Santander's acquisition of Alliance & Leicester, the
nationalisation of Northern Rock - some of our major financial
institutions are being merged, acquired or nationalised at a rate
none of us would have predicted, writes Tony Reid, UK services
director at Hitachi Data
Systems.
Takeovers can be tough even at the best of times but today, they
need to be completed swiftly to avoid further losses. This means
that everything, particularly the integration of infrastructure and
resources, is being completed at break-neck speed.
Solutions for the data storage headache
Of all the elements that need to be tied together, data storage
is undoubtedly one of the most challenging. The merging of two
storage environments is a long, intricate process, complicated by
numerous incompatibilities such as the variety of vendor
technologies involved, a lack of industry standards, as well as the
sheer volume of data that most companies possess.
These issues can complicate the CIO's job of integrating
different IT systems. Not only does the CIO have to ensure the
systems work efficiently with one another, this has to be achieved
without affecting customer experience or employee productivity.
However, help is at hand in the form of three technologies -
de-duplication, virtualisation and tiered storage.
De-duplication eases the CIO's IT integration challenge by
addressing the issue of redundant and repeated data which, in some
cases, can bloat the total storage volume by more than 10 times.
De-duplication tackles the 'storage bloat' by stripping out
repeated data, thus substantially reducing the amount of data in
the IT system as well as information that needs to be backed up.
Besides repeated data, many organisations store a surprisingly
large amount of unnecessary information. In fact on average, 40 per
cent[1] of an organisation's information has not been accessed in
the last four years. Therefore, de-duplication technology also
ensures that redundant data is removed, resulting in the remaining
data being much easier to move and manipulate.
Once unnecessary data is stripped out of the system, storage
virtualisation can speed up the integration process by enabling the
consolidation of disparate storage pools. It is not unusual for
companies to utilise only 20 to 30 per cent of their overall
storage capacity. So, there is clearly huge scope for efficiencies
and cost savings if this capacity is better utilised.
While server virtualisation is very popular today, adoption
rates for its storage equivalent are still fairly low. However, as
the economic downturn is driving demand for solutions that enable
organisations to optimise their current resources, there is
certainly a strong case for storage virtualisation this year.
After the different storage systems are brought together in a
single, virtual pool, the next step involves tiering the data.
Tiered storage provides an architecture where data is ranked
according to functionality and importance, with capacity being
allocated accordingly. For instance, mission critical information
will be placed on high-performance, high-availability systems while
low-cost, limited access storage resource is used to store archived
data. This means that all storage resources are used as effectively
as possible.
A simple resolution
In short, data storage need not be a pain for CIOs when
integrating IT infrastructures following a merger or acquisition.
Bringing in the appropriate technologies such as de-duplication,
virtualisation and tiered storage will ensure that data storage
integration is seamless.
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