical devices – has become deeply rooted for servers for some time, and is rapidly gaining acceptance for storage and desktops. A recent study conducted by SearchStorage.co/UK said about one-third of its readers who were surveyed had already virtualized some or all of their capacity, and that figure is certain to rise rapidly, based on similar studies done in other geographies. The reason why this is accelerating is quite compelling: Virtualization allows storage administrators to combine the storage assets already within their physical infrastructure, regardless of technology, operating system or protocol. As a result, previously unused space on a specific storage system can be made available for use by another storage system already filled to capacity. Without virtualization, IT organizations had to resort to buying more disk drives – and dedicate more management resources – to accommodate capacity needs for
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
4
dedicated storage “silos,” resulting in higher hardware costs and greater management complexity. Virtual storage pools can be built and accessed on-premise through a variety of well-established virtualization hypervisors, or as a shared service (Storage as a Service) in a cloud-computing environment. Regardless of the deployment method, virtualization provides IT organizations an efficient solution that is faster, easier and less costly to deploy and manage than buying and integrating more storage systems for dedicated applications. Numerous independent studies have pointed to savings in hardware acquisition costs of about 70 percent after deploying a storage virtualization solution. This is a result of eliminating the need to buy more disk systems every time there is a spike in business activity or when a new, data-rich application like social media comes along. 2. Unified Storage. Although this technology has been around for about a decade, it is building momentum among storage architects as an efficient way to ramp up storage systems’ performance and capacity utilization without increasing complexity or cost. Unified storage is essentially a system that runs and manages storage resources from a single device, as opposed to having various storage systems operate independent of each other, often with different storage architectures, management software and network
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
5
topologies. With unified storage, the central device consolidates both file-based and block-based storage into a single platform, combining and integrating such diverse storage solutions as Fibre Channelbased SANs, iSCSI-based SAN and low-cost NAS appliances. Unified storage reduces capital expenditures by replacing dedicated storage systems for file and block storage with a single, low-cost solution (often a modified NAS appliances, for instance). It also improves manageability through the singlesystem approach, obviating the need for multiple storage management storage software and different management consoles. Storage snapshots and replication often are supported in unified storage systems, easing backup/recovery requirements. 3. Flash-Based Storage. Storage professionals looking for enterprise-class performance in a package offering low hardware acquisition costs and significantly reduced power usage versus traditional rotating memory should consider flash-based storage. Flash has long offered the advantages of extremely high reliability and superior performance because it doesn’t utilize moving parts to access and store information, making it a favorite in such applications as high-performance computing, Web 2.0, transaction-intensive environments such as financial trading and exchanges, and telecommunications. In recent
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
6
years, flash technology has made significant improvements for storage applications in both actual capacity and cost-per-Gigabyte. It also provides a very small form factor, providing significant space savings in data centers as well as much lower power consumption. It was that dramatic cost reduction that helped bring flash drives into consumer applications as USBbased storage. Until recently, the idea of an end user purchasing eight gigabytes of storage for under $20 was laughable. Now that high-capacity, inexpensive storage is possible with flash, that value proposition is increasingly showing up in server-based environments in all-sized organizations, all the way up to enterprise-class data centers. Storage professionals also will be captivated by flash-based storage devices’ ability to read data as much as 100 times faster than traditional disk drives, making it a solid alternative platform for network-based array storage. 4. Storage Management Software. Regardless of your storage physical infrastructure – SAN, NAS, directattached or unified – storage management software is the key to a simplified, cost-efficient storage architecture. If your organization is mid-sized or larger, chances are good you have more than one type of storage management software installed throughout your data centers and departments. Therefore, one of your first steps should be to take an inventory of
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
7
storage management solutions and consider a consolidated approach. That consolidated management scheme will certainly ease complexity and reduce cost simply by spotting functionality gaps and overlaps, and by automating many of the heretofore manual tasks of monitoring and managing storage infrastructure. Done properly, storage management software supports many of the different capabilities discussed in this paper, from virtualization and thin-provisioning to backup, recovery, archiving, deduplication and scale-out architecture. Today’s cutting-edge storage management platforms reduce total cost of ownership both by reducing the number of dedicated storage administrators, and limiting the amount of time they have to devote to repetitive tasks such as running backups at regular intervals and storage policy management. Be sure that your storage management software can support a well-thought-out storage tiering policy to automatically migrate data between different storage media and systems in order to reduce restore times and more efficiently utilize existing storage resources. Finally, best-of-breed storage management software will support improved uptime through advanced analytics, load leveling and real-time resolution of unplanned service interruptions.
