Banner
Backup D.R. Replication Virtualisation Hardware/Media Privacy

Current Filter: >>>>>>

PREVIOUS

   Current Article ID:3078

NEXT



False economy

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 11-2013    Views: 2373   







Nigel Houghton, Regional Sales Manager EMEA at Aptare, argues that monitoring and reporting on your storage infrastructure is too important a task to be managed solely on a cost basis

Whilst editing my LinkedIn profile the other day I realised that I have spent over half my life in the storage industry. Over this time the open systems market has continued to add mainframe functionality within a market of continual introduction of new vendors, technology and consolidation.

There has been a burgeoning business trend to remove IT as a cost centre and recent initiatives have spawned technology that helps this. BYOD, Private/Public cloud and Mobile working are all examples of IT helping transfer costs to the business unit. In storage, this is difficult as there are obvious compliance and data protection advantages in consolidating your storage on an enterprise storage system. As a result there has been a rapid acceleration in storage chargeback projects. Most projects don't go to the full extent of actually cross charging departments but aim to visualise how much of the annual storage budget needs to come from each cost centre.

There are three ways to achieve this:

1. Get your storage administrator to provide a spreadsheet of all storage assets and who is using them
2. Outsource the task to someone with plenty of time
3. Invest in storage reporting technology

Option 1 is no doubt going to get out of hand if your company has multiple vendors, multiple locations, server virtualisation and storage virtualisation. Additional complexity is introduced if you have clustering, replication, auto-tiering and other advanced storage technologies.

Option 2 doesn't provide any more accurate results but you can absolve responsibility for the results.

Option 3 is the most costly option but creates the most accurate and up-to-date views - and is the one where I spend most of my time advising potential clients.

One multi-national company that I have recently been working with has gone through the pain of creating manual reports which took many days per month to get somewhere near accurate and adopted an "equitable" split by department. The unwanted side effect of this policy was that it bred uncontrollable storage growth as the different departments didn't care about how much storage they were using, they were still paying the same percentage of the budget every year.

This company has decided to invest in storage reporting software to re-instigate a proper chargeback process and have already recovered enough wasted storage capacity to justify their investment. A further consequence is that the business units are now consulting with the Storage team for advice on reducing spend for the next round of budgeting.

Another area where independent reporting tools can help is in giving storage administrators an end-to-end view of the infrastructure in terms of capacity and performance. There are countless times where applications 'go slow' and it usually takes time to understand where the underlying problems are. In multi-vendor open systems, performance issues are becoming harder to trace; consolidation and virtualisation technologies can create the "I/O Blender" effect. Good reporting tools can not only show the current state of performance and potential bottlenecks but also capture that data historically, giving answers to that traditional first question of support: "What has changed?"

Performance profiling in the storage infrastructure also helps IT create different tiers of storage that provide a match with the proposed application. It is becoming a great way to reduce performance issues and is also one of the key axes in 3-dimensional storage chargeback where performance, along with capacity and data-protection, are creating a charging profile that both delivers expected SLAs and is much more equitable to the storage consumers. It also helps IT understand and forecast how much of each type of storage is needed and the tiering policies that provide the best combination of performance and value.
More info: www.aptare.com

Like this article? Click here to get the Newsletter and Magazine Free!

Email The Editor!         OR         Forward ArticleGo Top


PREVIOUS

                    


NEXT