Smart ways to store

Thin provisioning
One of the newest storage concepts, thin provisioning refers to the ability of storage software to allocate capacity to different users in a single storage area network (SAN).

Inflexible allocation of capacity according to corporate hierarchy or department requirement has proven one of the greatest sources of overprovisioning and underutilisation in SANs.

Now thin provisioning promises to end the silo structure at the back end.

"Traditionally, IT departments would forecast how much space they needed for each application on a three-year basis and from day one, the storage would be carved up in the buckets people asked for, with no opportunity to change, only to wipe and bring it back," explains Morris. "This created a lot of unused storage and perpetuated itself, because in the next three-year cycle, they'd ask for more just in case."

Thin provisioning compensates for the need for flexible allocation while keeping track of usage by application
or client.

FlexVols (or flexible volume tools) allow managers to shrink or grow storage volumes with simple commands while the system is running.

"When we combine deduplication and thin provisioning we are actually able to get utilisation beyond 100 percent," Morris claims.

Other novel terms include thin replication, FlexClones, snap mirror and snap vault which individually or combined promise further storage optimisation.

Gold says the bottom line is that through thin provisioning "some customers have reduced the amount of storage they had to buy by 40 percent".

Storage as a service
Symantec has joined the chorus of vendors professing the virtues of storage optimisation by launching a new campaign titled "Stop Buying Storage".

David Dzienciol, senior director, enterprise sales and partners, Pacific region, Symantec Australia, says customers must employ the best tools to maximise their existing assets and should defer any future storage investment until the financial storm has passed.

That might also be the time when Symantec's North American storage-in-the-cloud service becomes available in Australia, but Dzienciol won't be drawn on when that might be.

"Certainly there is a trend towards a cloud service," he says, adding the vendor is exploring ways to bring the Symantec Protection Network (SPN) - an 18-month-old online backup service - down under.
He says a Symantec survey of companies' IT plans last year found 64 percent were looking at using cloud services in some way. "SaaS are a way to manage cost, reduce risk of patches, reduce the need to acquire software and satisfy demand issues. But our goal this year is to help customers utilise the assets they do have onsite," says Dzienciol.

"The opportunity in 2009 will be ‘how do I get more out of what I have?'," he says, suggesting software tools such as Symantec's Command Central Storage as a solution.

"Where the customer already has the tools we are working with our partners to help them better understand the technology, reclaim and repurpose the storage. We are spending a lot of time communicating this message to our partners for them to turn a challenging economic time into an opportunity for them."

Strategic consulting
Queue the opportunity for consultants to enter the storage market. Are customers using all the storage they have? Could they use it better? Is replication more efficient than deduplication? How much time and resources are wasted re-storing data that is not needed or not managing data that is crucial? These are only some of the questions a new consulting service by Hitachi Data Systems promises to address.

Under the umbrella of "Storage Economics", the vendor is promising a technology-agnostic analysis of a client's overall storage requirements and a long-term strategic plan to better address them.
Simon Elisha, Hitachi chief technologist, Australia and New Zealand, says Storage Economics is a set of some 30 metrics that enable the Hitachi consultant, together with the reseller, to evaluate a client's needs in relation to their business objectives.

The metrics include management-time-by-terabyte, power consumption, outage and downtime, disk procurement, data transfer, floor space, depreciation and rate of growth by tier of storage, among others (see screen shot).
"It's an opportunity for our channel partners to change the conversation they are having with the customer," says Elisha.

"The conversation is not just about needing more storage. During boom times, organisations got away with it because budgets were growing, but now we need to change that thinking.

"We need to sweat their storage asset to get more out of repurposing and making subtle changes."
It's a big picture discussion better held in the boardroom rather than on the IT floor.

"If the conversation is held at the correct level, that of director of IT, chief operating officer, chief information officer or senior operations manager, it's a very quick and very well-received conversation because it's done in business terms."

But he says such long-range strategic discussions can fall on the deaf ears of IT managers who are "up to their neck in running the day-to-day".

"The chance is for good channel or sales people to have the conversation with the right people. It comes down to the relationship they have with their customers. We don't want to be box-dropping, saying ‘see you next time'. We actually do care about what they are doing from a business perspective."

IDC's Simon Piff says vendor-tied consultants ultimately have one thing in mind: "sell more kit". "But (Hitachi) is taking the right approach in trying to get closer to the customer."

The bigger opportunity for consulting, he says, lies with resellers who represent more than one vendor and are not yet engaging customers in strategic discussions.

"Some resellers just ask ‘what do you want to buy - we have everything'. The market has changed a lot in the last six months," Piff says.