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January 23, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 4
Page(s) 9 in print issue
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Storage Essentials
Thin Provisioning & Data Archival Are A Must In The Data Center
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 Given today's cost cutting environment and the ever-increasing stores of data enterprises must deal with, the storage tools you implement in your data center need to focus on decreasing costs while increasing efficiency. The goal is to meet increased capacity demands, reduce the amount of primary storage that you will need to purchase, and lessen the investment in the backup process.
 Thin Provisioning
One of the best ways to limit the amount of storage to be purchased is to implement a system that can control growth via thin provisioning and data deduplication.
“Data deduplication finds redundant blocks of data and only stores one copy of that data; this technique is especially valuable in virtualized server environments where there tends to be a large amount of redundant data. Thin provisioning addresses the other side of the coin by minimizing the space allocated in the first place,” says Jeff O’Neal, senior director of data center solutions at NetApp (www.netapp.com).
It is common practice for a user to submit a request for storage doubling what the application will actually need. Ironically, storage administrators will then double that number again so they don’t have to be troubled expanding the volume. The result is capacity that is provisioned but not used.
Thin provisioning only allocates disk space as it is actually used. For example, if a 1TB volume is provisioned, but only 256GB is actually written to it, then only 256GB is actually consumed. The result is a significant reduction in the amount of storage required by the storage systems.
Secondary Storage
Beyond thin provisioning is moving older data off of primary storage. The common rule of thumb is that 80% of the data stored on servers is not active and in most cases has not been accessed in years. Moving this data greatly reduces the need to purchase additional primary storage but also reduces the amount of data that needs to be backed up, thereby reducing the investment required in the backup process.
“As part of this archive move, it is an ideal time to optimize this data via compression and deduplication to reduce the amount of disk capacity that it consumes on the archive, as well as freeing up primary storage,” says Carter George, vice president of products at Ocarina Networks (www.ocarinanetworks.com). “The result is a cost reduction in three critical areas: reduction in primary storage, reduction in backup storage, and reduction in secondary or archive storage.”
The challenge with optimizing the archive is that most of the data on an archive is unique. This requires a more detailed content-aware approach to data reduction. Because moving data to the archive is less time-sensitive, greater time can be spent examining the data to be archived. This allows complex documents, such as PDF files or even images that have changed slightly, to be examined and optimized prior to moving to secondary media.
“Implementing a content-aware data optimization tool that can also optionally migrate that data to a secondary storage tier can create a compelling reduction in storage resources. Being content-aware is especially critical where the data similarities may not be as obvious to a tool that simply examines the data bits,” concludes George.
Backup Virtualization
Another storage must-have that reduces costs in the backup process is consolidated backup resources via backup virtualization. Gresham Storage’s Vice President of Product Management Tom Wright (www.gresham-storage.com) says, “Because of the challenges associated with backup, administrators have had to implement a lot of point solutions, which have made the process unwieldy and expensive. By consolidating these resources into a single shared pool that can be accessed by a variety of backup applications, they can leverage the existing resources better and delay future purchases significantly.”
Most disk and tape solutions are not integrated, and as a result, users don’t see an increase in overall backup performance to tape. This leads to more of the IT budget being spent on backup disks to hold the active backup data set while waiting for the tape to accept the migration of the backup job from disk. “Because backup virtualization solutions more tightly couple the backup disk and tape libraries, users will actually see an improvement in overall tape performance, and this reduces the required quantity of tape drives, as well as reducing the backup disk capacity investment. . . . This can prevent any additional backup storage purchase, tape or disk, in 2009,” concludes Wright.  by George Crump
Most Essential Tool: Active Recovery
The most essential storage tool to consider for your data center is a product that can take advantage of your storage system’s snapshot technology or backup storage area to enable quick and easy restores.
“Active recovery tools allow the administrator to peer into existing snapshots or backups to perform live interaction with their applications,” says Barry Dop, manager of the enterprise software group at Kroll OnTrack (www.krollontrack.com). “Once the snapshot or backup instance has been brought up by the application, the user can then rapidly search for and recover individual components of those environments. They can then be directly restored to the application while it is live or exported out for some other reason, legal discovery being a common example,” continues Dop.
Without these tools, granular recovery is difficult, if not impossible, and most administrators only use snapshots for complete rollback and use their backups for individual component restores, such as restoring messages or documents. As a consequence, most users dramatically underutilize snapshots and are too reliant on backup data sets. Active recovery tools allow for granular use of the snapshot area, and when implemented, users begin to derive greater functionality from the snapshot features of the SAN or NAS. Not only does this reduce the capacity required by keeping extra backup copies of these applications, it also increases the efficiency of the backup administrator. |
| Key Points
• Storage tools should reduce storage costs while increasing efficiency.
• Thin provisioning, data offloading and archival, and virtualized backups free up resources and make better use of the storage you have.
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