The single storage pool

Tagged with: storage costs, efficient it, virtualisation

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Storage costs have never been lower and data volumes have never been higher. That leads many companies to buy new storage devices whenever they install a new system, rather than explore how they can better utilise the spare storage capacity that already exists within their IT infrastructure.

The results of that are clear at every company that runs a sprawling, uncontrolled and under-utilised storage environment. In fact, on most enterprise storage devices, utilised disk space runs to no more than 30 per cent of total capacity, says Jan Zelezinski, strategic architect at Logicalis.

That's a waste of money and resources, and also complicates day-to-day storage administration tasks such as storage provisioning and back-up.

It also makes long-term strategies such as information lifecycle management - the matching of data with storage according to its business value - extremely hard, if not impossible, to achieve, says Zelezinski.

Storage virtualisation provides an answer, by creating what appears - at least to servers and applications - to be a single, large ‘pool' of storage resource, from what is in fact a composite of many networked storage devices of different capacities and types.

The cost benefits delivered by virtualisation through better and more efficient use of storage are immediate. Simply put, there is no need for a company to invest in more disk space until it has filled the two-thirds of existing disk capacity that it had previously ignored.

Another major benefit is a reduction in the manual overhead typically associated with storage management, by bringing many burdensome tasks under the control of software, rather than people.

"Virtualisation adds much greater storage system intelligence, so tasks can be handled automatically," Zelezinski explains. "That means a company needs fewer storage administrators, and those that it does need spend their time on more interesting work," he says. It also means that many vital tasks can be carried out without interruption to normal service.

Recent developments in storage networking are also bringing the benefits of networked storage and virtualization, to companies of all sizes, he adds. By using Internet Protocol (IP) in a storage area network, it is possible to overcome the problems of expense, complexity and lack of interoperability that Fibre Channel has typically presented.

A new, less wasteful age of storage, it seems, may be here.

Your Comments and Questions

Jan Zelezinski, 8 months ago

In theory the answer is yes if the desktop data is company specific information then it should either be replicated to a fileserver or backed up on a regular basis and is therefore included in the utilization %. Far to many companies, especially in the SME/SMB space ignore the "D" drive or "my documents" and with the proliferation of Laptops, and the numbers that get lost or stolen then I rest my case M'lud !!!

George Black, 8 months ago

When you talk about typical utilisation rates for storage devices of around 30%, and the benefit that virtualisation can bring, are you specifically talking about storage servers, back up tapes etc, or does it also include PC and desktop storage?

Jan Zelezinski, 11 months ago

Oh I wish it were that easy !! Best advise I can give give is to understand what you have by way of exisiting data first, where it is who owns it and why they need it ? You will need help from the business and some tools but you may be surprised at how much waste and duplication you have and space you free up !! Do some trending analysis to find the big storage users and go discuss future requirements. Look at Storage tiering and archiving (NOT Backup). The pundits tells us we will all store more data but begs the question, is it relavent to the business ?

K D, 11 months ago

that seems pretty high level - are there any more detailed white papers or other such info?

Edward Charvet, 11 months ago

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid5_gci1133419,00.html Try this to start with, Dan Weinstein's Five tips for better storage forecasting in Searchstorage.com