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April 13, 2007
• Vol.29 Issue 15
Page(s) 24 in print issue
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What’s Up With Centralized Storage?
An Overview & Issues To Consider
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Consolidation has been an enduring theme of IT strategy for many years—IT departments have been increasing control over their costs and infrastructure by centralization and standardization. Although server consolidation using virtualization has been red-hot the past couple years, merging of scattered direct-access storage into a unified infrastructure has been a quieter, but still common, trend.
As data storage demands continue unabated, a centralized storage architecture has offered the best hope for efficiently increasing capacity with minimal disruption to production systems. According to a recent study by IDC, the amount of information created or captured in digital form is growing at an annual rate of 57%.
Originally enabled by dedicated, high-performance SANs, centralized storage has evolved to include Ethernet-based NAS servers and tiered storage, incorporating lower-cost, “near-line” arrays and archival backup devices, all lumped under the generic moniker file area networking, or FAN. If your SME is considering a move to centralized storage, it’s wise to examine the concepts, technologies, and tools underlying storage consolidation and the business rationale, benefits, and potential problems associated with centralization.
 Storage Costs & Consolidation Benefits
According to Symantec (www.Processor.com/SymantecCorp), the costs of meeting ever-expanding storage needs without a centralized architecture are numerous. They include poor resource utilization due to inefficient use of capacity; increased system management costs for the burgeoning number of servers and disks; tool proliferation (often a different one for each platform and vendor), causing inefficient complexity; and difficulty in meeting new storage demands, causing laggard response to new demands.
The benefits of storage consolidation are manifold, says Tom Pisello at Alinean (www.alinean.com), a provider of IT ROI/TCO sales tools. Paramount is the more efficient use of resources; pooled storage eliminates the need for unused capacity on each server and reduces the need for standby storage because redundant drives aren’t required for individual servers.
Pisello says consolidated storage pools further enhance efficiency by enabling automated SRM (storage resource management) tools that can enforce usage quotas and eliminate redundant storage of files using disk deduplication technology. Furthermore, Pisello claims that it reduces administration costs, leading to “better storage-per-administrator ratios.” Centralized storage infrastructure, often using high-performance arrays and storage networks, also serves to reduce backup windows and data restore times. Finally, Pisello says that a consolidated infrastructure improves uptime by use of hardware with built-in redundancy and software technologies such as snapshotting, mirroring, and vaulting, which taken together can achieve “99.995% availability or higher.”
Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of CiRBA (www.Processor.com/CiRBA1), a software vendor specializing in server consolidation and virtualization planning, notes that aside from the efficiency and reliability business advantages of a consolidated infrastructure, centralized storage is necessary to deliver the full benefits of a virtualized server environment. Hillier also points out that as virtualized, industry-standard (read x86) servers commodify the compute infrastructure, “storage and data becomes the center of the infrastructure,” prompting the need for “a new level of sophistication around data management.”
Maxwell Riggsbee, CTO of file services at Brocade (www.Processor.com/Brocade-Comm), cites the ability of centralized storage to enable more effective data replication and backup without disrupting users. He notes that many companies have adopted a disaster recovery/business continuity architecture using a secondary location for backup and have found that replicating data from a consolidated storage pool is much easier than from dozens of disparate servers. He also points out that ancillary benefits of consolidated storage are its facilitation of enhanced information lifecycle management services such as data classification, indexing, and search.
Consolidating Storage: Architectures
Underpinning any centralized storage implementation is one or both of the major storage network technologies—dedicated SAN, primarily used for block-level storage such as databases, or LAN-based NAS, used for file storage such as personal directories or email. Greg Schulz, founder of storage consultancy StorageIO (www.storageio.com), points out that the line between these two is blurring with many companies, such as NetApp (www.Processor.com/NetworkAppliance) with its StoreVault line, HP (www.hp.com) with its AiO 400 and 600, and newcomer NSC (Network Storage Corp; www.spanstor.com), featuring converged SAN/NAS products targeting SMEs.
FAN, the generic term Brocade and others adopted to describe the panoply of connected storage technologies, can also incorporate hierarchical storage management, often known as tiered storage, to migrate infrequently used data from high-performance (and costly) devices to lower-cost near-line or archival media.
StorageIO’s Schulz sounds one note of caution to those planning centralized storage. He says administrators shouldn’t just look at optimizing space utilization and disk capacity but should also ensure that performance doesn’t suffer. Consolidated storage infrastructure can lead to I/O bottlenecks and added latency anywhere from individual disk mechanisms or arrays to LAN or SAN paths connecting array and server. Schulz also advises that when consolidating storage from remote sites, look at techniques such as WAN accelerators or other forms of local caching for decreasing I/O latency for time-sensitive applications.
Tools & Processes
Managing a large and growing storage pool is challenging, particularly with tight staffing common in most IT departments. While storage systems and networking hardware generally ship with some sort of administrative utility, integrating heterogeneous tools and devices into a unified management console has proven challenging and is a niche filled by a number of third-party software vendors targeting comprehensive SRM.
Rick Clark, president and CEO of APTARE (www.aptare.com), notes many of its customers found “connecting [storage] systems was the easy part; managing it was a nightmare.” He says one of the issues that earlier attempts at SRM faced was attempting to do too much, made all the more difficult by the dearth of management interface and protocol standards for storage hardware (think SNMP for network devices). For this reason, APTARE has initially focused on problems with backup and recovery.
Without automated management tools, Clark feels it’s impossible for companies to scale their storage capacity and backup frequency while meeting increasing application availability and regulatory requirements. He cites an example of a customer who, using APTARE’s automated tools, increased the number of backup jobs per day, over a much larger data set, by an order of magnitude, all while reducing the number of people managing the storage infrastructure.
Consider The Benefits
Consolidating storage promises to increase hardware efficiency and utilization while offering new prospects for information management and control. These benefits can be saddled with a complex environment requiring highly trained staff and sophisticated management tools. While the hardware to implement a highly concentrated storage infrastructure is stable and standardized, administrative software and information lifecycle management tools are still maturing. 
by Kurt Marko
Growing Storage Needs
 According to IDC, the amount of digitally transmitted and stored information is exponentially increasing at more than 50% per year, while the growth of available storage capacity is projected to lag significantly over the next few years.
SOURCE: IDC WHITEPAPER, “THE EXPANDING DIGITAL UNIVERSE”
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