Tiers for fears
OWEN COLE Technical Director, F5
F5’s Technical Director, Owen Cole, offers some advice for dealing with the ‘headache’ of storage management.
Te total amount of stored data grew by approximately 62% last year to nearly 800,000 petabytes1
and is predicted to grow by at
least a further 50% this year, according to recent research. Tis is not simply an escalation in consumer data - enterprises are storing an ever-increasing amount of unstructured data, which has created significant challenges in terms of both the need for ever larger storage devices and efficient data management. In fact, according to one source, 8% of organisations today have at least a petabyte of stored data - the equivalent of 20 million full four-drawer filing cabinets2
. Acquiring the assets to store this
data and then ensuring low priority information is not stored on tier one systems is an ongoing headache.
Many companies continue to utilise large numbers of physically dispersed, underused storage systems which support different projects, work groups and remote working sites. Although others have consolidated file systems, they can still struggle with rapid change in storage technology and coping with the ‘data deluge’.
Tere are a number of problems with dispersed storage devices - although incremental disc purchase can be relatively inexpensive, larger storage systems are expensive to acquire and maintain, and become more expensive to maintain as the years go on. Furthermore, although storage device retirement is common aſter three to five years, retiring data is a much more complex challenge - choosing a time to migrate data, and carrying this out without causing disruption to the rest of the network can be a tricky task. Consequently, acquiring a large number of low-volume storage devices may be a low-cost option in the short term, management costs will continue to rise year-on-year. It also leads to the general underutilisation of each storage device, which is not particularly cost-efficient.
The Challenge of Effective Data Management On the flip side, data consolidation projects can be both costly and take a long time - at least six months in many cases. Whilst many enterprises do effectively store and manually tier their data, this system can experience problems. Data which should be archived stays on tier one storage, taking up valuable space which could be better occupied with business critical data, and
28
Automated tiering of virtualised files has an important advantage over simple cloud approaches. Cloud can act as a virtually limitless repository for files, infinitely scalable. However, cloud should not simply be a ‘dumping ground’ for data: what organisations really need is a simple way of choosing the data that they put in the cloud, without the headache of having to do it all manually. Moving data into the cloud should be a simple automated process with a degree of user control.
No More Tears In-house automated tiering can be extremely beneficial. Tese solutions enable use of local storage pools based on SSDs and HDDs, but they also include the ability to automatically move older, less frequently accessed data and backup copies to a “cloud storage tier” from major service providers. Given typical use patterns for file data, this approach can provide excellent performance for critical data (e.g., new files, VM images) while seamlessly migrating inactive and archive data to a highly elastic and remote cloud tier.
Cloud storage promises almost limitless scalability and a ‘pay as consume’ format, particularly appealing for lower tier and archive storage. Clouds are physically remote, enabling organisations to get their data off-site for DR protection. Being an out-sourced service, they can also reduce storage management and the logistics of housing storage infrastructure.
Storage tiering can be implemented in a number of ways. It could be something as simple as an archive package which
aiding purchase avoidance. With SAN storage at a premium, it’s easy to see why budgets can get blown by simple sheer weight of storage.
Virtualisation helps with this to some degree, making it easier to shiſt files between storage tiers, but much of the process is manual. Although many organisations have looked to the cloud to help with this - there is another system which can lend a hand - auto-tiering.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40