Stop Buying Storage To Cope With Downturn

Given the fact that globally companies are facing tough market conditions,
budget allocation towards technology in most organizations is under pressure.
While spends on new technology has not halted, it definitely has been
rationalized. This does not apply only for IT but also for most other functions.
In this environment, it is imperative that while organizations do not make any
further investment, they need to keep the lights on to the infrastructure that
is already in place.

Forecasts vary widely for the depth and length of the recession, but it is
clear that budgets in the current and the next year are uncertain at best. For
most organizations, the focus will be optimizing existing systems and extending
their usual life.

The good news is that many organizations have 50 percent or more available
storage capacity that may accommodate its needs for the foreseeable future.
Plus, many technologies exist that can help optimize existing systems and
increase function and features that will help them tide over this financially
constrained period.

Optimizing underutilized storage resources

During stages of economic growth, organizations may be tempted to take the
'equick fix' solution to storage management problems. This means purchasing
additional storage once the current capacity is reached.

The incremental cost of adding storage is relatively small and can be
absorbed by the budget.  Such a shortcut may facilitate faster project
roll-out, but it also leads to underutilized storage. In fact, according to
Symantec's State of the Data center India findings report, the data center
storage utilization is around 54-60 percent.

Accurate storage allocation is difficult because data growth rate information
is incomplete or unavailable. Consequently, storage allocation does not
correlate to consumption.

New applications, with no historical trend data, receive storage allocation
on a 'ebest estimate' basis. If the allocated capacity is too high, then the
excess capacity may languish unused.

Needless spending is the primary consequence of neglect. Having capacity that
is only 50 percent utilized is like paying twice as much for storage
required. Idle capacity also consumes power, increases cooling costs and
unnecessarily consumes floor space and maintenance dollars with no return on
investment. Moreover, storage software licenses are typically based on total (or
raw) capacity, not utilized capacity, thereby needlessly driving up the cost of
software.

Turning things around

To make better use of storage resources, organizations can leverage storage
management technologies. Storage resource management (SRM), for example, enables
IT to navigate the storage environment and identify old or non-critical data
that can be moved to less expensive storage. These tools can also be used to
predict future capacity requirements.

Managing storage without an SRM tool is like going on a journey without a
map. Having a clear plan and objective before taking action is the best
assurance of rapid progress and success.

Companies surveyed in the 2008-09 Symantec's State of the Data center India
reported their data centers are becoming too complex to manage. Of this, 32
percent claimed it to be a huge problem while 36 percent reported this as an
average problem.

Anand Naik, Director-Systems Engineering, Symantec India

SRM technology can help companies make an assessment and provide an
enterprise-wide view of the storage environment, which helps identify problem
areas, consolidation opportunities and create a priority list of solutions.

Going thin

Thin provisioning can be used to improve storage capacity utilization. These
tools allow space to be easily allocated to servers on a just-enough and
just-in-time basis. Thin provisioning can enable higher capacity utilization by
allowing applications to share a pool of available storage.

This reduces the amount needed for any individual application. Storage is
allocated to applications dynamically as needed, resulting in higher
utilization.

Thin provisioning also eliminates the guesswork in new application
provisioning, because rapidly growing applications can access space as required,
while low-growth applications will not hoard empty space.

Furthermore, thin provisioning can reduce capital expenses because it
requires less up-front storage than a 'estove pipe' environment and permits
'ejust in time' storage allocation.

Don't store it in the first place

Data de-duplication is another technology that has gained wide acceptance as
a tool to streamline the backup process.

De-duplication eliminates duplicate data even when such data is unrelated,
greatly reducing the multiplier effect.

For example, if a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation is stored on different
file servers multiple times, de-duplication ensures that only one copy is stored
no matter how many full or incremental backups occur. Organizations may consider
specialized appliances to provide backup-to-disk and de-duplication functions.

However, these appliances add complexity to the data center with more devices
to manage and actually add capacity to the environment rather than using what
already exists more efficiently.

Data archiving: Out with the old

Thin provisioning and data de-duplication are strategies for reducing the
growth rate and space consumption of new data or finding more efficient ways of
storing it. These strategies must be combined with addressing unnecessary data
storage in order to fully utilize existing assets. The largest container of
unnecessary and obsolete data is unstructured data.

E-mail is the biggest unstructured information pain point today and a top
target for data reduction via archiving. The Radicati Group estimates that the
volume of e-mail will increase by 30 percent from 2006 to 2010.

Although storage costs continue to fall on a per-unit basis, e-mail is often
stored many times in the email server, on the user's PC, in a Microsoft Exchange
or IBM Lotus Notes file, on file servers, saved in SharePoint, and in backups.
Because of the excessive storage consumed, the cost of power and cooling is also
commensurately higher.

Across all business industries and public sector organizations, IT
professionals are being called on to address the common management concerns
around e-mail and unstructured information, which is resource management.
Archiving technology will act as an online archive for older items that are
moved from primary application storage according to company-defined policies. It
also leverages optimized single instance storage and compression technologies to
further reduce the data footprint.

By controlling the size of the message store, the applications and servers
hosting them remain focused on real-time transactions. The online archive also
enables organizations to rationalize their storage resources and dedicate
primary storage to dynamic and transactional data. Older, less frequently
accessed content can be moved to a secondary or tertiary storage device, saving
money for more strategic purposes.

Take steps now

IT organizations must be educated about taking steps to optimize existing
assets, especially during the current economic situation. Obviously, storage
managers no longer have the luxury of cutting management corners.

However, the situation presents an opportunity to complete existing projects
while implementing processes, procedures and simple technologies to improve the
storage cost profile. As IT budgets are tightened, companies should look to
shifting their focus to finding more efficient technologies that manage
complexity while reducing the resources required.