Data Crunch

When the credit crunch starts to bite, your financial director may look at cutting the budget for storage management. Our panel of experts offer strategies to help you reduce bills, not effectiveness.

So you really enjoyed Euro 2008, the Olympics were interesting for a change, the summer was awful but the footie season has restarted and Big Brother 9 will be over soon. All’s pretty well, yes?

Until this morning, that is, when your FD pulled you aside to tell you that, well, we’re all having to pull in our belts, and that you’ll understand that a 30 per cent cut in operational IT budget is no bigger a sacrifice than Charmaine having to let four salespeople go. You’ve just been credit crunched.

But the cuts come at a time when storage is growing faster than a mutant virus in a dodgy sci-fi film (see “Scary storage numbers”, p12). Is it possible to maintain any kind of a credible, cost-effective IT storage story in the face of draconian budget revision?

This month, Server Management has put this scenario to some storage and technology experts.

Don’t panic!
You’ve been here before. “Being asked to do more with less is no great surprise to any IT department,” points out Chris Reid, managing consultant at IT services company Morse. “The economic slowdown does not translate into less data needing to be managed and stored. In fact, it is precisely at these times when having an efficient storage strategy can pay dividends.”

So what are you going to do? Buy a load of second-hand filing cabinets off eBay? They may not be that much use to you. “Some companies could be tempted to sidestep IT storage costs and rely on paper records,” admits Malcolm Turnbull, founder and technical architect of datamirroring specialist ClusterScale. “But space is an issue here. To keep all the material needed takes a lot of man-hours to manage and file; printing it all uses a lot of paper and physically storing the data can use up much needed space. There is also an issue with access.”

You could go mainframe. Don’t laugh. There are many sound reasons why you should buy the biggest data shelter you can. This may not make much sense for a small to medium-sized enterprise (SME), but for larger enterprises, rationalisation may equal putting back Big Iron.

Alternatively, you could go virtual. A budget freeze may be the right time to really take the bull by the horns and transform your environment into as virtualised a world as you can, seeking to enjoy the reputed advantages of a hyper-virtualised operating infrastructure.

“Luckily, creating an effective storage strategy doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg,” offers Morse’s Reid. “We are seeing demand from more and more companies that are interested in using virtualisation to consolidate the storage devices that are spread throughout the organisation, because not only will this make the storage environment easier to manage, but it will mean greater utilisation of each device. As a result, less physical storage will be needed now and less will need to be purchased in the future. This approach will also free up valuable room in the data centre and lower cooling and power costs, which is not only good for the environment but also for your bottom line.”

Go SaaS
If you can’t afford to run your own server farm any more, maybe this is God’s sign that you need to outsource the running of data-hungry applications to someone else. The angle here is that turning to Software as a Service (SaaS) might simplify infrastructure and allow you to cut your IT cloth to your new, slimmer IT needs.

One happy SaaS customer, Canary Wharf-based chartered accountants Meer & Company, claims that a move to using applications provided by First Hosted has reduced the volume of data required for storage through improved file format efficiencies, “minimised the amount of time and effort involved in data storage”, “eliminated hardware costs in the backup process”, and helped the firm “identify and protect business-critical data”.

Could budget cuts be the best prompt you could be given to take the plunge and get at least some IT delivered remotely?
If that seems too radical a break, you could get fashionable and take the iSCSI route. The advent of iSCSI as a flexible and powerful storage area network (SAN) protocol has enabled breakthrough virtual storage designs that parallel the advanced designs of server virtualisation technologies.

“Scalability, simplified storage management and, perhaps most importantly, cost are the drivers here,” believes Tim Sherbak, senior manager for virtualisation solutions marketing at Dell. “The implementation and operational costs of an iSCSI SAN are substantially lower than those of a Fibre-Channel-based SAN – in fact, there can be up to about a 50 per cent saving. As a result, iSCSI SANs not only remove the cost barrier of classic SAN architectures, but also the barrier to the adoption of virtualisation technologies.” The claim here is that the  iSCSI protocol is superior to traditional Fibre Channel as a storage virtualisation technology.

This article is not the right place to air these controversies once again, but plainly iSCSI is now such an established standard that at least evaluating a move in this direction in budget crisis mode could be a good idea.

Go Tiered
Yes, we have been doing this for years. Actually, we used to do it, then we stopped when the rough boys starting laughing at us for having tape still hanging around. Seriously though, sound storage management approaches transcend the storage medium: some things are more important than others to keep. Some things can go to sleep off-site for years. You should store and retrieve them in the cheapest way possible.

