Tough economic times are prompting IT shops to scour their infrastructures for the most efficient ways to reduce costs, improve performance, and reduce risk. Because the amount of managed data continues to grow even in a suppressed business environment, storage is rapidly becoming a priority area of focus.

In many cases, relatively small investments in storage can return significant savings. Before diving in, however, it’s important to keep some challenges in mind.

Look Into Storage Resource Management To Keep Tabs On Data

Companies often pay little attention to what they’re storing until they approach maximum usage and alarm bells start going off.

“Most organizations only know they have a problem with storage when users call in to report problems running their applications,” says Andrew Reichman, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “In effect, they use the phone as their performance analytics, which makes it very difficult to manage. If your only form of measurement is a red warning light, that’s not very granular.”

Valdis Filks, research director for storage technologies and strategies at Gartner, says reactive strategies are problematic. “Businesses don’t know if the data is being used, if it’s not being used, and how important it is because they haven’t done any research into how they use their data,” says Filks. “So they have lots of duplicate data.”

Filks cites a common example of an employee emailing a PowerPoint presentation to 1,000 staff members. “If the presentation is a megabyte in size, and it ends up being stored a thousand times, you’ve just lost a gigabyte straightaway on your email server,” he says. “Companies need to spend more time understanding how people use storage on their desktops, on their servers, and within their applications.”

To gain visibility into storage resources, SMEs should consider using SRM (storage resource management) tools. You wouldn’t drive a car without a speedometer and fuel gauge, so why would you run your storage environment without similar visibility? SRM tools give IT much more granular control over its storage investments.

“You can justify the cost of these tools pretty easily,” says Filks. “If you’ve got a badly utilized environment with disk systems that are only 10% utilized, you can use SRM to increase utilization and stop buying storage for a couple of months.”

A short ROI period and the cost of storage-related crises make this a simple choice for IT. “It’s easy to make the business case,” he says. “You spend money on this to make money.”

Find A Better Mix Of Storage Technologies

Organizations often buy the wrong types of storage, resulting in an expensive, high-performance primary storage environment that hits the wall sooner and a secondary storage tier that fails to meet day-to-day business needs.

“We’ve learned that 90% of the data in any organization is idle after about 30 days,” says Bob Woolery, senior vice president of marketing for Nexsan Technologies (www.nexsan.com). “But you still want to keep it online and readily accessible.”

Rapid advances in disk-based technology could be all the incentive storage-stressed companies need to dump tape once and for all as a second-tier storage medium.

Woolery says SATA drives, which traditionally have not been considered suitable for data center deployment, deserve a second look. “We tell people that modern SATA storage is not the storage they knew, even from just a couple of years ago,” he says. “Today, it’s very high-capacity, very high-performance, and very reliable. People don’t necessarily think of SATA storage when planning out their storage roadmap, but they really should consider it.

Woolery says a second-tier array of SATA-based drives—typically up to 42 1TB drives in a 4U rack space—delivers high-density, energy-efficient, high-performance managed storage without the drawbacks of traditional tape.

Implement Acceptable Use Policies To Keep Employees In Check

Employees often use corporate storage for personal data. Lack of management transparency can easily push any organization to its limits.

“Someone brings in a camera filled with holiday photos, sticks that on [a] laptop, and sends it to 20 people,” says Filks. “That’s another couple of gigabytes that’s just disappeared. This happens all the time, and it puts a lot of pressure on storage.”

Although SRM can address abuse by flagging certain data types—such as MP3s and JPEGs—the real answer is somewhat lower-tech.

Filks says acceptable use policies that clearly outline what is and is not allowed are a good place to start. File blocking and allocation control are also effective behavior modifiers.

Policies that define disciplinary action for infractions can also help. This is especially critical in the increasingly regulatory-heavy financial services and healthcare sectors.

Properly Allocate Storage

Many organizations often assume that they must run all of their mission-critical applications from their expensive primary arrays. Similarly, companies often bring in unique storage solutions for specific applications. The resulting heterogeneous storage environment is expensive to maintain.

Performance improvements in SATA- and SAS-based technologies have made it realistic to retire point-solution storage arrays and shift applications that formerly would have run only on primary storage onto these lower tiers.

“What’s the best way to get rid of complexity? Stop doing it,” says Woolery. “All of a sudden, you have one or two systems instead of five or six, and that is real value.”

by Carmi Levy for .