Managing the Capacity you have rather than Simply Adding More

2006-04-15T15:35:00.000+03:00

Maximize the capacity you have through data consolidation

Prelude Whitepaper to the Presentation to be held in Dubai at Storage World 2006

1) Challenges facing Storage

New Industry requirements have increased demands on businesses which have added pressure on Information Technology (IT) to perform better, faster and at a more efficient rate. Sadly, this new trend has also coincided with corporations lowering IT budgets and operating expenses (OPEX) while expecting performance levels not to change but to even improve.

Data, the lifeblood of all corporations is increasing exponentially in size and the requirements to have it available in the shortest possible time frame has grown proportionally, but resources and manpower allocated to the maintenance and management of such an organ has highly decreased.

Based on reputed studies it has been estimated that within the next 3 years storage capacity requirements will increase at around 122% annually to grow from a total of 1.78PB to 6.5PB ,but expenditures are expected to relatively stay the same. Two other issues that are manifesting themselves are the increase in the amount of time that information is required to stay online (from months to years) and the clear shift in data types that are being catered for (from only Databases & file services to introduction of Email, web servers & digitized content). All these obstacles are compounded by the fact that in order to maintain this type of growth storage administrators need to increase their productivity by 60% each year. Failure to take this into account can result in improper management which can adversely affect maintenance costs raising them up to between 300 - 1000%.

Current Storage topologies are structured in a distributive and de-centralized manner which have present the following weaknesses:

Management is done on a server by server basis, using different tools & GUIs
Backups are done on each System independently which is showing signs of exceeding backup windows causing problem with the inability to maintain the required Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
de-centralized storage utilization is estimated at 30% with exceptions on some having extremely more then required while others have reached their having fully utilized their existing storage and their need for more.
De-centralized Storage are usually low end and require frequent downtimes for upgrades
Once storage is fully utilized on a decentralized storage system Migration is required to move data to a higher capacity System which is labor intensive and requires numerous downtimes.

This leads us to the conclusion that the existing storage methodology needs to be drastically improved to coup with the hurdles of the future.. Implementing Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) over a consolidated Storage Environment is a viable and proven method to counter these growing concerns, while also allowing for flexibility in dealing with future concerns.

2)What Consolidation Offers

The benefits of implementing a consolidated centralized Storage & centralized Backup implementation correctly holds the promise of solving your existing or potential problems:

Simplifying complex IT environments
Streamlines Backup Processes improving Recovery time (RTO) and Recovery point (RPO)
Improving capacity utilization
Reduced Downtime Costs, due to improved fault-tolerant systems
Ability to Scale capacity without affecting operation or performance

While also providing more benefits and improved Services to deal with all the challenges that the future might hold :

Lowering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO),by lowering storage and license purchases
Boosting Productivity & efficiency, due to the ability to integrate with a wider range of Systems
Reduced Environmental Costs (smaller foot print and lower power usage)
Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Provisioning
creating a high speed dedicated Storage communication infrastructure (SCI) (utilizing Fibre Channel (FC) or even iSCSI) that allows for the accommodation of future requirements
Few Automated Tape libraries (ATL) since all systems on the SCI can share a single ATL
Improved Development Cycles due to the use of Data Replication Capabilities.

When implementing Storage Consolidation it should be mentioned that is not just one big projects but actually it is a composed of various sub-solutions and more importantly it is a methodology that relies heavily on ILM.

2.1 Physical Components
The different physical components of Storage consolidation can be broken down in to:

Storage Communication Infrastructure (SCI) Consolidation:
allows for effective scalability & management of either the SAN or iSCSI Network pushing costs lower, creating an infrastructure that allows for centralizing management, automation of backup and recover to improve service levels

Network Attached Storage (NAS) Consolidation:
Increases stability, simplifies management, provides higher availability lower costs and increase service levels

Tiered Storage Consolidation:
assigns different storage service levels based on type of information or applications that are running. Different tiers have different performance, protection and accessibility requirements, to cater for different service levels.

