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Rajneesh De
A snapshot of storage implementations across India Inc. revealed that there are three crucial issues where most CIOs usually falter. These include undertaking a proper planning exercise before implementing the storage solution, comparing different storage vendors across multiple parameters before deciding on a particular one and finally to devise a few quantitative as well as qualitative parameters to measure the effectiveness of the storage solution. Each of these functions includes several micro issues; most CIOs concur that broad compliance with several of these issues across all three functions spell success for a storage implementation in an enterprise.
No Substitute for Planning
Planning for a proper storage solution involves a careful consideration of four parameters-these include capacity planning, the type of application, throughput generated and storage consolidation. Pramod Deshpande, vice president, Information Technology, Central Depository Services (India) advises on the necessity of performing a storage capacity audit based on the business projections of the organization.
"In our case, we took into account capital market peaks, and planned for three times the peak capacity for all our processes. Since it was extremely difficult to predict on the networking requirements for the next three years, the overall planning was done for one year only." Depending on the criticality of the data stored and the type of organization, planning for three times the peak capacity would be a good measure. A scalability factor of at least 20 times the peak capacity would also be advisable for organizations like banks and telcos that are witnessing an explosion of customer data.
The type of application and throughput generated are two other important issues that most CIOs tend to overlook while planning for storage. It is very crucial to factor in issues like permissible downtimes for the applications that are running, as well as the sizes of the data stores generated. While customer-driven organizations like banks and telcos might not be able to afford a longer downtime, the case could be different for manufacturing organizations. One effect of an increasing data mart could be reduction in throughput; therefore, it is imperative for CIOs to consider this while planning for storage. Deshpande informs that in CDSL's case, the decision taken at the beginning was to change the server in order to increase the throughput.
In case data is being accessed from multiple sources, appropriate planning is absolutely vital as otherwise this might lead to data replication, loss of data integrity ultimately leading to loss in business revenues. Once CIOs had taken into account all these four factors while planning for their overall storage environment, they could plan differently for individual areas of storage.
Ishwar Jha, vice president, business technology, Zee Networks, advises that CIOs should plan separately for their backup, nearline, online and even DR strategies. Dataquest, through its interactions with different CIOs, have come out with a matrix in this regard that could act as a rough guideline for all enterprises embarking on storage adoption. (See box "Storage Modes: Guru Speak".)
Choosing the Vendor
Most CIOs agree that pedigree is the most crucial element to look at while choosing a storage vendor. For V Chandrasekhar, general manager, IT, Bank of Baroda, the vendor should not only have the total product range starting from standalone DAS to NAS and SAN in different capacities, it should also provide total solutions for the lifecycle management of information rather than just storage.
Jason Gonsalves, general manager, IT and costing, Goodlass Nerolac, feels that having a well charted out product road map and a proven, efficient and robust storage technology are absolute musts for any vendor.
Both Jha and Chandrasekhar are discerning about whether the vendor has a focused R&D commitment and budget-this could become crucial as otherwise the vendor might not be able to easily adopt emerging technology in storage. In today's environment this could have a serious impact considering that new concepts like information lifecycle management (ILM) and utility computing and storage-on-demand are gradually gaining mainstream acceptance. In addition, vendors must offer 24x7 support to answer any technology/solution related query, must have a strong support network to provide faster recovery in case of failure.
Gonsalves even suggests a closer inspection of the business partner who is actually deploying the solution. Adds Deshpande, "the CIO must check out whether the storage vendor and the system integrator have a global mutual agreement to support their solutions. Otherwise, the CIO often might end up in a situation where he is forced to change the solution or get tied down to one vendor for all his requirements."
Speaking about a single vendor for all storage requirements, Venkat Iyer, CIO, TVS Motors informs that they have been following the single vendor principle (HP in its case). Though this arrangement has both its merits and demerits, of late the idea is gaining ground that for specialized storage management solutions, it is better to seek the software only vendors, since the rest have a hidden hardware agenda about pushing their boxes.
Last but not the least, all CIOs agree that it makes immense sense not to ignore basic issues like the standing of the vendor in the industry, the number of reference sites it can offer, the ubiquity of the storage solution as well as its inter operability on various operating systems. Another key driver in selecting the storage solution/vendor is the design of the storage box itself and also the point in time copy solution available with the it.
Avers Gonsalves, "the design of the storage solution offered us the feature by which we could have independent storage boxes for various application with independent resources with in the same storage solution, which in turn meant guaranteed performance for various applications without sharing of resources."
Measuring Success
Deshpande suggests that while planning and vendor selection are no doubt crucial, most important is to document a host of qualitative and quantitative parameters that would measure the effectiveness of the storage solution.
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Storage Modes: Guru Speak
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Two of India's leading CIOs Arvind Tawde and GM Shenoy, associated with large organizations like Mahindra & Mahindra and National Stock Exchange, inform Dataquest about their own parameters for choosing a storage vendor as well as planning for different types of storage solutions.
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Options Available
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Remarks/reasons for adoption
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Arvind Tawde
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GM Shenoy
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Arvind Tawde
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GM Shenoy
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Offline
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Tape backup, Ultriums, tape library
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Tape/Tape library
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Easy for offsite protection, library is easy to manage
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Cost/reliability
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Nearline
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DLT, Juke Box, optical devices, CD-RW
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Disk
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We went for optical devices and CD-RW as they are cost effective and frequency of data access is low
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Cost/access time
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Online
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SAN, DAS
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SAN
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Being SAP database, high I/Os, Cache is required. Manageability features are also taken into account.
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Access time/ reliability
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DR
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SAN, DAS
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Combination of above
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Being SAP database, high I/Os, cache is required. Manageability features are also taken into account.
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Gonsalves feels that the effectiveness of the storage solutions is specific to a site and can be measured only with reference to the requirements of the site and the reasons for going in for storage solution.
But how do CIOs determine these measuring parameters? Iyer suggests that speed, reliability and expandability could be the key concerns. No wonder, the SAN storage in TVS Motors is benchmarked against all three of these. "Every three seconds a barcode needs to be printed which defines the speed of the entire architecture. We ensure
99.999% uptime that defines the reliability part; 0+1 mirroring is done on the storage, hence even if six hard disks fail in one single shot which itself is quite rare, our storage will not go down. Lastly, for expandability we can go up to 16 TB of data whereas our current sizing is 4.3 TB. So for the next three years we expect to have no issue on data growth."
Another key parameter that Goodlass Nerolac has used to measure the effectiveness of the storage solution is the performance of the system in an OLTP environment. The system performance problems encountered with JBODS have receded to the background with the implementation of the storage solution. Freeing of the server resources for end user computing is also important, which in turn resulted in better response time to the end users. Optimum utilization of the available storage capacity is also one of the quantitative benefits Chandrasekhar has seen in the Bank of Baroda set up.
Insulation of data against individual disk failures could be another effective measure. Deshpande informs that monolithic storage solution, therefore, can often become a serious limitation. Independent monitoring and early warning alerts for the storage subsystem is another key advantages felt by CIOs. Simplified, centralized management of storage, reducing administrative workload to save time and money plus flexible configuration of storage are other quantitative benefits since these could directly impact the RoI.
Adds Jha, "CIOs should also do well not to forget focusing on information life cycle management, content expiry and security integration."
Source: Dataquest
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