Given the current economic situation, many companies have become conservative and are reluctant to spend. However, reducing expenditure should not be the only plan as maximising each dollar spent is equally important for ushering in positive change.
The storage challenge
When it comes to data storage, a confluence of factors bring extra pressure to bear. Dramatically increasing amounts of data; the increased importance of data to business; rising management costs of increasingly complex storage networks, and increasing pressure to hold or reduce IT costs leaves a CIO little room for waste or error. And these are only the problems they confront today.
Even if the current storage architecture works well, they will still have to cope in the future with the pace of technological change and the requisite migrations or upgrades that accompany it. The universal commandment for the CIO, for today and the foreseeable future breaks into three very basic, very difficult challenges: reduce costs, reduce complexity and improve QoS (quality of service).
Because of the way storage is packaged, businesses end up buying up to 75 percent more capacity than they actually need. It's cheaper to simply buy more storage than to hire somebody to manage it, so an organisation's first response to a storage crisis will be to throw more storage at the problem. Of course, the many different business units in a given organisation may not want to share storage, so they each purchase silos of infrastructure through project-based acquisitions and through a variety of different vendors with an eye to the lowest cost option.
The result is a confusing tangle of heterogeneous storage systems and management software, which requires more IT staff expertise, and massively under-utilised storage assets and "stranded storage", which waste already shrinking budgets. Ultimately, coping with exploding data requirements by simply purchasing more storage can lead to very costly consequences.
Results that matter: effective solutions
In these disruptive times, measuring Return on Investments (ROI) to gauge the savings achieved on the metrics mentioned is not accurate enough since it is primarily based on new assets being purchased and doesn't take into account the existing assets that may be of value.
Measuring IT spend against business revenue trends and ratios by taking ROA (Return on Assets) into consideration is a more strategic approach as it considers the impact of an investment on the total asset base rather than a specific project. Measuring ROA makes existing assets more productive and it is important that IT organisations develop a common set of metrics to calculate ROA for their customers. The development of innovative metrics is particularly important at a time when the worldwide economy is forcing new types of economic reviews to justify large IT spending.
Several technologies play a key role in reducing the cost of storage while increasing its effectiveness.
Virtualisation: Virtualisation helps organisations do three important things that help create an economically and ecologically superior data centre. Virtualisation enables cost lowering functions - reducing hardware costs, SAN infrastructure costs and environmental costs - by providing a single management interface for all virtualised storage hardware and extending the useful life of all assets.
Tiered Storage: Organisations using a single-tier storage architecture store all data in a single pool, purchased at a general rate, with an expected growth rate that applies uniformly to all applications and data in the pool - regardless of their individual resource requirements or business value. High-value data thus tends to receive insufficient resources, while low-value data and archive data enjoy resources far beyond what is required. As a result, storage is under-provisioned and poorly utilised, and it commands a relatively high CAPEX.
Tiered storage presents a superior alternative by assigning the right applications to the right storage tier for current and future access requirements. Since the tiers of storage represent various service levels and costs, stratifying storage across lower cost tiers (as opposed to a single, higher cost tier) will result in less CAPEX spending in upcoming years.
Multi-tiered storage allows costs and price erosion factors to be spread between multiple tiers, thus reducing CAPEX costs over the short term.
Dynamic Provisioning: Dynamic provisioning software reduces CAPEX by increasing the relative efficiency of each block of storage. This means that organisations no longer need to devote physical space to storage that is allocated but never used. Furthermore, it results in a smaller physical footprint for the storage that remains. The improved performance derived from the "wide striping" capabilities of dynamic provisioning also creates indirect CAPEX savings by reducing the amount of infrastructure necessary to obtain a certain level of performance.
Dynamic provisioning can also dramatically reduce the OPEX because it greatly simplifies the storage provisioning process and increases the number of terabytes one administrator can manage.
VTL/De-duplication and Active Archive: Perhaps the most compelling argument for VTL and de-duplication solutions lies in the sphere of reducing costs. They enable organisations to get the most out of their current storage set-up by facilitating integration into existing back-up systems.
The applications with the most amount of duplication are those with unstructured data such as file servers and email systems. By eliminating redundant or duplicate data, physical storage needs can be reduced by up to 25 times or more.
In conclusion
It's good to know analysts at IDC believe that of all the hardware categories, storage is likely to have positive growth this year.
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