Introduction to Storage Networking Storage Consolidation
Solution Requirements For Storage Consolidation
• Disk consolidation: – Reduce number of supported platforms – Supports heterogeneous servers and protocols – Offers flexibility in configuration – Potential virtualization solution?
• Tape consolidation: – Tape library sharing (“tape virtualization”) – Software to manage the access to the library – Supports heterogeneous servers
With storage consolidation we are looking to maximise the utilization of our existing storage platforms by giving us the flexibility to allocate the correct sized logical units to our heterogeneous application servers. These servers can be running different operating systems from different vendors, but our consolidated disk subsystem is able to accommodate all of these. By consolidating our storage the average organization can increase its disk utilization from 30% for direct attached storage up to 70% with SAN attached storage.
Tape consolidation can be considered in two different formats. We could look at it as tape pooling where we can allocate tape resource to any of our devices as they require it. Alternatively, we could look at it as the creation of a virtual tape resource, which could improve our ability to restore individual files.