Management Consolidation:
incorporating a centralized management software based on the SNIA Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) which is an open standard for managing storage systems, simplifying that task, reducing complexity and defining polices, processes as well as organizational development strategies for operational improvement.

Backup Recovery & Archiving Consolidation:
utilizing a central solution to manage backups and archive policies, which help in reducing backup windows, improve restore speeds, enhance reliability, simplify manageability and decrease costs.

2.2 Logical Components
The Second aspect of Storage Consolidation is implementing the ILM strategy, which basically categories data based on importance, age and usage. Then utilizing the physical components of Storage consolidation data is moved from primary storage to less expensive storage. The retention duration and type of service level it is given is based on policy setting that it falls under. This Lifecycle process is all governed by the concept that data cannot be left unattended but must be managed from it’s creation until its ultimate disposal.

A common phrase that is often used to describe what ILM does is "It puts the Right Data at the right place at the right time".

3)STC’s storage consolidation implmentation

STC has implemented a full ILM infrastructure to coup with growing requirements imposed by business on recently storage requirements have risen more then 200% in the last year alone to give a total capacity of over 600TB. Not only have we solved problems we were facing with de-centralized storage but implementing our storage consolidation solution allowed us to easily and seamlessly implement our business continuity and disaster recovery solutions.

3.1 Physical Components:

Storage Communication Infrastructure (SCI) Consolidation:
4 EMC McData FC-SAN Fabrics providing a total of port capacity of 1696
Network Attached Storage (NAS) Consolidation:
Based on EMC’s NS700 NAS Gateway
Tiered Storage Consolidation:
5 Tier levels (Tier 1-1 on 3xDMX 2000, Tier 1-2 on DMX3000 & DMX1000, Tier 1-4 on 2x DMX2000, Tier 2-1 on 1xCX600 & 4xCX700, Tier 3-1 on 2x Centera (CAS) & DL720)
Management Consolidation:
EMC’s Control Center with EMC’s Solutions Enabler
Backup Recovery & Archiving Consolidation:
EMC’s Legato Networker & EMC’s Disk eXtender

3.2 Logical Component
ILM policies are agreed upon by committee and enforced on all systems based on corporate and governmental rules and regulation and ability to maintain the required service levels.

4)Considering Storage Consolidation

How to know when your environment cannot afford to delay storage consolidation:

Is your Storage growth difficult to predict or manage?
Are your storage costs out of control?
Does your data need to be updated more often then it is currently?
Are your storage administrators over worked?
Is the complexity of your storage environment spiralling upward?
Is your IT department finding it difficult to deliver required availability and performance levels?
Is your business a global company with global e-mail, v-mail, or intranet requirements?
Is your upper management using reports based on outdated information?
Are IT dependencies not fully understood, leading to the application of incorrect management disciplines
Is your business experiencing difficulty scaling quickly and non-disruptively to meet growing demands?
Are planned /unplanned services or maintenance disrupting production?
Would a catastrophe put you out of business for an unacceptable amount of time?

If you answered yes to one or more of the above questions, your company should serious consider implementing storage consolidation in the near future.

5)References

IDC's "New Options for Managing Tiers of Storage in the Enterprise: The Role of the Networked Storage Controller"

Hitachi Data Systems' "Storage Consolidation: Considerations when utilizing Modular Storage Systems"

Hitachi Data Systems' "Storage Economics: Identifying & Reducing Operating Expenses in the Storage Infrastructure"

Sun's "SUN StorEdge: The Business Case For Storage Consolidation"

Technology Alignment Partners "Storage Systems Consolidation The Next Generation"

EMC's "Today's Choices for Consolidation"

EMC's "Today's Choices for Total Cost of Ownership"

Sun's "Storage Consolidation: How to Reduce IT Costs and Complexity"

Enterprise Storage & Disaster Recovery Solutions

Managing the Capacity you have rather than Simply Adding More