Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: David Floyer
Over the last 20 years, the huge growth in demand for storage at all levels has driven overall storage budgets skyward despite the dramatic, 30% per year, drop in the purchase price of disk storage. This has fueled strong interest from both suppliers and users in tiered storage solutions as a key to overall cost control.
Tiered storage based on IBM's Systems Managed Storage has long been reality in the mainframe world. However, the heterogeneous nature of hardware, software, and file architectures outside the mainframe arena created by the common practice of purchasing a different storage solution for each application has so far defeated attempts to impose a universal tiered solution on a diverse environment. As a consequence, tiered storage still has effectively only 10%-15% penetration in this marketplace.
Nonetheless, the promise of 50% cost savings makes tiered storage an attractive goal. We believe that users need to acknowledge that a single universal solution is impractical and instead focus on homogeneous areas based on technology (Linux, Unix, Microsoft) and application types (software development, data warehousing, email) with large data pools growing at 40% to 50%.
This first step simplifies the resolution of the three main challenges of tiered storage:
- Defining storage service levels based on user and application needs;
- Creating a meaningful data classification structure based on those service levels that best meets the needs of users and applications within a tiered storage structure;
- Establishing a single point of control across each pool of data that controls the movement of data from tier-to-tier and maintains the metadata identifying the location of each data set for retrieval when and if that becomes necessary.
We do not expect to see a general purpose tiered solution in the marketplace in the foreseeable future, therefore. Rather we expect in see islands of tiered storage bridged by human-imposed management and labor.
Action Item: Users should cease pursuing any dream of a general-purpose heterogeneous tiered storage solution and instead focus on sets of applications that can be made to look homogeneous at the storage level. Typically these applications will feature very fast growth rates (in excess of 40%-50%) and common techniques for classification, and can be classified under a single point-of-control.
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