Consolidation
Storage Consolidation
- Reap the Benefits of Storage Consolidation...Simplicity, Agility, and Value learn more » »
- Analysis and Planning are Keys to a Successful Storage Consolidation learn more » »
- Storage Consolidation Architecture and Automation Provide Long-term Benefits learn more » »
- Disaster Recovery and Flexibility in Storage Consolidation learn more » »
Reap the Benefits of Storage Consolidation...Simplicity, Agility, and Value
Storage consolidation is the process of replacing older, less efficient storage with fewer, more efficient, and more easily managed storage platforms. Specifically, storage consolidation reduces the number of storage devices required to deliver the same storage capacity, reduces the number of licenses required, and achieves a higher utilization of existing capacity. Centralized storage is also necessary to deliver the full benefits of a virtualized server environment.
Just as in all areas of IT, the complexity of systems integration has increased and forced more investments in ongoing maintenance.
Overwhelming storage concerns include:
- Proliferation of data: Some sources cite the amount of information created or captured in digital form is growing at an estimated annual rate of more than 50%. The data is increasing daily and yet has to be made readily accessible to more users and still be protected.
- Changing storage requirements: Regulatory mandates along with new types of data impact requirements for high availability, archiving, and performance.
- Inefficient storage topologies: Direct attached storage is the most common inefficient storage topology that begs consolidation. SAN islands, consisting of multiple discrete SANS, have also proven inefficient and under-utilized in the storage topology.
- Budget pressures: Just as everywhere else in today’s struggling economy, budgets are not increasing as fast as demand. IT managers are continually asked to do more with less.
In the storage landscape, organizations need to think beyond individual business units, a silo-based business approach filled with inefficiencies and redundancies, and consider the broader business implications. Storage consolidation offers answers.
- Greater Simplicity - Streamlined compliance and disaster recovery processes. Streamlined and simplified administration.
- Increased Agility - Transform your storage environment into virtualized pooled IT assets with enhanced service levels providing the ability to respond quickly to change and rapidly scale to accommodate growth.
- Boosted Efficiency - Storage capacity managed per administrator is increased by more than 25% and storage resource utilization is increased to as high as 80%.
- Increased Business Value - Optimized asset utilization lowers costs and ultimately speeds the ROI. Costs are also lowered through less licensing and fewer administrators required for management.
Storage consolidation also reduces the need for standby storage because redundant drives are not required for individual servers. Other benefits include the facilitation of enhanced information lifecycle management services such as data classification, indexing, and search.
ENS-Inc can help your organization with a strategic storage consolidation :
- improve responsiveness
- reduce costs
- increase performance
Through a carefully planned storage consolidation, you can create a flexible, scalable IT environment that supports future growth and change.
Analysis and Planning are Keys to a Successful Storage Consolidation
When done right, storage consolidation reduces the number of systems and increases storage utilization up to 80% and more. It allows administrators to organize and provision storage across multiple storage systems through a single control panel. But a successful storage consolidation requires careful planning.
You need to know what you have before you can figure out where you want to go and how to get there.
- Inventory all storage assets.
- Determine the business drivers: cost reduction, reduction in storage proliferation, streamlined management and efficiency.
- Define the desired outcome.
- Develop a phased approach which can deliver benefits quickly and overcome management resistance.
The process involves determination of what data needs to be migrated, where the data is going, and how it’s going to get there. Minimizing the data to be moved is a first step. Active production data can be moved to tier 1 storage while active archived data can be moved to less expensive tier 2 storage. Data reduction can also be achieved through single instancing or block-level data deduplication.
Although an array can be loaded up to capacity, performance optimization also needs to be brought into the equation. Consolidated storage can lead to I/O bottlenecks and added latency anywhere from individual disk mechanisms or arrays to LAN or SAN paths connecting array and server. Traffic resulting from large temporary jobs such as end-of-month activities or even just growth in general impacts the data highway. Capacity monitoring tools can prevent unwelcome surprises. When dealing with consolidating from remote sites, WAN accelerators can be used along with other forms of local caching for decreasing I/O latency for time-sensitive applications.
Data will need to be migrated in the process of the consolidation and planned for minimal impact to users. It needs to be scheduled so as not to disrupt normal business activities and it cannot shut down the network. There also needs to be sufficient bandwidth available for the process at the time of the migration. The longer a migration takes, the more chances there are for problems. Virtualization and migration-specific tools can help.
Problems with consolidated storage can have a large impact on an organization. You need the right tools and the right experts. ENS-Inc consultants and engineers are certified and experienced in all areas of consolidation, virtualization, and migration and can help you achieve a smooth and efficient data migration for your storage consolidation project.
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Storage Consolidation Architecture and Automation Provide Long-term Benefits
Companies can consolidate within a single silo, or substitute fewer large arrays for many smaller storage arrays. This can offer some benefit in the overall. But a strategic storage consolidation goes beyond silos, consolidating systems for maximum simplicity, agility, and value. Organizations need to consider consolidating not only devices and arrays but also the storage management tools.
Just storing the information is not enough. Users and applications need to interact with the information and must be able to access the information reliably and in a timely manner. Storage consolidation is about building storage infrastructures that meet the demand of information-rich business environments of today and scale easily for those same businesses tomorrow.
The storage system should be planned with scalability to meet five-year growth rates and offer advanced functionality such as thin provisioning (for capacity optimization), automatic capacity load balancing, and VM-aware snapshot capabilities and replication.
Centralized management, a single interface, can be used to manage the entire storage pool. With the storage investment spread across multiple servers, a properly designed storage consolidation architecture could support literally hundreds of heterogeneous servers simultaneously sharing the capacity of one or more storage subsystems. Capacity can be allocated to specific servers on an as-needed basis, drawing from a pool of storage. And, because storage consolidation architectures justify using industry-leading technologies, high availability, performance, and capacity can be designed into those architectures to ensure the application server requirements are met.
The underpinnings of a centralized storage implementation are one or both of the major storage network technologies:
- dedicated SAN, primarily for block-level storage such as databases
- LAN-base NAS, used for file storage such as personal directories or email
Many vendors are now featuring converged SAN/NAS products. If you’re ready for a storage upgrade or plan to move the virtual environment to a more consistent infrastructure configuration, consider deploying an iSCSI SAN or NAS system.
Efficiency of the storage infrastructure is further enhanced by enabling automated Storage Resource Management (SRM) tools that can enforce usage quotas and eliminate redundant storage of files using deduplication technology.
Storage consolidation reduces backup windows and data restore times. Uptime is also improved by implementing hardware with built-in redundancy and software technologies such as snapshots, mirroring, and vaulting, which taken together can achieve near total availability.
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Disaster Recovery and Flexibility in Storage Consolidation
With centralized storage, organizations can dynamically move live workloads from one virtual host to another to avoid planned downtime or performance degradation, or can rapidly restart VMs (virtual machines) on another virtual host in the event of unplanned downtime.
Centralized storage enables more effective data replication and backup without disrupting users. Many companies have adopted a disaster recovery/business continuity architecture using a secondary location for backup and have found that replicating data from a consolidated storage pool is much easier than from dozens of disparate servers.
To maximize resilience in your storage consolidation, let ENS-Inc engineers and consultants help you plan and implement the system that will best work for your organization.
ENS-Inc develops and deploys centralized storage systems and then provides the onsite training and knowledge transfer to empower success.
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