There Are Several Technologies To Consider As You Look Ahead

Key Points

• Make scalability your watchword. Data continues to grow unabated, and its rate of growth is often proportional to the growth of the organization.

• Technologies such as iSCSI, storage tiering, thin provisioning, and virtualization can make it easier for an SME to scale its storage and meet growing needs.

• Avoid one-size-fits-all solutions and instead consider varying vendors. Locking into one can lead to unnecessary expense and fluctuations in quality.

Moore’s Law famously states that the capacity of computing hardware doubles about every two years, and that rule of thumb hasn’t gone wrong yet. For your data center, though, that can mean a headache about every two years: You need to not only meet your enterprise’s current needs, but make sure the storage setup you create lasts well into the future.

How can you best ensure that your storage setup will meet your needs for years to come? In short, the key word is scalability. Data continues to grow unabated, and its rate of growth is often proportional to the growth of the organization.

“Scalability is essential to meet many of the growth and consolidation requirements of today’s data centers,” says Jim Smid, data center practice manager for Iron Bow Technologies (www.ironbow.com). “Luckily, scalable means different things in today’s storage marketplace and with the advent of more modular storage, the ability to scale all resources incrementally is fundamental to prolonging the longevity of the investment.”

Consider Connectivity Options

EExperts say that by using some specific technologies, enterprises can future-proof their storage and give the rest of the data center a fluid and flexible platform on which to grow. Storage-area networks are a given in many data centers, but IT managers should look to have SANs that easily connect to Fibre Channel or iSCSI server interfaces on the front end, says Scott DesBles, director of technical solutions for Compellent Technologies (www.compellent.com).

According to DesBles, iSCSI lets admins use Ethernet-based networks to access and transport storage. And, he adds, less costly storage connectivity options are vital to enterprises that want to add new devices but are short on budget resources and staff. “iSCSI is an ideal interconnect because it utilizes an organization’s existing IP infrastructure and does not require specialized skills or training,” he says.

If a company that currently uses iSCSI eventually wants to move to Fibre Channel, he adds, it should be able to do so without a major upgrade.

Implement Tiering

Automated tiered storage lets enterprises gain the flexibility to not only handle current storage needs, but also adapt to changing requirements as data capacity grows.

“Effective automated tiered storage applications give data center managers the ability to mix and match the drive technologies for an optimal configuration,” DesBles says.

For instance, if a company requires high-performance storage for transaction-heavy applications, it can simply add in SSDs (solid-state drives) to handle mission-critical data while the automated tiered storage technology moves infrequently accessed data to lower tiers of storage, which can be made up of FC, SAS, or SATA drives.

“As more data moves from the high-performance drives to the lower tiers, IT managers will need to purchase fewer expensive, high-performance drives,” DesBles says.

Think Thin

Another key initiative to look into is thin provisioning. Previously, enterprises were forced to guess at what their storage needs would be over time and often ended up purchasing too much or too little storage for their future needs. Thin provisioning lets them eliminate preallocated but unused capacity. As utilization reaches 100%, you can simply add in more drives while avoiding downtime.

Storage thin provisioning presents a certain amount of storage space to the operating system or application, but unlike traditional storage systems, the capacity that is not used by the OS or application can be redistributed.

“I like to think of thin provisioning in the same light as the overbooking concept in an airline,” says Marc Howard, solutions architect at All Covered (www.allcovered.com). “Traditionally, [a company] purchases disks by estimating its capacity over the next several years. Usually the total capacity is over-estimated so that there is plenty of space available, even if never used. It’s that never-used space that often ends up as waste by the time those hard drives are fully depreciated.”

Go Virtual

Quickly growing in popularity among enterprises that are trying to win the guessing game of storage needs is storage virtualization. Server virtualization provides a lot of performance and efficiency benefits to the data center, but to truly take advantage of all that the virtual data center has to offer, experts say enterprises should pair it with a storage virtualization technology.

“To ensure flexibility for future needs, the storage virtualization software implemented must support any server virtualization application without the need for server-side agents,” Compellent’s DesBles says. “Through this strategy, enterprises won’t be locked in to any specific server virtualization technology, and they can move to different applications knowing that their storage will integrate seamlessly no matter what.”

DesBles says enterprises should be looking for a solution that allows them to create any size virtual volume within a short time period that can support most virtual server platforms and optimize the placement of virtual applications. That should keep you from having to allocate a drive to a specific server or deal with issues around capacity planning or performance tuning.

Plan Carefully

Some prudent steps enterprises can take to be ready for future storage needs involve technology less than business acumen and common sense. For instance, before jumping in and designing a storage solution, IT managers should assess access rates, performance, and data protection needs.

“One of the common mistakes made is to treat all data the same and create some sort of holistic one-size-fits-all storage solution that gets them into a nonscalable, vendor lock-in situation,” says Rob Sims, CEO of Crossroads Systems (www.crossroads.com).

Vendor balance is important to keep in mind when shopping for storage. The path of least resistance is going with a single vendor, or the “one throat to choke” approach. But Sims warns that this approach can lead to a vendor lock-in situation, and subsequent purchases" and, more importantly, support and maintenance" can be costly.

"Some of the smaller vendors offer high-quality solutions that many of the main providers actually OEM from the small vendor," he says. “You can get better pricing" and in many cases, better service "from the original vendor."

Article by Dan Heilman for .