6 Ways to Reduce Data Storage Cost
Transcript of 6 Ways to Reduce Data Storage Cost
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Six Ways to Reduce
Data Storage Costs
and Complexity
2011 Oracle and TechTarget
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Table of Contents
Storage Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Unified Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Flash-Based Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6Storage Management Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Backup and Recovery Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Scale-Out Storage Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
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Its every IT professionals dream: Reduce the complexity of
data storage while getting a tighter handle on skyrocketing
storage costs. But for decades, thats 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 higherspending 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,
its clear that doing so requires adding significant capacityto 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 require-
ments such as the explosion in unstructured data; security;
compliance mandates; disaster recovery/business
continuity, and support for rich-media formats including
social media, and its no wonder that IT organizations are
struggling to come up with new ways to reduce complexityand confront ever-tighter storage budgets.
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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 operateindependent of each other, often with different storage
architectures, management software and network
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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 Channel-
based SANs, iSCSI-based SAN and low-cost NAS
appliances. Unified storage reduces capital expendi-
tures 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 single-
system 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 lookingfor 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
doesnt utilize moving parts to access and store
information, making it a favorite in such applications
as high-performance computing, Web 2.0, transac-tion-intensive environments such as financial trading
and exchanges, and telecommunications. In recent
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years, flash technology has made significant improve-
ments 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 consump-
tion. It was that dramatic cost reduction that helped
bring flash drives into consumer applications as USB-
based 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 environ-
ments 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, direct-
attached or unified storage management software is
the key to a simplified, cost-efficient storage architec-
ture. If your organization is mid-sized or larger,
chances are good you have more than one type of
storage management software installed throughoutyour data centers and departments. Therefore, one of
your first steps should be to take an inventory of
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storage management solutions and consider a
consolidated approach. That consolidated manage-
ment 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 capabilitiesdiscussed in this paper, from virtualization and
thin-provisioning to backup, recovery, archiving,
deduplication and scale-out architecture. Todays
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 storagemanagement 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.
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5. Backup and Recovery Techniques. Its 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 todays always-
connected, 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 entitys 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
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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. Todays 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 capacityto anticipate future storage needs), scale-out storage
architecture is just starting to gain momentum as a
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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 doesnt have to be
part of a virtualization approach. Its usuallyassociated with network-attached storage (NAS), but
increasingly is being used with larger, enterprise-
class 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 manage-
ment complexity because this approach can make alarge 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 arent likely to ever face a time
when storage demands arent 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
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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 storageand 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.