Bangkok--6 Feb--Core & Peak
In an era of explosive data growth and flat or diminishing budgets, organizations must evaluate potential technology purchases not only on their technical merits or upfront costs but on their longer term economic merits as well. This argument takes a newer meaning in the current turbulent economic conditions, the effects of which may plague ITinvestments for time to come. Ironically, often a crisis serves as wake-up call to implement strategic solutions and sharpen focus on enhancing costs-savings. Taveesak Saengthong, Thailand Country Manager of Hitachi Data Systems explains how a comprehensive and sustainable approach to storage can reap benefits — both today and for the future.
Introduction:
These are difficult times, full of uncertainty and doubt, and many real dangers. Ongoing global economic problems in 2009 could reduce IT market growth from 5.8% to 2.3% in 2009 says Gartner. Given the current economic situation, many companies have become conservative and are reluctant to spend. The problem is further compounded by the shortage of talent due to a tight labour market over the past few years. However, reduction should not be the only plan as maximising each dollar spent is equally important for ushering in positive changes.
Change doesn't happen just because we have great technology and from a storage perspective, change happens because of leaders who have the clarity of vision to see storage technology as a change agent for business improvement and have the leadership skills to apply new technologies to real business problems. Currently, the CIO is caught up in a classic situation where he has to cut costs and grow the business as well. The dichotomy is better managed with a clear understanding of the business environment, the costs incurred and the implementation of solutions that provide the CIO with the mean to maximise organisational performance, effectively.
The Storage Challenge:
When it comes to data storage, a confluence of factors brings extra pressures to bear. Dramatically increasing amounts of data, the increased importance of data to business, the rising management costs of increasingly complex storage networks, and increasing pressure to hold or reduce IT costs leaves a CIO little room for waste or error. And these are only the problems they confront today. Even if the current storage architecture works well, they will still have to cope in the future with the ever increasing pace of technological change and the requisite migrations or upgrades that accompany it. The universal commandment for the CIO, for today and the foreseeable future breaks into three very basic, very difficult challenges:
- Reduce costs
- Reduce complexity
- Improve QoS (quality of service)
Because of the way storage is packaged, businesses end up buying up to 75 percent more capacity than they actually need. It's cheaper to simply buy more storage than to hire somebody to manage it, so an organization's first response to a storage crisis will be to throw more storage at the problem. Of course, the many different business units in a given organization may not want to share storage, so they each purchase silo’s of infrastructure through project based acquisitions and through a variety of different vendors with an eye to the lowest cost option. The result is a confusing tangle of heterogeneous storage systems and management software, which requires more IT staff expertise, and massively underutilized storage assets and "stranded storage," which are a waste of already shrinking budgets. Ultimately, coping with exploding data requirements by simply purchasing more storage can lead to very costly consequences.
Results that Matter: Effective Solutions
Measurement Metrics: History has shown that great companies with the foresight and vision have leveraged technology to turn around an organization’s fortune in times of such crisis. The first step starts with an in-depth study of the situation. A number of metrics apply in assessing the economic impact of storage solutions, but three of them are more commonly used — CAPEX (Capital Expenditure), OPEX (Operating Expenditure) and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). CAPEX refers to, essentially, investments that add value to the business and normally come in the form of the purchase of assets or the extension of an asset’s useful life. Meanwhile, OPEX represents the costs associated with managing, supporting, maintaining and upgrading investments over their lifespans. TCO is a financial estimate designed to help assess the costs of deploying information technology during its whole lifecycle.
In these disruptive times, measuring ROI (Return on Investments) to gauge the savings achieved on the metrics mentioned is not enough and accurate since it is primarily based on new assets being purchased and doesn’t take into account the existing assets that may be of value. Measuring IT spend against business revenue trends and ratios by taking ROA (Return on Assets) into consideration is a more strategic approach as it considers the impact of an investment on the total asset base rather than a specific project. Measuring ROA makes existing assets more efficient and productive and it is important, that IT organisations to develop a common set of metrics that allows companies to scrutinise a wider range of building blocks to help them to calculate their true ROA.
