Don't let storage become a bottomless pit
Hardware prices are falling but the
total cost of ownership for storage is rising. Savvy IT chiefs are
using storage resource management to rein in spiralling
costs.
The price of discs may be plummeting, but the growing number of
non-hardware costs is seeing storage make increasing demands on
companies' hard-pressed IT budgets.
Storage currently accounts for about 12% of datacentre costs and
will more than double over the next three years to 26%, according
to analyst firm Gartner. With rapidly rising e-mail volumes and the
development of new applications and websites, storage is in danger
of becoming a bottomless pit for IT budgets.
"Storage may not be a massive item in the IT budget but a company
with 15Tbytes of user data, paying £2 per gigabyte per month,
will be spending £60,000 a month on storage," said Neil
Barton, director of global consulting at benchmarking specialist
Compass.
Storage sprawls across a company's IT infrastructure, covering
hardware (disc drives), tapes and storage area networks. However,
the answer may have arrived in the form of storage management
software that can police your storage needs.
To get any kind of handle on storage costs and how to manage them
will require storage resource management software (SRM) - a
powerful emerging technology.
SRM software collects not just traditional storage metrics such as
capacity, but also more complicated measurements such as the number
of times data is copied and the number of days needed to run
storage inventories.
SRM software, which costs about £25,000, could give IT
managers a quick payback on their investment.
"The amount of private data, from music to photos, on corporate
storage can be a ticking bomb," said Krischer. "One company in the
UK issued a memo saying it was going to install SRM and it
recovered 10% of its storage in one week - which was more than the
cost of the SRM software."
While the hardware costs of storage have steadily decreased, the
total cost of ownership has not. Experts estimate that owning
storage can cost four times as much as the purchase cost of storage
hardware.
The hidden elements of storage TCO come predominantly from storage
software and storage administration.
Consolidating distributed storage into a centralised architecture
with technologies such as storage area networks will help improve
both utilisation and availability, but it will also push up the
cost of maintaining the software. Centralising storage can increase
the amount of data a storage administrator can manage from
500Gbytes to 800Gbytes.
Storage software is the other great hidden element of TCO -
software packages can cost between £150,000 and £300,000.
Companies should be careful not to become too dependent on one
supplier, for example by buying storage software from their disc
drive manufacturer.
"Pay attention to software features that create lock-in," said
Krischer. "We have seen locked-in companies pay twice the market
price, and one UK bank paid four times the market price.
"Do not buy anything just because it is 'nice to have' and change
your requirements so you are free to choose between
suppliers."
The other decision organisations have to make is how many copies of
their data to back-up. Firms in regulated industries such as
financial services have more stringent requirements to meet but
other companies will have to work out whether the data is important
enough to justify the cost of backing it up. Firms can mirror
software by using storage management software to maintain copies of
data as it is updated.
"Do you really need to offer a Rolls-Royce service to everyone?"
asked Barton. "One company I know used disc mirroring everywhere
and said that one advantage was that there was no downtime when
upgrading a server, but you do not need that if it is just a mail
server you are upgrading over the weekend."
Also, look at why you need the software in the first place. If it
is used for mirroring and creating back-ups and redundancy, check
how much of that you really need to meet actual business
requirements.
Mirroring not only doubles the storage capacity you require, it
also adds to costs for management software, communication between
sites and human administration.
Evaluating the cost to the business of the unavailability, and for
how long, of particular data is an essential exercise of good
storage management. This, said Dawson, means turning the issue of
TCO on its head and looking at it from the point of view of service
delivery. Some parts of a business will have heftier data storage
demands than others.
"You should package storage services at different costs to users,"
he said. "It is up to users to choose which level of service to
have - and pay for it.
"One US company told me it managed 25Tbytes of data with one third
of a person - but it took it 12 days to supply an end-user when
they requested more storage," said Krischer. "That is not
good."
Barton warned that there will also be "rogue data" generated
legitimately that needs to be brought under control, owned by users
who do not like to pool their data centrally. The worst offenders,
he said, are the marketing department, engineering department and
IT itself.
Top tips for managing storage
-
Appoint a storage manager. Don't just make it a part-time add-on task to another job
-
Understand that the most costly aspect of storage is not hardware, but software and administration
-
Consolidate distributed storage to decrease administration costs, but allow for the cost of the consolidation project itself
-
Learn the lessons from the ordered mainframe environment and apply them to the chaotic distributed Unix/NT environment
-
Adopt single-console multi-platform software management
- Avoid software lock-in. Don't buy proprietary "nice to have" features
- Have multiple suppliers to keep them in price competition with each other
- Never buy storage in a hurry - you will have no room to negotiate good prices
- Take time to do storage capacity planning
- Ban or minimise end-user private storage of photos, music, etc - make sure you are not backing-up personal files
- Aim for 80%-85% disc utilisation as best practice.
