|
Re-architecting the Data Center with Storage Management
Businesses are re-architecting their storage systems with a variety of new capabilities that improve storage efficiency by reducing the number of devices, reducing energy consumption, improving I/O performance, increasing allocation levels, and adding stronger security measures.
Deduplication has gained considerable momentum for the backup application offering reductions in the amount of storage required for backup data and shrinking the backup window. Deduplication affects applications that demonstrate the characteristic of moving the same data repeatedly, but will not easily be able to address the growing size of other files such archives, video and fixed content. Compression is implemented within most of these file formats, which will mean a reduction rate at the transmission stage. Data reduction is expected the next generation of deduplication taking deduplication one step further, moving it from a reactive to a proactive approach to data management serving most file types.
Thin provisioning is new for non-mainframe systems and allows physical storage to be reserved only when data is written, not when the application is first configured. In traditional storage provisioning, application teams guess at how much storage they might consume and that full amount is reserved on day one. The amount reserved can be used only by that application, and not by others. This means that large portions of costly storage go unused, and consume power and cooling resources in spite of the fact that no data is actually written to that disk.
Classifying data and understanding how its value changes over time have become primary IT initiatives. Data classification encompasses aligning data with the optimal storage architectures and services based on the changing value of data. Defining policies to map application requirements to storage tiers can be time-consuming, but is assisted by emerging data classification and policy-based management software from a variety storage software companies.
Bottom line: Though challenging and becoming increasingly complex as storage requirements grow, re-architecting the data center yields much improved operational efficiencies and cost savings. Businesses should develop plans to begin re-architecting their IT systems before the task get too large.
Source: Horison Information Strategies: Storage Spectrum
© 2008 Horison
|
|
|
