6 Ways to Reduce Data Storage Cost

7/31/2019 6 Ways to Reduce Data Storage Cost

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Six Ways to Reduce

Data Storage Costs

and Complexity

2011 Oracle and TechTarget


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2 2011 Oracle and TechTarget

Table of Contents

Storage Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Unified Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Flash-Based Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6Storage Management Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Backup and Recovery Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

Scale-Out Storage Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11


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Its every IT professionals dream: Reduce the complexity of

data storage while getting a tighter handle on skyrocketing

storage costs. But for decades, thats been easier said than

done. The reasons why, are well-documented: Market

researcher, International Data Corp. has predicted that data

storage will increase globally by a factor of 44 times over

the coming decade. The sheer magnitude of that growth of

data storage inevitably has been translated into higherspending on primary and backup storage, and a more

diverse, complex environment.

But this mountainous growth in data storage only tells part

of the story. Storage has become increasingly indispensible

in IT architectures as organizations of all sizes, industries

and geographies look to find ways to manage that storage

for business benefit and competitive advantage. Although,

its clear that doing so requires adding significant capacityto storage infrastructure, actually being able to manage that

data back up, archive, share and even reconstruct it for a

host of applications. This adds huge levels of complexity to

storage hardware, software and services. Toss in require-

ments such as the explosion in unstructured data; security;

compliance mandates; disaster recovery/business

continuity, and support for rich-media formats including

social media, and its no wonder that IT organizations are

struggling to come up with new ways to reduce complexityand confront ever-tighter storage budgets.


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dedicated storage silos, resulting in higher hardware

costs and greater management complexity. Virtual

storage pools can be built and accessed on-premise

through a variety of well-established virtualization

hypervisors, or as a shared service (Storage as a

Service) in a cloud-computing environment.

Regardless of the deployment method, virtualization

provides IT organizations an efficient solution that is

faster, easier and less costly to deploy and manage

than buying and integrating more storage systems for

dedicated applications. Numerous independent studies

have pointed to savings in hardware acquisition costs

of about 70 percent after deploying a storage

virtualization solution. This is a result of eliminating

the need to buy more disk systems every time there is

a spike in business activity or when a new, data-rich

application like social media comes along.

2. Unified Storage. Although this technology has been

around for about a decade, it is building momentum

among storage architects as an efficient way to ramp

up storage systems performance and capacity

utilization without increasing complexity or cost.

Unified storage is essentially a system that runs and

manages storage resources from a single device, as

opposed to having various storage systems operateindependent of each other, often with different storage

architectures, management software and network


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topologies. With unified storage, the central device

consolidates both file-based and block-based storage

into a single platform, combining and integrating

such diverse storage solutions as Fibre Channel-

based SANs, iSCSI-based SAN and low-cost NAS

appliances. Unified storage reduces capital expendi-

tures by replacing dedicated storage systems for file

and block storage with a single, low-cost solution

(often a modified NAS appliances, for instance). It

also improves manageability through the single-

system approach, obviating the need for multiple

storage management storage software and different

management consoles. Storage snapshots and

replication often are supported in unified storage

systems, easing backup/recovery requirements.

3. Flash-Based Storage. Storage professionals lookingfor enterprise-class performance in a package offering

low hardware acquisition costs and significantly

reduced power usage versus traditional rotating

memory should consider flash-based storage. Flash

has long offered the advantages of extremely high

reliability and superior performance because it

doesnt utilize moving parts to access and store

information, making it a favorite in such applications

as high-performance computing, Web 2.0, transac-tion-intensive environments such as financial trading

and exchanges, and telecommunications. In recent


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years, flash technology has made significant improve-

ments for storage applications in both actual capacity

and cost-per-Gigabyte. It also provides a very small

form factor, providing significant space savings in

data centers as well as much lower power consump-

tion. It was that dramatic cost reduction that helped

bring flash drives into consumer applications as USB-

based storage. Until recently, the idea of an end user

purchasing eight gigabytes of storage for under $20

was laughable. Now that high-capacity, inexpensive

storage is possible with flash, that value proposition

is increasingly showing up in server-based environ-

ments in all-sized organizations, all the way up to

enterprise-class data centers. Storage professionals

also will be captivated by flash-based storage

devices ability to read data as much as 100 times

faster than traditional disk drives, making it a solid

alternative platform for network-based array storage.

