Reining in the data monster with consolidation (1)

Taveesak Saengthong

What challenges are companies facing with regard to data growth?

The forces of regulatory compliance, new media and email are conspiring to create a data monster of huge proportions. Traditional transaction-processing applications are capturing more and more data which is being put to a wide range of uses from business intelligence reports to customer relationship management. Recent regulatory requirements and newer storage-intensive applications such as email, multimedia, life sciences research, and biometrics, are propelling growth rates to heights that have never been seen before.

For many enterprises, the knee-jerk reaction has been to try to placate the monster by feeding it capacity. Storage systems are being attached directly to servers whenever the "disk full" flag goes up. The irony is that elsewhere within the same environment, other storage systems could be sitting idle. The result is that pockets of saturation are coexisting with pockets of underutilization.

Such a storage environment is costly to manage, wasteful, and unable to deliver the quality of service - availability and performance - that businesses require. Storage management costs are likely to grow faster than the budget. Environmental costs - the electricity, cooling, and floor space needed to support the disparate storage systems - will escalate. And storage administrators, already struggling to complete their backups within the designated windows, will find the going even tougher.

How can companies better manage data growth?

The key to reining in the data monster - and re-introducing order into your storage environment - is to re-centralize.

Consolidated, networked storage reduces management complexity and cuts operational cost. The centralized storage pools can be managed as a whole and shared across applications and servers. This improves storage utilization and reduces the number of storage systems needed to support data center applications.

Storage can be allocated (or de-allocated) to an application in seconds.

With storage consolidation, the ratio of terabytes per square foot increases and frees up floor space. The power and air conditioning requirements of the data center decrease, delivering savings in environmental costs.

Operating expenses are also lowered because storage administrators are more productive. This is especially when solutions couple consolidated networked storage with robust storage management software. The combination enables administrators to manage a greater amount of storage without additional manpower resources.

Using a single interface reduces the training requirements for storage administrators and other IT personnel, and speeds up the implementation of new subsystems. It also ensures that policies and procedures, such as a single backup and restore platform, can be implemented consistently across the IT environment. 

Email: taveesak.saengthong@hds.com