How do you manage something that's constantly growing at an unprecedented rate, with no end in sight? That's the question many IT managers around Australia are currently asking themselves, as they size up their storage and data management strategy going into 2009. Unfortunately, there's no easy answer.
We went to the coalface and talked to three organisations about their storage and data management challenges in general, and came up with three different points of view.
Big bang
Web hosting and domain specialist Melbourne IT has a
lot of storage. In a recent interview with ZDNet.com.au, the
company's chief IT architect Glenn Gore pegged the total at just
under a petabyte (500 terabytes). An astounding 330 terabytes of
that was purchased in one hit last year. But the problem is just
not going away.
"We are getting to the point where we now are actively looking at purchasing more storage because we have exhausted that purchase," says Gore.
And that's the company's only problem. The nature of Melbourne IT's business means that the storage needs of its customers change at different periods of the year -- for example, financial institutions get busy at tax time. Storage virtualisation, including the use of dynamic performance tiering, has gone some way towards helping Gore's team with dealing with the demands of the business.
Coming from a company who last year bought 330 terabytes in one hit, Melbourne IT's next move may give some insight into the extent of the storage and datacentre issue hitting Australian organisations. The company went out to market for a long-term storage partner to help it keep ahead of the race.
Gore says the company initially ruled out Network Appliance for being too expensive for its specific requirements, eventually selecting IBM over EMC. "I think ... if you talk just about the raw storage capabilities, EMC storage is probably better than the IBM storage," he says. "But you have to take that holistic view of, 'how do all the components of my storage fit together?"
The eventual solution includes a disk to disk to tape backup facility, with the aim being that most data recovery scenarios would see data recovered from a disk in the same facility. The tapes are encrypted and stored remotely by a third party, with Melbourne IT spending more than $10,000 a month on tapes.
Mobile datacentre
Box Hill TAFE might be in the same state, but
the datacentre and storage challenges outlined by IT services
manager Chris Tayler are different from those of Melbourne IT's
Gore.
The organisation recently awarded APC and Dell a contract to build a state-of-the-art new datacentre that will give it enough space to grow by about 80 per cent, including an initial 15 terabytes of storage and a new building. However, it's the devil in the details that has given Tayler the proverbial headache.
The new datacentre will be the culmination of a year-long project to shift Box Hill TAFE's existing datacentre, which had outgrown the corridor where it was first established, to a new site. While the location was only over the road diagonally from the current IT setup, that diagonal is on one of the busiest intersections in Melbourne.
In short, Tayler knew that moving the datacentre was going to involve some significant challenges, but one he hadn't originally anticipated was having to negotiate with the local council to run fibre optic cables from one side of a major road to another.
It eventually proved easier to send the fibre further up the road and back again in a U-shape, thus avoiding having to close both branches of the intersection. Even so, Tayler still wryly recalls hearing a travel announcement on the radio and realising that a traffic jam being discussed was due to the datacentre migration he'd been planning. "Digging up Whitehorse Road for fibre channel was hard work," he tells ZDNet.com.au during a recent interview.
(Credit: Junction 3 by Dan Shirley, Royalty free)
Making the move had become inevitable, however. "We had the usual issues in an ageing datacentre: lack of available power in the area, lack of real meaningful physical security, lack of fire survivability" he says. A building program within the TAFE provided the opportunity to shift — "my datacentre was getting squeezed out physically," Tayler recalls — but determining the best approach was time-consuming.
"We looked at moving it to one of the outsourced datacentres down the road, but the cost of communications was the deciding factor there. We also looked at outsourcing some services, but one of the limiting factors is we have a high-definition television studio that we teach from and do internal resourcing from. After much argy-bargy we finally discovered a location we could live with and that practically the business could live with."
That process took close to a year, during which time Tayler also had to find the million dollars required to make the shift, though he had some leverage with management on that front: "It was holding up building projects."
The project was eventually sold on a 6-year ROI plan, something that many business finance managers might resist. Tayler acknowledges that it's a lengthy investment, but says that's inevitable: "A datacentre is a specialist thing. Its ROI is longer, but its lifespan is longer."
"Glenn Gore pegged the total at just under a petabyte (500 terabytes). An astounding 330 terabytes of that was purchased in one hit last year."
errm, isn't there 1000 TB in one PB?