Reducing costs
Templeton says to reduce storage management costs businesses need to look at ways of consolidating servers, and providing a shared tape back up and recovery. "Then look at what level of disk sharing can be achieved between multiple servers," he suggests.
"You talk to an analyst and they'll tell you that 60-70 percent of the costs of a server infrastructure environment is in storage. [Businesses] need to better leverage that storage for online access--make sure it's highly available 24/7 and then apply the business continuity applications to that environment."
Nevertheless, Templeton adds it's also dependent on the application. "Some are mission critical and they require a level of disk mirroring, but that in itself is not sufficient, because any virus attack will also be mirrored. Obviously virus attacks are quite prevalent, so at the end of the day, you need some sort of consolidated backup recovery using tape."
However, businesses shouldn't forget they still have to manage the resources. Brocade's Schultz says this requires skilled staff which aren't always easy to find and are also costly. "With the right infrastructure you can keep the same head count and increase your storage."
Switched SANs
Brocade's Schultz says any organisations challenged by pressures such as large amounts of data tend to find a switched SAN a viable solution. "Any company with lots of information, and typically e-business client applications may have lots of storage requirements," he says.
The other issue is availability, where information has to be available to customers visiting your site, no matter what time of the day or night. Schultz says availability can also create other issues, such as how to carry out maintenance on the system.
Yet another critical driver for businesses to deploy a storage infrastructure that allows them to just add storage as a utility. "You don't want to have to go buy a new server because you haven't got enough space for your storage," he says.
"You just want to be able to add storage as, and when, you need it. You can have your servers just tapping in to that utility in different amounts depending on what their application may be. That is the high level value of a SAN--to be able to deploy and allocate storage resources seamlessly without interferring with any of the business applications."
He says there are different ways of providing levels of availability and performance, but you need to design the infrastructure to meet your business' needs. Schultz believes the SAN is also evolving, using the example of the core fabric switches which Brocade has recently introduced. These can sit in the middle and fan out to the smaller port count devices around them.
Hi,
Outside the operational and IO aspects, there are also costs associated with all these technologies. I thought readers may also want to check out an article which discusses Costs associated with SAN and DAS.
http://capitalhead.com/articles/san-vs-das-a-cost-analysis-of-storage-in-the-enterprise.aspx
- Mike