The demand for storage in today's data center continues to grow at a rapid pace, and IT professionals are expected to deliver the storage their users need even as budgets are tightening. Taking a multistep approach can help IT departments meet storage demands without breaking the bank.

Assess Your Situation

The first step is to know what you have. "As the need for storage capacity continues to mount, the need to understand and monitor the assets becomes more critical," says Ken Barth, CEO of Tek-Tools Software (www.tek-tools.com). "Often, companies may decide to do a one-time audit of their environments, but because of the increasingly dynamic nature of IT, what is really needed are real-time monitoring solutions that can present the state of the IT assets at that moment in time, as well as project into the future and perform trending," continues Barth.

Storage requests don't come in an orderly fashion; instead, they are often in response to sudden requests to deploy an application or to add additional storage. In these cases, there is no time available to stop everything and perform an audit. Having real-time data of the storage assets is critical and allows for a more sane decision-making process. Also, with real-time monitoring, the consumption of storage and backup resources can be trended and storage purchases planned for within the budget cycle.

From this data, IT can build simulators that will show the effect of adding a new application to an existing storage system, which allows IT to place new workloads on the correct storage platforms for both optimal use of the storage and optimal application performance.

Save In The Long Run

IT should next explore storage systems that are able to drive down the costs associated with both the acquisition and the operation and maintenance of storage. "Moore's law will help out with the CAPEX, but the real question is how to deal with OPEX," says Rob Peglar, vice president of technology with Xiotech (www.xiotech.com). "Storage manufacturers need to focus on driving down the operational expenses for users with easy-to-monitor, self-healing storage."

As storage grows, acquisition cost remains a factor, but it is not just the hard dollar cost that should be considered. Look for solutions that can start small (with a low initial investment) and expand easily to avoid over-allocation. Also, look for systems with a smaller physical footprint, saving data center floor space and potentially power and cooling as a result.

From the OPEX perspective, Peglar advises using virtualized storage solutions, which are significantly easier to manage and work well in virtualized server environments. They also have a dynamic nature that enables storage to be added as needed.

Companies should also look for solutions that have the ability to self-heal or recover from failure, because even if the drives that fail are under warranty and have no hard cost to replace, there is never a convenient time for failures and it is always disruptive. Drive repairs or replacements cost time that an IT professional does not have. However, systems that are built to reduce vibration and heat and have specific software built in to try to recover failed drives can save IT significant time.

Lock It Down

The third step in dealing with increased storage demands in the enterprise is locking down the data. Tony Cerqueira, president of Cofio Software (www.cofio.com), believes that as the demands for storage increase, so does the temptation for users to "solve it themselves" by buying external USB storage to transport data from home to work. He adds that they may also use the corporate storage of assets to store personal information.

"The best way to win this battle is [to] fight the problem from the beginning and eliminate the problem at the moment data is created. Our advice is to invest in tools that manage storage actively," says Cerqueira.

One basic tenet of active storage management is to use blocking to make sure data that does not belong on fileservers does not get there. For example, a user's MP3 collection does not belong on corporate file servers. In addition, there is the need to assure that even authenticated users do not copy corporate assets. Authenticated users have the ability to copy data to USB hard drives or email data as attachments to personal email accounts or to competitors. Blocking tools make sure that only corporate data is stored on fileservers and that it stays on those fileservers.

Back It Up

As storage demands increase, so does the strain on the backup window and the backup infrastructure. Rich Pilkington, manager of market research at Syncsort (www.syncsort.com), believes that while most data centers will find budget dollars to keep pace with storage capacity demands, they will not have the budget to make sure that the backup infrastructure keeps pace, as well. Says Pilkington, "The cost to upgrade the existing SAN or network backup infrastructure to keep pace with the growth of storage and to meet current or even tightening SLAs (service-level agreements) may result in an ROI that is never met."

Pilkington believes that the way to address this problem is at its source by using source-side data reduction technology such as block-level incremental backups to reduce the amount of network traffic. Using this type of technology can significantly reduce load on the backup infrastructure.

Another often-overlooked impact of storage growth on the backup process is the time it takes to recover data. When a server fails, even if everything else in the recovery process goes perfectly, the sheer act of moving all of that server's data back across the network can be very time consuming. "A result of using this type of backup technology is that the backup disk destination becomes an active and usable target," says Pilkington. With an active target you can recover in place, meaning that the backup data can be iSCSI-mounted and be ready for the application to begin using without having to transfer the data back across the network.

George Crump for .