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
8
5. Backup and Recovery Techniques. It’s long been fashionable to think of backup as high-priced “insurance” for unplanned outages, with simple approaches like mirrored disk arrays or incremental backup to tape libraries as sufficient practices to ensure a smooth transition after an unexpected event. But backup and recovery in today’s alwaysconnected, always-available economy has had to evolve in dramatic fashion for a simple reason: No organization, regardless of size, industry or technology profile, can afford to be offline for more than a few heartbeats. When organizations rely on network-accessible information for everything from processing payroll to conducting commerce, backup and recovery become vital links on any entity’s ability to stave off financial disaster. This has given far greater emphasis to backup storage system to ensure that organizations not only can recover and restore their critical data in real time after an outage, but can continue to conduct business without missing a beat. When done properly with suitable planning and execution, these new systems can actually reduce recovery and continuity costs, and can do so with less complexity than has traditionally been the case with legacy backup solutions. Take one specific technology: data deduplication. This software approach allows organizations to eliminate virtually all copies of a particular piece of data when doing
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
9
backups, focusing only on the original file in question. (Think of what happens when email directories – dozens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands containing a copy of a multi-megabyte PowerPoint attachment. With deduplication, only the original copy is backed up, thus reducing complexity, cost and time to do normal backup.) Another approach being used by IT organizations is continuous data protection, which shifts the emphasis from backup to recovery by providing additional recovery points from snapshots. This speeds recovery for critical applications, again reducing complexity and cutting costs associated with recovery and data loss. Even tape drives – for decades the de facto standard backup and recovery medium in most enterprise data centers – are making important strides in providing easier management, greater reliability, improved performance and heightened security. Today’s tape backup solutions – essentially linchpins to modern data recovery and business continuity capabilities – offer unsurpassed reliability, scalability and automation than ever. 6. Scale-Out Storage Architecture. While every IT professional is certainly familiar with scale-up storage architecture (essentially, “buying ahead” on capacity to anticipate future storage needs), scale-out storage architecture is just starting to gain momentum as a
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
10
solution to control costs and reduce complexity. Scale-out architecture (sometimes referred to as “horizontal scaling”), allows relatively low-cost storage components to be combined and configured to create a storage pool beyond a traditional disk array. It often is utilized in conjunction with a broader storage virtualization strategy, but doesn’t have to be part of a virtualization approach. It’s usually associated with network-attached storage (NAS), but increasingly is being used with larger, enterpriseclass storage-area networks (SAN) because it allows organizations to ramp up storage availability without having to invest in more and more disk systems to achieve necessary capacity. Storage administrators also are excited about the ability of scale-out storage architecture to dramatically reduce storage management complexity because this approach can make a large collection of low-cost storage “nodes” look and behave like a single, integrated storage system, whose resources can be deployed as needed when capacity demands ramp up. Conclusion IT storage professionals aren’t likely to ever face a time when storage demands aren’t accelerating by leaps and bounds. Such trends as the increased use of rich media such as video and audio, increased legal compliance mandates, and the explosion in social media are just a few
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
11
factors that will surely threaten to further bloat storage infrastructure. But with storage spending likely to be squeezed as IT budgets continue tightening, decision-makers will need to stretch the bounds of innovation to come up with new approaches to deal with both complexity and cost of storage. In some cases, technologies such as flash storage and cutting-edge storage management software will be a valuable initial step toward those goals. In other instances, architectural decisions such as virtualization, unified storage, scale-out and disaster recovery/business continuity will be essential. In virtually all cases, however, storage professionals will need to adopt all of these approaches – as well as be on the lookout for new advances – in order to deliver tangible business benefit to their organizations in spite of mounting complexity and costs.
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
12
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
Table of Contents
Storage Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Uniļ¬ed Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Flash-Based Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 Storage Management Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 Backup and Recovery Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Scale-Out Storage Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
2
It’s every IT professional’s dream: Reduce the complexity of data storage while getting a tighter handle on skyrocketing storage costs. But for decades, that’s been easier said than done. The reasons why, are well-documented: Market researcher, International Data Corp. has predicted that data storage will increase globally by a factor of 44 times over the coming decade. The sheer magnitude of that growth of data storage inevitably has been translated into higher spending on primary and backup storage, and a more diverse, complex environment. But this mountainous growth in data storage only tells part of the story. Storage has become increasingly indispensible in IT architectures as organizations of all sizes, industries and geographies look to find ways to manage that storage for business benefit and competitive advantage. Although, it’s clear that doing so requires adding significant capacity to storage infrastructure, actually being able to manage that data – back up, archive, share and even reconstruct it for a host of applications. This adds huge levels of complexity to storage hardware, software and services. Toss in requirements such as the explosion in unstructured data; security; compliance mandates; disaster recovery/business continuity, and support for rich-media formats including social media, and it’s no wonder that IT organizations are struggling to come up with new ways to reduce complexity and confront ever-tighter storage budgets.