“Faced with a budget crisis, you could react by starting to automatically migrate data from primary to secondary storage,” thinks Eric Herzog, a storage veteran and now vice president of sales and marketing at archive start-up Tarmin. “Migration to secondary storage saves approximately four to five times on capital expense, as secondary storage is four to five times less costly to buy than primary.”

Note that less storage on-site does not necessarily mean less technology. “Cutting the IT budget usually goes along with cutting back on IT people, so automation of the IT/storage environment is necessary,” says Juergen Arnold, chairman at SNIA Europe. He’d expect to see a fully automated backup process to tape libraries, tools for easy provisioning of storage resources and automated failover processes in case of storage or server failures in any environment looking to manage storage better (be it tiered or not).

Go… better!
Under this heading we have filed responses based on the notion that better storage isn’t a technology or a budget issue at all – it’s a management one. “You need to take a holistic approach if you want to optimise your storage strategy – space, power, cooling, management, longevity, future proofing, value,” comments Simon Pamplin, systems engineer manager UK & Ireland at storage specialist Brocade. “Organisations should be looking for ultra high performance from high-density storage networking products that consume less power and have lower cooling requirements.

Data centre architectures are available today that enable companies to reduce the number of physical chassis they have in their data centres through high density and port speed (resulting in less power and cooling, but also less space required and less management), while simultaneously future-proofing investments with the ability to take feeds from 10GbE (gigabit Ethernet), 8Gb Fibre Channel, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and run data migration and virtualisation applications all within the same chassis.”

The point being that we all have lots of options – we need to mix and match intelligently to get the best environment for the organisation’s specific needs. “Disk, VTL, compression, deduplication and tape storage all have their own benefits and drawbacks relating to speed of recovery, physical space usage and power consumption,” Chris James, EMEA marketing director at Overland Storage, reminds us. “A terabyte of RAID is very different to a terabyte of deduplicated VTL, which is very different to a terabyte of LTO tape. If chosen well, an end-to-end data protection strategy can amount to business gain, ensure legal compliance and result in lower power costs.”

Go… where it makes most sense
Ultimately, it could be that none, all or some of these storage technology pathways would be the right response to a crisis: it depends, of course, on your organisation’s individual needs. The brief list of storage options and strategies above is far from exhaustive. We could also have mentioned deduplication (to be fair, cited by many of these commentators as a sensible thing to do to combat storage bloat) or WAN optimisation (allowing storage and server consolidation with multiple sites or remote users), for instance.

Actually, the current credit crunch is irrelevant. You shouldn’t need an external push like a massive budget cut to evaluate ways to rationalise and better manage your storage portfolio, exploiting the best that the latest technology can give you. Saving costs and doing better with what you have is the warp and woof of the IT leader’s job, surely?

Just when you thought it was safe to read a storage article and not hear about compliance… “In the current economic climate companies are pulling back on budgets, but storing and backing up your data is essential,” says ClusterScale’s Turnbull. “Many industries are subjected to compliance regulations which demand that information is stored for a certain number of years. For example, Sarbanes-Oxley requires storage of all relevant financial records, and in most cases that includes unstructured and semi-structured data such as e-mail. Therefore organisations must have a storage system in place and it must be kept up to date.”

“When investing in storage, it’s vital to look beyond price per terabyte to the factors that truly affect total cost of ownership, such as automated provisioning, energy efficiency and data reduction features,” thinks Adam Thew, business manager for Hewlett-Packard’s StorageWorks division. “A balanced combination is the best way to ensure that your enterprise is getting not only the most for its investment, but also the best – saving money now and in the long run. Cost is a long-term issue and, far from being mere buzzwords, solutions such as storage consolidation and virtualisation will continue to be a long-term answer to an effective storage strategy. By giving yourself more time due to simpler management, your limited resources go further and you can invest in future technologies much sooner.”

Maybe the best cost-effective storage strategy would be to go to your FD yourself and give him back 30 per cent of the budget: “We won’t need that, Clive, thanks very much – we are operating just too efficiently to warrant it.” Well, it would be worth it to see the look on his face, wouldn’t it?

Further reading
www.brocade.com
www.clusterscale.com
www.firsthosted.co.uk
www.hp.com (HP Storage Works: http://tinyurl.com/4v4xax)
www.morse.com
www.overlandstorage.com
www.snia.org/home
www.tarmin.com