Conclusion
Now is the time to take a long, hard look at your IT environment. It is possible to do more with less, without compromising on business outcomes. Examine closely the areas that can be cut or deferred; scrutinise your vendor solutions and see who works most effectively with others; and assess your storage environment, as it’s an area where significant cost savings and efficiency gains can be made.
Combining these tactics will help to ensure your organisation’s IT infrastructure will be ready and available to allow the business to grow and innovate when economic conditions improve.
Sidebar: Storage Efficiency Technologies
Dual-parity RAID & Caching technology: allows the use of higher density, lower cost SATA drives by providing production resiliency and performance in a cost effective way. Dual-parity RAID safeguards data from double-disk failure without impacting performance. Coupling caching technology like NetApp’s PAM card with cheaper SATA drives can improve their performance to Fibre Channel levels. These two technologies enable cost savings without compromising performance or data protection.
Data deduplication: is the automated process of removing duplicate files from volumes of storage. Data duplication assigns a unique signature to every block of data in a given volume. If more than one data block with the same signature is discovered elsewhere in the volume, all other but the original are deleted and replaced with the smaller footprint of a reference/pointer to the original. Three of the most common applications ripe for deduplication are within virtual machines, on user file servers and within back-up volumes. At its most effective, data deduplication can enable organisations to reclaim up to 95 per cent of storage space.
Thin provisioning: eliminates the common practice of over-provisioning storage based on anticipated future needs. Instead it provides ‘just-in-time’ provisioning – the flexible allocation of required storage to an application on-the-fly from a consolidated networked storage pool. A larger pool of unused storage enables administrators to defer the purchase of new hardware or even decommission older arrays. This can both reduce storage costs directly and yield the ‘soft savings’ from reductions in data centre space and associated power and cooling requirements.
Unified Storage: all use cases for storage (production; development and testing; back-up and recovery; disaster recovery, and archive and compliance) and all common storage protocols (such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NFS) are incorporated into a single, unified operating platform. This enables massive consolidation opportunities and significantly simplifies data management and staff training time. When combined with the storage efficiency features listed above, a Unified Storage deployment provides the greatest opportunity for storage efficiency.
Roger Mannett is Marketing Director for NetApp in Australia and New Zealand. In this role, Roger is responsible for all aspects of NetApp’s marketing program in the region, encompassing the direct sales and channels environments, corporate branding, product management, media and analyst relations as well as corporate events. For more information visit www.netapp.com.
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