special report Can storage management in the future be as easy as setting a few policies and flicking a switch? We look at the steps needed to get there.
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| Source: META Group research | |
Your storage is a mess. You don't know how much of it there is or where it is, but you do know everything's running out of space and it's costing too much. You spend hours a day running mirrors, snapshots, and backups, and you're never quite sure what would happen if you needed to restore something. You've started putting storage on the network, but each network attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) has a new management interface someone in the IT department has to learn how to use. And now the CEO is breathing down your neck because he or she just read in an airline magazine that your company needs to keep every single spam, personal conversation, porn, and other bit of junk e-mail received in the last seven years.
Vendors tell you that within six or seven years your storage will run so smoothly it will be like plugging into a power point. It will manage itself automatically, apportion storage to applications, make room when space is running out, decide on its own what needs to be backed up and to where, and if space starts to run low, you'll just plug in a few more disks. And you'd love to believe it, but...
The problems with storage today
Despite the cost per GB or TB coming down as technology improves, the amount of data organisations need to store is going up faster than the cost is coming down. Even worse, our ability to manage data is not growing fast at all. If TCO studies are to be believed, and hardware is a small fraction of the overall cost of any IT system, then the increasing amount of data and the complexity of the systems they're stored in adds up to a whopping great bill for staff and other resources managing storage.
Another problem is although individual hard drives are getting bigger, they're not getting any less likely to kick the bucket at the least opportune moment. "As you store more and more data on a single device, the disk drive's mean time to failure has not been increasing at the same rate as its capacity," says Dilip Kandlur, head of IBM's storage systems research division.
As a result, a simple RAID scheme is no longer sufficient protection for your most critical data. "There is an increasing need to provide additional levels of protection... to go towards replication and other methods of protection to make sure your data is available in the context of multiple failures," says Kandlur. Of course, someone has to manage all these additional layers of protection, and someone has to decide which servers or applications are worth spending this additional money and management effort to keep running. And that person is currently very, very busy.
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