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
3
Dealing with both complexity and cost requires new ways of thinking – and new technologies – in storage hardware, software and architecture. Here are a few ideas to help IT decisionmakers overcome these problems. 1. Storage Virtualization. For storage administrators, storage virtualization has become the holy grail of storage solutions to reduce complexity and costs. Virtualization – creating virtual “pools” of IT resources by using state-of-the art hypervisors that manage the creation and administration of virtual machines instead of physical devices – has become deeply rooted for servers for some time, and is rapidly gaining acceptance for storage and desktops. A recent study conducted by SearchStorage.co/UK said about one-third of its readers who were surveyed had already virtualized some or all of their capacity, and that figure is certain to rise rapidly, based on similar studies done in other geographies. The reason why this is accelerating is quite compelling: Virtualization allows storage administrators to combine the storage assets already within their physical infrastructure, regardless of technology, operating system or protocol. As a result, previously unused space on a specific storage system can be made available for use by another storage system already filled to capacity. Without virtualization, IT organizations had to resort to buying more disk drives – and dedicate more management resources – to accommodate capacity needs for
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
4
dedicated storage “silos,” resulting in higher hardware costs and greater management complexity. Virtual storage pools can be built and accessed on-premise through a variety of well-established virtualization hypervisors, or as a shared service (Storage as a Service) in a cloud-computing environment. Regardless of the deployment method, virtualization provides IT organizations an efficient solution that is faster, easier and less costly to deploy and manage than buying and integrating more storage systems for dedicated applications. Numerous independent studies have pointed to savings in hardware acquisition costs of about 70 percent after deploying a storage virtualization solution. This is a result of eliminating the need to buy more disk systems every time there is a spike in business activity or when a new, data-rich application like social media comes along. 2. Unified Storage. Although this technology has been around for about a decade, it is building momentum among storage architects as an efficient way to ramp up storage systems’ performance and capacity utilization without increasing complexity or cost. Unified storage is essentially a system that runs and manages storage resources from a single device, as opposed to having various storage systems operate independent of each other, often with different storage architectures, management software and network
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
5
topologies. With unified storage, the central device consolidates both file-based and block-based storage into a single platform, combining and integrating such diverse storage solutions as Fibre Channelbased SANs, iSCSI-based SAN and low-cost NAS appliances. Unified storage reduces capital expenditures by replacing dedicated storage systems for file and block storage with a single, low-cost solution (often a modified NAS appliances, for instance). It also improves manageability through the singlesystem approach, obviating the need for multiple storage management storage software and different management consoles. Storage snapshots and replication often are supported in unified storage systems, easing backup/recovery requirements. 3. Flash-Based Storage. Storage professionals looking for enterprise-class performance in a package offering low hardware acquisition costs and significantly reduced power usage versus traditional rotating memory should consider flash-based storage. Flash has long offered the advantages of extremely high reliability and superior performance because it doesn’t utilize moving parts to access and store information, making it a favorite in such applications as high-performance computing, Web 2.0, transaction-intensive environments such as financial trading and exchanges, and telecommunications. In recent
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
6
years, flash technology has made significant improvements for storage applications in both actual capacity and cost-per-Gigabyte. It also provides a very small form factor, providing significant space savings in data centers as well as much lower power consumption. It was that dramatic cost reduction that helped bring flash drives into consumer applications as USBbased storage. Until recently, the idea of an end user purchasing eight gigabytes of storage for under $20 was laughable. Now that high-capacity, inexpensive storage is possible with flash, that value proposition is increasingly showing up in server-based environments in all-sized organizations, all the way up to enterprise-class data centers. Storage professionals also will be captivated by flash-based storage devices’ ability to read data as much as 100 times faster than traditional disk drives, making it a solid alternative platform for network-based array storage. 4. Storage Management Software. Regardless of your storage physical infrastructure – SAN, NAS, directattached or unified – storage management software is the key to a simplified, cost-efficient storage architecture. If your organization is mid-sized or larger, chances are good you have more than one type of storage management software installed throughout your data centers and departments. Therefore, one of your first steps should be to take an inventory of
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
7
storage management solutions and consider a consolidated approach. That consolidated management scheme will certainly ease complexity and reduce cost simply by spotting functionality gaps and overlaps, and by automating many of the heretofore manual tasks of monitoring and managing storage infrastructure. Done properly, storage management software supports many of the different capabilities discussed in this paper, from virtualization and thin-provisioning to backup, recovery, archiving, deduplication and scale-out architecture. Today’s cutting-edge storage management platforms reduce total cost of ownership both by reducing the number of dedicated storage administrators, and limiting the amount of time they have to devote to repetitive tasks such as running backups at regular intervals and storage policy management. Be sure that your storage management software can support a well-thought-out storage tiering policy to automatically migrate data between different storage media and systems in order to reduce restore times and more efficiently utilize existing storage resources. Finally, best-of-breed storage management software will support improved uptime through advanced analytics, load leveling and real-time resolution of unplanned service interruptions.
