Originally posted by: TonyPearson
Continuing my coverage of the Data Center Conference, held Dec 1-4 in Las Vegas, an analyst presented the challenges of managing the rapid growth in storage capacity. Administrators ability to manage storage is not keeping up with the growth. His recommendations:
- Aim to just meet but not exceed service level agreements (SLAs)
- Revisit past IT decisions. This includes evaluating your SAN to NAS ratio.
- Embrace new technologies when they are effective, this includes cloud storage, solid state drives, and interconnect technologies like FCoCEE.
- Follow vendor management best practices, update your vendor "short list".
A survey of the audience found:
- 20 percent have a single external storage vendor
- 39 percent have two external storage vendors
- 18 percent have three external storage vendors
- 23 percent have four or more external storage vendors
Throughout the industry, storage vendors are following IBM's example of using commodity hardware parts. This is because custom ASICs are expensive, and changes take a minimum of three months development time. Software-based implementations can be updated more quickly.
In terms of technologies deployed of SAN, NAS, Compliance Archive (such as the IBM Information Archive), and Virtual Tape Library (VTL) such as the IBM TS7650 ProtecTIER data deduplications solution, here was the survey of the audience:
- 8 percent: SAN only
- 14 percent: SAN and NAS
- 23 percent: SAN, NAS and Compliance Archive
- 9 percent: SAN and VTL
- 14 percent: SAN, NAS and VTL
- 32 percent: SAN, NAS, Compliance Archive and VTL
Cost reduction techniques including thin provisioning, compression, data deduplication, Quality of Service tiers, and archiving. To reduce power and cooling requirements, switch from FC to SATA disk wherever possible, and move storage out of the data center, such as on tape cartridges or cloud storage.
For emerging technologies, the following survey:
- 16 percent have already implemented a new emerging technology (IBM XIV, Pillar, 3PAR, etc.)
- 30 percent plan to do so in 12-24 months
- 4 percent plan to do so in 24-48 months
- 50 percent have no plans, and will continue to stick with traditional storage technologies
As for adopting Cloud storage, here was the survey:
- 14 percent already have
- 31 percent plan to use Cloud storage in 12-24 months
- 13 percent plan to use Cloud storage in 24-48 months
- 42 percent have no plans to adopt Cloud storage
My take-away from this is that many companies are still "exploring" into different options available to them. Fortunately, IBM offers a broad portfolio of complete end-to-end solutions to make acquiring the right mix of technologies that are optimized for your workloads possible.
technorati tags: , XIV, Cloud Storage, SAN, NAS, VTL, ProtecTIER, Information Archive