Storage gain minus pain
- Posted:
- 11:37 05 Oct 2004
- Topics:
- Storage Management Software | Data Storage Hardware | Networked Storage | Data Management | IT Management | Storage Management | Content Management
The pressure to cut storage costs is
stronger than ever in response to the burgeoning volume of data.
Danny Bradbury investigates the best ways to ease the burden of
data management
Are your executive users stalking the corridors with a hunted look
these days? It could be because they are straining under the weight
of too much information. A 2003 study from the School of
Information Management and Systems at the University of California
revealed that five exabytes of new information was created
worldwide in 2002. Of that new data, 92% is stored on hard drives -
and companies produce and consume most of it.
"Only 20% of your storage cost is hardware," says Derek Lewis,
sales manager for IT reseller Morse. "The other 80% is management
such as user administration and archiving." According to IDC, the
market for storage management software in Q1 2004 had jumped 23%
compared with Q1 2003.
With management such a key issue, consolidation is a prerequisite.
The more central the data, the easier it is to control. But
although increasing your overall capacity usage is the most
obviously quantifiable benefit, it may not be the greatest, says
Hamish Macarthur, founder of analyst firm Macarthur Stroud
International. "The big thing is that applications which crash
unexpectedly in a distributed storage environment suddenly work
again because they can scale better," he says.
Consolidation is possible regardless of business size. Even a very
small business can install a network attached storage device,
pulling storage away from servers and desktops to make it more
manageable. Sans, in which collections of disc arrays are connected
using high-speed pipes such as Fibre Channel, are affordable and
manageable.
The next step towards reduced storage costs is virtualisation, says
Lewis. Even though devices in a San can be accessed from different
servers and applications, they are still independent of each other
and must be addressed physically.
Virtualisation software, which often sits on a dedicated machine
connected to the San switch, creates a logical view for
applications which hides the physical devices, enabling you to
store your data in the most efficient way possible.
Just as suppliers want you to use your San for virtualisation, they
also want you to use a virtualised San for information lifecycle
management, which is split into data and content.
Data lifecycle management is simply re-badged hierarchical storage
management. The idea is that data can be transferred automatically
to less expensive media as it becomes less critical to the
business.
With the introduction of cheaper serial ATA disc drives, it is
now possible to introduce more levels of storage in a HSM
environment, so that data could be moved from fast SCSI drives to
serial ATA and finally to tape, says Craig Nunes, senior director
of marketing for storage supplier 3PAR.
The smart money is on content lifecycle management. Using
policy-based storage management software, you can decide how to
relegate data to cheaper media depending not only on when it was
last accessed, but also on other criteria such as who created
it.
For smaller firms suppliers offer flexible storage licensing using
pay-as-you-go deals. Hewlett-Packard's pay-per-use option for its
Storageworks disc arrays allows customers to pay a fixed monthly
fee, plus a variable fee based on how much disc space they use.
Metering within the disc array calculates your monthly usage and
transmits it back to HP.
Macarthur says this creates lock-in to one supplier but, if you
flood your disc drives with data from a large project one month and
archive it to tape the next, a pay-per-use arrangement would enable
you to modify what you pay for expensive tier-one storage.
Some companies choose to outsource to a managed service such as
InTechnology. Pricing for online back-up to the firm's network
rests in the sub-£10-per-gigabyte range. Costs for the 100mbps
connect are amortised over three years and 10% of the total cost is
normally paid up-front in consultancy fees as the firm models your
data structure and hooks your current storage system to its
own.
Charles Cameron, InTechnology chief executive, sniffs at concerns
about customer privacy, pointing out that giving back-up tapes to a
motorcycle courier to take them to a third-party location is just
as dangerous. "You have to factor in the cost of recovering files
when they're lost, and managing tape back-ups in a distributed
environment," he warns.
If you want to cut your storage costs, don't concentrate only on
the hardware. Think consolidation and management, then the
opportunity for further savings will follow.
Information lifecycle management is the subject of one of the
seminars, run by Hewlett-Packard, at Storage Expo on 14
October
www.storage-expo.com
This article is part of Computer Weekly's Special Report on storage produced in association with Cisco Systems