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
8
5. Backup and Recovery Techniques. It’s long been fashionable to think of backup as high-priced “insurance” for unplanned outages, with simple approaches like mirrored disk arrays or incremental backup to tape libraries as sufficient practices to ensure a smooth transition after an unexpected event. But backup and recovery in today’s alwaysconnected, always-available economy has had to evolve in dramatic fashion for a simple reason: No organization, regardless of size, industry or technology profile, can afford to be offline for more than a few heartbeats. When organizations rely on network-accessible information for everything from processing payroll to conducting commerce, backup and recovery become vital links on any entity’s ability to stave off financial disaster. This has given far greater emphasis to backup storage system to ensure that organizations not only can recover and restore their critical data in real time after an outage, but can continue to conduct business without missing a beat. When done properly with suitable planning and execution, these new systems can actually reduce recovery and continuity costs, and can do so with less complexity than has traditionally been the case with legacy backup solutions. Take one specific technology: data deduplication. This software approach allows organizations to eliminate virtually all copies of a particular piece of data when doing
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
9
backups, focusing only on the original file in question. (Think of what happens when email directories – dozens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands containing a copy of a multi-megabyte PowerPoint attachment. With deduplication, only the original copy is backed up, thus reducing complexity, cost and time to do normal backup.) Another approach being used by IT organizations is continuous data protection, which shifts the emphasis from backup to recovery by providing additional recovery points from snapshots. This speeds recovery for critical applications, again reducing complexity and cutting costs associated with recovery and data loss. Even tape drives – for decades the de facto standard backup and recovery medium in most enterprise data centers – are making important strides in providing easier management, greater reliability, improved performance and heightened security. Today’s tape backup solutions – essentially linchpins to modern data recovery and business continuity capabilities – offer unsurpassed reliability, scalability and automation than ever. 6. Scale-Out Storage Architecture. While every IT professional is certainly familiar with scale-up storage architecture (essentially, “buying ahead” on capacity to anticipate future storage needs), scale-out storage architecture is just starting to gain momentum as a
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
10
solution to control costs and reduce complexity. Scale-out architecture (sometimes referred to as “horizontal scaling”), allows relatively low-cost storage components to be combined and configured to create a storage pool beyond a traditional disk array. It often is utilized in conjunction with a broader storage virtualization strategy, but doesn’t have to be part of a virtualization approach. It’s usually associated with network-attached storage (NAS), but increasingly is being used with larger, enterpriseclass storage-area networks (SAN) because it allows organizations to ramp up storage availability without having to invest in more and more disk systems to achieve necessary capacity. Storage administrators also are excited about the ability of scale-out storage architecture to dramatically reduce storage management complexity because this approach can make a large collection of low-cost storage “nodes” look and behave like a single, integrated storage system, whose resources can be deployed as needed when capacity demands ramp up. Conclusion IT storage professionals aren’t likely to ever face a time when storage demands aren’t accelerating by leaps and bounds. Such trends as the increased use of rich media such as video and audio, increased legal compliance mandates, and the explosion in social media are just a few
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
11
factors that will surely threaten to further bloat storage infrastructure. But with storage spending likely to be squeezed as IT budgets continue tightening, decision-makers will need to stretch the bounds of innovation to come up with new approaches to deal with both complexity and cost of storage. In some cases, technologies such as flash storage and cutting-edge storage management software will be a valuable initial step toward those goals. In other instances, architectural decisions such as virtualization, unified storage, scale-out and disaster recovery/business continuity will be essential. In virtually all cases, however, storage professionals will need to adopt all of these approaches – as well as be on the lookout for new advances – in order to deliver tangible business benefit to their organizations in spite of mounting complexity and costs.
© 2011 Oracle and TechTarget
12
