Reducing Storage Complexity

WHITE PAPER Reducing Storage Complexity with Sun Unified Storage Sponsored by: Sun Microsystems Steven Scully Richard L. Villars May 2009
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY IT organizations of all sizes are struggling to deal with the tremendous growth in data moc.and the complexity of managing it all. The march of digital applications and the data cdi.they create continues at a rapid pace, even in today's difficult economic times. IDC wwforecasts that external disk storage capacity will grow 50% through 2010. w 510Unified storage has emerged as one way that IT managers are using to reduce the 4.5complexity of storage implementations while improving the business flexibility and 39.lowering the total cost of storage. The benefits of unified storage include: 805.F !"Unified block- and file-level storage through SAN, NAS and iSCSI interfaces 00allowing storage administrators to consolidate multiple workloads onto a single 28.2storage platform. 78.80!"5Advanced software features for provisioning, data protection and system .P management, improving utilization rates and simplifying management. ASU !"Fully integrated hardware and software solutions (often in the form of appliances) 107that simplify the implementation. 10 AM ,Sun Microsystems, a leader in server and storage technologies, has launched the first main a family of open, unified storage appliances. In addition to providing all the benefits hgniof unified storage, Sun's solution includes two unique features: marF !"DTrace Analytics - a new way of observing and understanding what the unified teerstorage system and enterprise network clients are doing and how they are tS behaving, using real-time graphical analysis. IT administrators can use it to neediagnose issues and optimize their application/storage environment. pS 5 :s!"rHybrid Storage Pools - a high-performance architecture that integrates flash-etrbased SSDs as a caching tier with capacity-optimized, enterprise class HDDs for auqall storage. daeH lWith all protocols and storage features included in the cost of the system, Sun claims abolits new unified platform delivers significant performance gains and cost benefits Gversus proprietary unified storage solutions.


SITUATION OVERVIEW - CHALLENGING TIMES FOR MANAGING DATA
IT organizations of all sizes are struggling to deal with the tremendous growth in data and the complexity of storage management. They are supporting a growing array of data intensive applications (e.g., business analytics) and content rich applications (e.g., digital images or video). They are also improving application availability and disaster recovery through increased use of disk-based data protection/replication. In this information intensive environment, IT managers need to optimize the capacity and performance of storage systems while working to reduce complexity and lower costs. Today's challenging economic times only bring more focus on these requirements.
IT organizations are also adapting to a major shift happening with the use of disk-based backup and recovery solutions, which provide improved data protection with greater availability and continuity than previous solutions (i.e. tape). While they speed up and simplify some operations, they are not without their own management and operational challenges. These solutions improve application and data availability by enhancing system backup performance and reliability, shorten file restore times and are supported by major backup vendors. However, they add to the amount of data being stored on a daily basis and represent another element to manage. Data Growth
The march of digital data continues at a rapid pace. Even in difficult economic times, applications are generating tremendous amounts of data. Corporate reorganizations and mergers along with increased governmental regulations all contribute. Through the rest of this decade, IDC forecasts that the amount of external disk storage capacity shipped is still growing around 50% a year.
A variety of applications across a broad set of industries is driving this data growth. The use of high performance computing is expanding in a wide range of industries (e.g., financial services, life sciences, energy, media/entertainment). At the same time, companies are leveraging more collaboration and web 2.0 applications to boost productivity and improve customer support. Databases are at the heart of these applications, a... [download for more]