For example Hitachi Data Systems has developed a set of metrics named the ‘Storage Economic Model’ that go beyond traditional one-dimensional TCO calculations. Using tiered storage and virtualisation it helps customers to realise genuine OPEX savings when applied to their IT infrastructure.
The development of innovative metrics is particularly important at a time when the worldwide economy is forcing new types of economic reviews to justify large IT spending with new people and perspectives getting involved.
Virtualization: Virtualization helps organizations do three important things that help create an economically and ecologically superior data center — reclaim, utilize and optimize. A virtualization model that starts with reclamation and progresses through utilization to optimization lets IT pool all its storage, apply it as needed to meet application requirements, and manage it using one common set of software and processes. As the environment matures, IT moves from simple consolidation and migration of data, to right-sized tiers and data mobility, to implementing automated, policy-based (or even content-based) assignment of data to its optimal tier. Virtualization especially controller-based virtualization enables cost lowering functions — reducing hardware costs, SAN infrastructure costs and environmental costs — by providing a single management interface for all virtualized storage hardware and extending the useful life of all assets.
Tiered Storage: Organizations using a single tier storage architecture store all data in a single pool, purchased at a general rate, with an expected growth rate that applies uniformly to all applications and data in the pool — regardless of their individual resource requirements or business value. High value data thus tends to receive insufficient resources, while low value data and archive data enjoy resources far beyond what is required. As a result, storage is under-provisioned and poorly utilized, and it commands a relatively high CAPEX.
Tiered storage presents a superior alternative by assigning the right applications to the right storage tier for current and future access requirements. Since the tiers of storage represent various service levels and costs, stratifying storage across lower cost tiers (as opposed to a single, higher cost tier) will result in less CAPEX spending in upcoming years. Multi-tiered storage allows costs and price erosion factors to be leveraged or spread between multiple tiers, thus reducing CAPEX costs over the short term. Coupled with virtualization, the ability to dynamically move data (promote or demote storage between tiers) using automated software will help organizations more accurately align their costs to business requirements without incurring the risk of a manual data migration.
Dynamic Provisioning: Dynamic Provisioning software reduces CAPEX by increasing the relative efficiency of each block of storage by aligning the applications consumption of storage to the allocation of it. This results in organizations no longer needing to devote physical space to storage that is allocated but never used. Furthermore, it results in a smaller physical footprint for the storage that remains. The improved performance that derived from the “wide striping” capabilities of dynamic provisioning also creates indirect CAPEX savings by reducing the amount of infrastructure necessary to obtain a certain level of performance.
Dynamic Provisioning can also dramatically reduce the OPEX associated with the coordination and human labour involved in provisioning. Provisioning storage from a virtual pool reduces administration costs by cutting the time needed to provision new storage. It greatly simplifies the storage provisioning process, reducing manpower expense by increasing the number of terabytes one administrator can manage.
VTL/De-duplication and Active Archive:
Perhaps, the single-most compelling argument for VTL and de-duplication solutions lies in the sphere of reducing costs. They enable organizations to optimize their current investments by facilitating seamless and easy integration into existing back-up environments.
Enterprises can benefit through cost-savings by pushing off and compressing the data and reducing the time needed to back up data. By eliminating redundant or duplicate data, physical storage needs can be reduced by up to 25 times or more, the need to buy new tapes is eliminated—all without compromising the integrity of the data stored.
Archival solutions help in preserving and authenticating fixed content data ensuring complete security of digital assets. However, many archival solutions on the market include “Single Instancing” capabilities to dramatically reduce duplication of information assets. The most common applications where the most amount duplication resides are those with unstructured data such as file servers and E-Mail systems. An archival solution has the double benefit only storing duplicate data once while optimizing performance and cost of the production system by maintaining only the most valuable data.
In Conclusion:
As we brace for tough times ahead, it is reassuring to know industry experts such as IDC are of the opinion that of all the hardware categories, post crisis forecast suggest that only storage is likely to have positive growth in 2009.
Storage is a critical IT resource that warrants effective implementation. While it may not take away all CIO woes, it provides a compelling area to optimize efficiency in the face of such economic challenges.
For more information, please contact;
Srisuput Siangyen
Core & Peak
Tel: 0 2439 4600 ext. 8300
[email protected]