Monday, 20 May 2013
How to save storage cost and time
By StorageAsia Editors | Apr 26, 2011
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PrintIn the next few years, CIOs will face an inevitable predicament: the amount of data they will process will balloon to cosmic proportions but the storage systems they have will not be prepared for it. Worse, storage costs won’t see any sign of going down, adding the cost variable to the equation.
How then, can CIOs maintain the sweet spot between data demands and storage capacity growth? Loh Ching Soo, Singapore Country Manager for NetApp, shares his thoughts.
Consolidate and virtualize
Storage consolidation helps companies pool their storage assets into a single resource and simplify their storage infrastructure. It promotes complete visibility across physical and virtual multivendor and multiprotocol storage environments so that capacity can be allocated to specific servers on an as-need basis. Studies have shown that this can help organizations bring up their utilization rates to 80 percent or more.
The single interface in a consolidated storage environment enhances productivity and efficiency of administrators, freeing their time for more strategic tasks or allowing them to manage 10 to 20 times more capacity. As a result, headcount costs are reduced, bringing down the total cost of ownership (TCO).
These savings can be further multiplied with storage virtualization, enabling savings of up to 50 percent on power, cooling, and space, lowering overall data centre costs. Dynamic storage provisioning further boosts storage utility rate, availability and flexibility.
Optimize
Companies should take proactive measures to optimize storage utilization to reduce operating and capital costs. To delay additional capital purchases and save significant capital investment, look at processes that will improve optimization such as provisioning speeds, performance, tiering and archiving, as well as identifying and reclaiming orphaned storage capacity. It is important also to know your storage workload, so as to better manage it. Find out how, where and how much IT resources are being used, pinpointing stranded capacity.
Selecting efficiency technologies and features such as deduplication, thin provisioning and compression for your storage needs enables you to save money by storing data on fewer systems. For instance with deduplication, you can recoup on average up to 50 percent of capacity without purchasing new storage, while compression minimizes the disk capacity required to deliver the normal storage service workload, allowing you to reallocate the disk space for other needs. The end result – more capacity at a lower spend.
Automate
Automation allows companies to manage more storage capacity with fewer resources, thus increasing operational efficiency. Policy-based automation maps end-user requirements to specific levels of service. Once policies are established, new storage consumers can request and receive storage, while automatically getting the appropriate level of data protection without physical intervention.
