By Richard Treadway, Product Consultant
There has been a lot written about the pressures driving IT
to reduce costs and be more responsive to business imperatives. Explosive data
growth, inflexible dedicated architectures and inefficient use of resources are
forcing data centers to consider new approaches.
Explosive Data Growth
- General wisdom says that no
matter how much space you have you’ll accumulate more things to fill it. When you move into your new home you have a
lot of empty closets - 20 years later, not so much. So it is with data but the usual response of
users when they run out of disk space is to just get more. The steady falling cost of storage has thus
far let enterprises continue to solve the problem of data growth by simply
adding more storage. The danger with
this approach is that users assume space is infinite. This thinking has lead to an exorable
explosion in data that has meant the cost of today’s storage capacity dominates
many IT budgets. A
recent survey by ESG found that the majority of those surveyed (58%) had
data growth rates of 11% - 30% annually (figure 1).
Figure 1 - Annual Data Growth Rates, by
Number of Production Servers
Dedicated
Architectures - I may have a lot of storage space in my house while my next
door neighbor is bursting at the seams.
Even while he needs more space and I have extra space it’s not so easy
to move his possessions into my house.
There are all sorts of questions of liability and ownership to
consider. And so it is with dedicated
architectures that create application silos.
If a system is dedicated to a specific application it needs to have
enough capacity to account for fluctuating demands. It requires a lot of agreements and
infrastructure to create a system that can dynamically move applications, servers
and data to match needs as they change.
Inefficiencies –
Urban sprawl and single family housing has created inefficiencies in land use
and commuting costs. Planners are now
realizing that centralized communities create efficiencies through shared space,
reduced traffic and economies of scale.
So it is with IT infrastructure.
If I share resources and dynamically allocate them to meet my changing
demands I can get a lot more efficiency and flexibility from my existing
capacity.
Virtualization to the
rescue – These dynamics point to the need for a new approach to that calls
for dynamic shared resources.
Virtualization delivers on the promise of dynamic sharing of servers to
increase utilization and increase flexibility.
This promise has put virtualization in what Geoffrey Moore calls the
“the tornado” - It’s no longer a
question of, “should I virtualize”, but “when, how and what.”
It’s a journey –
The transition to vitualization isn’t a single event. Moving from application silos to a shared
infrastructure involves transformations at all levels in the IT
organization. As such it’s a journey that
usually involves major initiatives to centralize, standardize, consolidate,
virtualize, optimize and finally outsource.
These initiatives are driving two major transformations in the data center;
infrastructure efficiency and service efficiency. These transformations must drive equivalent
changes at all layers of the stack including the storage layer (Figure 2).
Leaving the storage layer allocated to specific virtualized servers doesn’t
deliver on the efficiencies and flexibility that virtualization promises. Just as the server layer is virtualized so
must the storage layer be virtualized.
Figure 2 – Data Center Transformation
– Infrastructure & Service efficiency
Storage Efficiency initiatives
are about deploying new technologies to bring about cost savings. At the storage layer this means technologies
that allow for the management of space as a single optimized pool. The application of techniques such as thin
provisioning, deduplication, clones and snapshots deliver substantial
cost savings.
Service Efficiency involves
automating processes and workflows as well as using analytics to drive
efficiencies in delivering services.
Service analytics help you gain a holistic view of your storage
infrastructure as a unified set of services using discovery, correlation,
service paths, simulation and root cause analysis. By aligning the relationship of storage
resources with application service levels, storage analytics provide critical
decision support metrics about how to improve availability, performance, and
utilization efficiency across applications, business units, data centers, and
storage tiers.
While storage and service efficiency promise considerable
cost savings there remain serious challenges to realizing them. NetApp Management Software is directly aimed
at helping customers gain the efficiencies of virtualized storage and manage
the complexity of these transitions to attain higher levels of storage and
service efficiency.
