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A New Look at Storage Consolidation
CreekPath Systems
White Paper
"Storage consolidation" is a term that has typically meant the consolidation of direct attached storage to a storage network, whether it is Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN). Consolidation has usually been undertaken to improve utilization of assets, lower the total cost of ownership (TCO), increase return on capital investment, improve IT operational efficiency and increase service levels. The cost of acquiring networked storage hardware has been dropping, and is continuing to fall quarter after quarter. In addition, the service levels and the accessibility of networked storage have improved. Despite these promising developments, reduction of the overall TCO has been hampered by the increasing complexity of managing the networked storage. Furthermore, consolidation of storage has only partially been achieved due to concerns about risks associated with change propagation, costs associated with incorporating low cost servers into the storage network, and isolation of applications in SAN and NAS islands. As an industry study by GlassHouse Technologies indicates, the average 1utilization rate of storage environments is approximately 25%. This study demonstrates that, while the industry is improving efficiency by moving to networked storage, enterprises are still not realizing the full savings potential. Furthermore, business agility is impacted because new applications cannot always gain access to available capacity in a timely fashion. The consolidated storage or the pools of storage and networks are isolated, preventing rapid deployment and delaying the anticipated benefits of the new application. The notion that storage is 'cheap' has been a major contributing factor to the unplanned growth of storage across the enterprise. When incremental storage requests from business users are made, many administrators simply add or allocate more local storage because it is the quickest and easiest way they know to solve the problem. These administrators often lack the visibility and decision support necessary to make better choices. As John T. McArthur at industry analyst firm IDC notes, "The amount of new storage 2capacity installed each year is increasing almost 80% annually. At the same time, the total number of IT workers is increasing approximately 5% per year." This means that the average storage administrator has to handle more and more storage every year. At some point it is no longer feasible to
1 Storage Magazine Real World Storage Utilization by Stephen Foskett of GlassHouse Technologies 2004 2 Storage Networking: Business Drives for SANs, John McArthur, IDC, 2003
buy more storage to solve the problem. Ultimately, businesses are going to have to manage their storage and data resources more efficiently. Impact of Regulation In addition, recent legislation like the Sarbanes Oxley and HIPAA retention requirements have made it mandatory for businesses to manage, classify and retain their data, further adding to the complexity. This has resulted in incremental storage and data management complexity as different classifications of data, which change over time, require varied storage and data management service levels. More and more data is being retained and must be recalled, but much of it is static. This leads to a requirement for tiered pools of storage resources and tiered service levels. The goal is to have a tier for high performance, highly available data and other tiers of lower cost solutions for less-frequently accessed data as well as archived data. These tiers are often isolated islands of storage. However, isolation prevents the migration over the life of the data, and creates an ineffective and potentially expensive Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) process. This requires the definition of storage consolidation to extend to include the integration of isolated storage networks and tiers of storage services. IDC has recognized the need for a... [download for more]
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