Monday, March 10, 2003		Guest Speak

Data storage to become prime concern
Sudhakar Rao

Sudhakar Rao, Technical Consultant, Hitachi Data Systems

IN order that businesses remain competitive they are increasingly relying on information to make day-to-day as well as strategic business decisions. But the fact of the matter is that just amassing data and information is not the answer, the key lies in transforming this information into knowledge. As a result the amount of data that is being stored and the amount of time it is kept online is perpetually growing. On the contrary, while the amount of data and information is growing, the resources to manage the growth in data and information are not growing. This presents a considerable challenge to companies striving to exploit information for competitive advantage and storage administrators tasked with storing, managing, and protecting that data. Adding to the challenge are competitive pressures, market globalisation, customers, partners, users, and technological advances, which are all changing the way enterprises do business and use technology. With information becoming the key to success for businesses, the amount of data that is being collected (about 250 MB per person, per year) and electronic transactions are increasing rapidly, and many companies are losing ground in the race to turn available data into valuable business knowledge. Indeed, for some companies, storage requirements are doubling or tripling between three and six months.

To meet the increasing storage requirements companies need to add on more capacity to their existing storage infrastructure. But unfortunately when they add more capacity they do not have the resources that are used to manage these storage systems. Existing storage administrators either have to become much more productive (manage many more terabytes) or many more administrators will have to be hired. According to IDC, storage administrators have to become 60 per cent more efficient every year just to keep up with the growth. If the average administrator is responsible for 2 TB of storage and nothing is done to make them more efficient, it is estimated that there will be a need for more than 1.35 million administrators by 2004.

Adding to the storage management challenge is the fact that storage resources can be widely distributed throughout an organisation and can be server-based or external. When storage is widely distributed throughout an enterprise, managing it is difficult. For example, if storage is a mix between internal and external and spread throughout an organisation, how is information shared? How are storage procedures standardised? Here’s the challenge. How do companies keep pace with growing volumes of information and demand for always-on, instantaneous access, while the resources to manage that information are not even close to increasing at the same rates? Will adding more storage systems solve the problem?

The answer lies in consolidation of existing storage systems into more manageable storage architecture. It is because storage consolidation holds the promise of not only supporting increased storage needs but also simplifying operations and improving resource utilisation and efficiency. By consolidating or re-centralising storage companies can benefit from storage being used more efficiently, maximisation of server capabilities, increased open floor space, lowered management costs, reduced storage devices, reduced software licenses and decreased hardware and software management costs.

Storage consolidation is centralisation of storage and allowing it to be shared by multiple hosts. In view of this, consolidation takes the shape of multiple servers attached directly to a single storage system or consolidation of the existing storage onto a SAN (Storage Area Network).

Generally most of the organisations use widely distributed storage architectures that is a mix of server based and external storage systems. In such cases the most ideal candidate for storage would be modular storage systems that offer organisations to buy-as-you-grow options. They scale from less than 1 TB (Terabits) to well over 20 TB, compared to monolithic storage, which can scale in excess of 70 TB. Most modular storage systems allow components to be removed or added without bringing the systems down. Many of the features that were previously only found on monolithic systems are now available on modular storage systems.

While considering buying a modular storage system organisations need to consider some vital attributes of the modular storage system that are key to storage consolidation projects. Since information and data volumes are perpetually growing the modular storage systems have to be scalable. It means that the modular storage system that is considered for consolidation should not only meet the existing storage demands but also has to meet the storage demands of the future.
Apart from providing the required scalability coupled with performance, the modular storage system should be able to support a variety of hosts. Further the modular storage system should be able to provide maximum terabyte capacity per footprint. This is the method used to estimate the amount of real-estate space a storage system requires. Environmental constraints form an important parameter that is considered while storage consolidation. Factors like power consumption, floor space become an important parameter during storage consolidation. Besides, one should understand that storage consolidation is more than replacing old storage systems with new ones. It involves moving the data in the old systems into the new systems. Therefore data migration becomes an important part of any consolidation strategy. For a successful consolidation project careful data migration planning must be undertaken.