Better storage performance for less
KEVIN CORNELL CEO, Veloxum
The propagation of social computing and disparate work forces compound the complexities of data management, crippling storage capacity and performance. Active Continuous Optimisation Is the Holy Grail of storage optimisation.
Indisputably, the mountain of data under management grows ever skyward as the pursuit of the holy grail of cost reduction and ROI grows ever more aggressive. Data is everywhere, from Smartphones, laptops and personal storage devices, to storage class memory, applications such as SharePoint, Oracle CRM and email, on the network and in the cloud.
As remote and mobile working proliferates, multi-site project collaboration becomes common place and data becomes more dynamic, two of the most critical IT processes - data access and data back-up - have been made significantly more complex.
The movement and management of data across such complex and dynamic environments present issues of storage capacity, performance and latency which cause a major headache to the CIO. As storage requests take on the least appealing characteristics of a snail, the business loses millions in lost productivity. Data accessibility and data backup cannot be a game of catch up but must be managed in real time.
Unstoppable data growth and flat lining storage budgets are the rock and the hard place between which the IT Manager is firmly wedged
Data management is a key area due to the sheer volumes now passing through enterprises. Independent analyst firm Ovum predicts the management of data will come to a head for CIOs
in 2011, as they realise that it is an issue that can no longer be ignored. Budgets will not allow for more and more hardware to be thrown at the problem, at the same time there will be no compromise on the performance standards that must be maintained.
When storage performance issues arise they need to be addressed quickly and with minimum disruption to the environment. Sadly too much time is wasted reactively responding to these issues and pouring over possible solutions, when actively monitoring and continuously tuning the interrelated settings between the servers and clients would prevent such issues from arising in the first place.
Data growth is the biggest data centre hardware challenge for large enterprises, according to a recent survey by Gartner. Forty-seven percent of survey respondents ranked data growth in their top three challenges. Sixty-two percent of respondents reported that they will be investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011 to address the data growth challenge.
Gartner states that while all the top data centre hardware challenges impact cost to some degree, data growth is particularly associated with increased costs relative to hardware, software, associated maintenance, administration and services and cost containment remains a key focus for most organizations. The real challenge in a dynamic environment, is to continually optimise existing infrastructure to achieve maximum throughput.
A survey of IT managers by research firm, TheInfoPro, found that spending on storage systems is expected to remain flat through next year because of the soft economy and new technologies that allow IT administrators to do more with what they already have.
Employing thin provisioning approaches, which allocate storage to applications on an as-needed basis goes some way to better utilising storage capacity. Alongside this, backup array and tape drive capacity can be improved through the use of
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