31 July 2010
Saturday
Dealing with enterprise data storage - Part 2
By Beth Pariseau | Jul 30, 2009
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PrintTo reclaim storage and consolidate the amount of data in their firms, enterprise data storage administrators are increasingly turning to technology tricks they can apply to get the most out of their storage arrays. Using techniques such as tiered storage, data deduplication, space-efficient snapshots, thin provisioning and wide striping, solid-state drives (SSDs) and energy efficiency, they can store as much data as possible in the smallest and least-expensive amount of space.
Tiered storage
Tiered storage has been in vogue for a while, but tiering projects are becoming more popular as companies seek to avoid purchasing more disk capacity.
University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC), an Oak Brook, Ill.-based industry group for U.S. academic hospitals and medical centers that collects data and coordinates cooperation between healthcare facilities, has been aggressive with its tiered storage strategy. Instead of starting data at tier 1 and progressing down through lower tiers as it ages, all data starts at tier 2, and the organization uses Hitachi Data Systems' Tuning Manager to evaluate what data needs to be moved up to tier 1 for performance reasons.
UHC purchased the Hitachi Data Systems' Universal Storage Platform V (USP V) storage virtualization controller in 2008 when it forecasted 400% data growth. Steven Carlberg, UHC's principal network administrator, said he chose the USP V system over systems from EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co., IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. because he anticipated virtualizing arrays behind the controller would make future migrations easier.
"Obviously, the main cabinet would take a forklift upgrade to replace, but I don't foresee having to swap it out for a long, long time. It can scale up to 247 petabytes," he said. "Going forward, on lower tiers, we can change out obsolete hardware without a lot of pain."
Data reduction maximizes tiered storage efficiency
Clackamas County in north central Oregon deployed tiered storage by using F5 Networks Inc.'s ARX file virtualization switch and Data Domain's DD565 data deduplication disk arrays in an effort to put off adding capacity to its tier 1 SAS-based iSCSI storage-area network (SAN) storage.
Similarly, Vancouver, B.C.-based Rainmaker Entertainment Inc. will use an ECO appliance from Ocarina Networks with network-attached storage (NAS) systems from BlueArc Corp. and NAS systems from Isilon Systems Inc. to reduce primary storage and keep more archival data online.
Good post. You have
Good post. You have explained briefly about the techniques such as tiered storage, space-efficient snapshots, thin provisioning and wide striping, SSDs and energy efficiency inorder to store data efficiently. Its really informative and useful.