Consolidating Data

Information is critical to the success of every kind of business today, and
the rate at which information is being generated is increasing exponen­tially.
However, data is of no value to the business when it is unmanageable and
inaccessible due to its size. Business infor­mation must be readily available
for users. The main challenge for any enterprise is the proper utility and
management of existing storage resources. In such a scenario, storage
consoli­dation is the best option.

Storage consolidation is all about building storage infrastructures that meet
the demands of information-rich business environment. It is the concept of
centralizing and sharing storage resources among numerous application servers.

Importance of storage consolidation

The primary reason for enterprises to deploy storage consolidation is to
simplify their current storage infrastructures. “The benefits of consolidation
include improve­ment in efficiency, improvement in storage utilization and
avoiding over-provisioning. So utilization of storage resources, ability to
share and pool resources across different host environments and cost are driving
customers to look at storage consolidation,” said Prakash Krishnamoorthy,
Country Manager-Storage­Works Division, Technology Solutions Group, HP India.

“More than looking for a solution to manage future data growth, the
enter­prises of today would like a solution, which can manage data within the
existing infras­tructure,” said L Sivashankaran, Director-Storage, Sun
Microsystems India.

“The customer puts in lots of emphasis on managing the explosive growth of
data and articulating and providing a solution that would not only cater to the
explosive growth of data by adding new customers or by adding new applications
but which would also make use of the existing infrastructure. The customers
expect vendors to provide long lasting solutions, which are not only
cost-effective but also compact and can be integrated with the existing
infrastructure,” he added.

Rajesh Saha, Country Manager-Enterprise Business, Systems and Technology
Group, IBM India, feels that storage consolidation brings forth unique
advantages of realizing better asset utilization along with better availability.
“With the level of growth that we are experiencing in this region, consolidation
and virtualization platforms provide much desired flexibility to the
infras­tructure,” he added.

Storage architecture

One of the most significant technological advancements in the storage
industry was the introduction of storage area networks (SANs). SANs enable
enterprise storage consolidation by providing high-speed connec­tivity between
hetero­geneous servers and a storage subsystem. SAN connectivity allows many
servers to share capacity residing on a single storage subsystem. Network
attached storage (NAS) consolidation architectures, which share many of the same
benefits provided by SAN, but use standard IP-based communi­cations networks to
provide

file level access to stored information.

“SAN are basically deployed in an organization supporting business
applications such as an ERP or a consolidated mail messaging environment or
while utlizing storage consolidation or storage virtualization. NAS is
predominantly used to aggregate, manage and deliver file system services. In
most environments, the organizations need to provide NAS for their client
environment on their desktop and for deploying business applications, SAN is
utilized. NAS can also be deployed in order to support the NAS function,” said
Krishnamoorthy of HP

According to him, most of the mid-market segment uses the fiber channel-based
SAN and IP SAN is being increasingly adopted among the SME sectors because of
its cost competitiveness.

SAN/NAS convergence storage

One of the issues that companies are facing today is that if they have made
an X terabytes of investment in storage then how can they optimize it without
spending any more money. Anand Naik, Director-Systems Engineering, Symantec
India, said that today more and more customers are adopting SAN to standardize
all new require­ments. “While they are building SAN, Symantec ensures that they
do not need to throw away their existing resources and they can redeploy their
existing resources even if they are from different vendors or different hardware
suppliers. This is called storage capacity management, which comes under the
overall SAN architecture,” Naik explained.

Opportunities for solution providers

Krishnamoorthy of HP feels that solution providers (SPs) can literally walk into
every customer organization and help them consolidate their storage by building
SAN environment,

NAS or deploy one over the other. The SPs can also consoli­date different
applications using two different protocols FC and ISCSI.

However, Surajit Sen of NetApp India feels that it is a storage
consoli­dation project has a far reaching impact on every layer in the
datacenter. “Unless the strategy is aligned to the rest of the data center
layers like applica­tion, networking and servers it may not deliver the promised
value. SPs therefore need to act as consultants and work with the customer on
building a long term datacenter strategy,” Sen opined.

IBM's Saha said that effective storage, consolidation and protection of
mission critical data is of paramount importance in today's marketplace.
“What­ever the economic situation is, customers will still need to purchase
storage technologies to handle the steady growth of data. However, given the
economic slowdown, we believe that acustomers will focus, now more than ever, on
purchasing cost-effective green storage techno­logies and on technologies like
consolidation and virtualization as these can help them success­fully compete in
today's challen­ging market,” Saha averred.

NR Sethuraman

sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in