4. Storage Management Software. Regardless of your

storage physical infrastructure SAN, NAS, direct-

attached or unified storage management software is

the key to a simplified, cost-efficient storage architec-

ture. If your organization is mid-sized or larger,

chances are good you have more than one type of

storage management software installed throughoutyour data centers and departments. Therefore, one of

your first steps should be to take an inventory of


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storage management solutions and consider a

consolidated approach. That consolidated manage-

ment scheme will certainly ease complexity and reduce

cost simply by spotting functionality gaps and

overlaps, and by automating many of the heretofore

manual tasks of monitoring and managing storage

infrastructure. Done properly, storage management

software supports many of the different capabilitiesdiscussed in this paper, from virtualization and

thin-provisioning to backup, recovery, archiving,

deduplication and scale-out architecture. Todays

cutting-edge storage management platforms reduce

total cost of ownership both by reducing the number of

dedicated storage administrators, and limiting the

amount of time they have to devote to repetitive tasks

such as running backups at regular intervals and

storage policy management. Be sure that your storagemanagement software can support a well-thought-out

storage tiering policy to automatically migrate data

between different storage media and systems in order

to reduce restore times and more efficiently utilize

existing storage resources. Finally, best-of-breed

storage management software will support improved

uptime through advanced analytics, load leveling and

real-time resolution of unplanned service interruptions.


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5. Backup and Recovery Techniques. Its long been

fashionable to think of backup as high-priced

insurance for unplanned outages, with simple

approaches like mirrored disk arrays or incremental

backup to tape libraries as sufficient practices to

ensure a smooth transition after an unexpected event.

But backup and recovery in todays always-

connected, always-available economy has had to

evolve in dramatic fashion for a simple reason: No

organization, regardless of size, industry or

technology profile, can afford to be offline for more

than a few heartbeats. When organizations rely on

network-accessible information for everything from

processing payroll to conducting commerce, backup

and recovery become vital links on any entitys ability

to stave off financial disaster. This has given far

greater emphasis to backup storage system to ensure

that organizations not only can recover and restore

their critical data in real time after an outage, but can

continue to conduct business without missing a beat.

When done properly with suitable planning and

execution, these new systems can actually reduce

recovery and continuity costs, and can do so with less

complexity than has traditionally been the case with

legacy backup solutions. Take one specific

technology: data deduplication. This software

approach allows organizations to eliminate virtually

all copies of a particular piece of data when doing


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backups, focusing only on the original file in question.

(Think of what happens when email directories

dozens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands

containing a copy of a multi-megabyte PowerPoint

attachment. With deduplication, only the original

copy is backed up, thus reducing complexity, cost and

time to do normal backup.) Another approach being

used by IT organizations is continuous data

protection, which shifts the emphasis from backup to

recovery by providing additional recovery points from

snapshots. This speeds recovery for critical

applications, again reducing complexity and cutting

costs associated with recovery and data loss. Even

tape drives for decades the de facto standard

backup and recovery medium in most enterprise data

centers are making important strides in providing

easier management, greater reliability, improved

performance and heightened security. Todays tape

backup solutions essentially linchpins to modern

data recovery and business continuity capabilities

offer unsurpassed reliability, scalability and

automation than ever.

6. Scale-Out Storage Architecture. While every IT

professional is certainly familiar with scale-up storage

architecture (essentially, buying ahead on capacityto anticipate future storage needs), scale-out storage

architecture is just starting to gain momentum as a


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solution to control costs and reduce complexity.

Scale-out architecture (sometimes referred to as

horizontal scaling), allows relatively low-cost

storage components to be combined and configured

to create a storage pool beyond a traditional disk

array. It often is utilized in conjunction with a broader

storage virtualization strategy, but doesnt have to be

part of a virtualization approach. Its usuallyassociated with network-attached storage (NAS), but

increasingly is being used with larger, enterprise-

class storage-area networks (SAN) because it allows

organizations to ramp up storage availability without

having to invest in more and more disk systems to

achieve necessary capacity. Storage administrators

also are excited about the ability of scale-out storage

architecture to dramatically reduce storage manage-

ment complexity because this approach can make alarge collection of low-cost storage nodes look and

behave like a single, integrated storage system,

whose resources can be deployed as needed when

capacity demands ramp up.

Conclusion

IT storage professionals arent likely to ever face a time

when storage demands arent accelerating by leaps and

bounds. Such trends as the increased use of rich media

such as video and audio, increased legal compliance

mandates, and the explosion in social media are just a few


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factors that will surely threaten to further bloat storage

infrastructure.

But with storage spending likely to be squeezed as IT

budgets continue tightening, decision-makers will need to

stretch the bounds of innovation to come up with new

approaches to deal with both complexity and cost of

storage. In some cases, technologies such as flash storageand cutting-edge storage management software will be a

valuable initial step toward those goals. In other instances,

architectural decisions such as virtualization, unified

storage, scale-out and disaster recovery/business continuity

will be essential. In virtually all cases, however, storage

professionals will need to adopt all of these approaches

as well as be on the lookout for new advances in order to

deliver tangible business benefit to their organizations in

spite of mounting complexity and costs.

6 Ways to Reduce Data Storage Cost

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