Sample Stub: Consolidating Storage
The purpose of this article is to provide guidelines and advice for consolidating storage. It is written for IT and finance professionals interested in exploring storage consolidation and infrastructure management as a means of cutting costs and improving organizational efficiency. The article provides an overview of consolidating storage and will help prepare the reader for a more in-depth investigation of the topic. The article is organized to provide an understanding of the business problem consolidating storage addresses, the capabilities of consolidated storage, the attributes of a successful consolidated storage infrastructure and prerequisites for deploying consolidated storage.
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The business problem
Many organizations have deployed dozens or hundreds of applications by allocating storage and server resources to a single application. Very often, this infrastructure is physically decentralized and unable to share resources. Storage is isolated and only provisioned for the respective applications they serve. This type of infrastructure, while simple to deploy, leads to inefficiencies and challenges that include poor storage utilization, expensive management, less than optimal availability and security and inflexibility with regard to sharing storage resources. While several can be cited, two classic examples of waste and inefficiency in a non-consolidated or decentralized infrastructure include: 1) running out of disk space and 2) managing distinct and different processes and procedures.
How consolidating storage addresses the problem
Storage consolidation works by provisioning storage in a manner that enables sharing resources across servers and applications and managing infrastructure using common processes and procedures. This most typically involves deploying storage area networks (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS). With SAN, storage and servers are connected to a centralized switch fabric that allows an 'any-to-any' type of connection between storage resources and servers supporting applications. NAS typically consolidates storage using a device with a file system, referred to as an appliance that servers access via network protocols like NFS. SAN requires more expensive switch fabric but offers high performance and is suitable for more transaction oriented workloads. NAS is simpler and cheaper and is best suited for files and workloads that are not as transaction intensive. This gross generalization needs to be further researched before the decision to use SAN or NAS is made. In either case, dramatic simplification in infrastructure management can be achieved by consolidating storage.
Attributes of a successful consolidated storage infrastructure
A successful consolidated storage infrastructure will: 1) improve efficiencies in terms of disk utilization, backup process and day-to-day storage management; 2) improve application service levels and 3) speed provisioning and changes to storage. The following guidelines are good benchmarks of success:
- Storage management costs are reduced by 10-30% and capacity managed per admin is increased 2-4X over a 3-5 year period.
- Disk utilization increases from less than 40% to more than 55%.
- Ongoing management costs (people costs) decline from as high as 66% to less than one third of overall storage total cost of ownership (TCO).
- The incremental capital costs of deploying a consolidated infrastructure (switches, more advanced hardware/ software, etc.) are offset within a six to eighteen month timeframe via improved and reduced ongoing storage management costs. [Note: this should be measured relative to the costs of not consolidating].
- Application owners cite appreciable improvements in time-to-deploy new applications as a direct result of a consolidated and simplified storage infrastructure.
- Training for backup and recovery and other key processes should be consolidated to a single set of courseware with 100% training participation by existing and new storage administrators.
Prerequisites for deploying consolidated storage
The decision to consolidate storage is one that involves the need to plan for managing a consolidated environment, the necessary skills to implement and operate a consolidated infrastructure and an up front investment in capital and people. Achieving a financial return on consolidating storage requires the right scale and often the proper workloads to realize substantial benefits. Consolidating storage may also involve a fair degree of network planning as once-distributed bottlenecks are centralized. In general, these conditions should be in place before consolidating storage:
- A large enough installation or expectation of high enough growth to warrant the effort. Usually a successful consolidation will involve more than five servers / applications and more often than not, dozens or even hundreds of servers and applications.
- A clear existing or foreseen problem in the form of current or expected inefficiencies, difficulties achieving application service levels and difficulty provisioning new storage to the extent that it is limiting or expected to limit business success.
- Strong infrastructure management skills either in house or outsourced.
- Technical expertise in application, server and storage infrastructure to assess workload friendliness and select the right technologies (e.g. switched SAN fabric or IP-based NAS).