Four Ways to Increase Storage Efficiency
December 27th, 2007
The “Green tech” movement and increasing focus on IT budgets is driving a growing awareness of storage deficiencies. The storage of data has become highly inefficient, with low utilization, over allocation, stranded storage, too many redundant copies, low access speeds, inefficient search, and disruptive movement and migration. Actual utilization of storage is less than 30% and 70% of that data over 60 days old is rarely referenced again. Continuing to buy more of the same old storage architectures will no longer be an option. Buying faster storage processors with larger capacity disks on the same 20 year old architectures will not solve the problem of inefficient use of storage. New storage architectures will be required to meet this demand for greater efficiency.
There are four fundamental things we must do to increase storage efficiency and manage the exploding growth of data.
Consolidation: Consolidation of hardware, management software, operations, data centres, and vendors will reduce costs and simplify management. Key to consolidation will be storage architectures that can relocate or move data without disruption to the applications and provide a single point of management across heterogeneous storage systems. Another requirement is logical partitioning. You can not expect users to consolidate onto the same storage system if you can not logically partition the system to ensure that there is no data leakage or performance impact from another user stealing the use of cache.
Utilization: Don’t confuse allocation of storage with utilization of storage. Storage may be 80% allocated but only 30% utilized. The combination of thin provisioning with storage virtualization is the most efficient way to increase utilization in a heterogeneous, multi tier storage environment.
Elimination: Eliminate unnecessary duplications. Single instance store, copy on write, compression, and de-duplication are technologies that can be used to eliminate unnecessary bytes. Pick a system that can Implement policies for deletion of data and ensure that they are enforced.
Archive: Most data that is over 60 days old is excess baggage that degrades your operations, and burdens your primary storage. Archiving data reduces the working set of operational data, making access, backup and business continuance more efficient. It also gives you better control of data disposition. Once the data is contained within an archive system, you can insure the immutability of the data and its authorized copies. You can encrypt it and set policies for retention, deletion, and scrubbing. Pick an archiving solution that can store and search across different types of data using different low cost, large capacity disks.
