Storage: Consolidation is the key

Information is the lifeblood of any organization. In current times, information,
and its usage has become a business critical factor and has a direct impact on
the survival of a business. Applications like CRM, business intelligence, and
data mining, ERP, web servers, email, knowledge management etc. are being widely
and effectively used across organizations worldwide. All these business enablers
generate and depend on information. 



This has caused an exponential growth in the volume of information to be stored
and managed. Older architectures for storing information are no longer enough to
maintain such volumes of information across disparate applications and
geographical locations. But if you foresee a significant growth in storage
requirement, you should develop your storage consolidation strategy now.

Storage consolidation makes good business sense. It will facilitate drastic
reduction in storage costs (if planned and configured well), and improves the
overall quality of storage. Storage consolidation is the pooling and allocation
of shared storage resources among numerous application servers. Instead of
directly attaching devices to workstations and servers, the network provides
access to storage which is on a need/access rights, and timely basis. Storage
consolidation architectures are designed to address limitations associated with
DAS.

In an environment clustered with servers, it makes sense to consolidate
storage and thanks to a high-speed fiber channel infrastructure between storage
pools, disaster recovery can be reduced from hours to a few minutes. Many
organizations throughout the world have embarked on storage consolidation
initiatives. Worldwide market trends indicate an awareness and a migration by
many organizations towards consolidated storage.



However in India storage consolidation and management is yet to pick up. Most
companies are satisfied with the traditional tape backup and offsite backup,
which in any case is a basic prerequisite of a disaster recovery plan. Most
organizations still operate in storage silos and as storage requirements and
applications increase, it becomes extremely costly to organizations to maintain,
backup and repair hundreds of distributed storage devices. The demand for more
and more storage is on the rise, as information hungry organizations need richer
and additional data for conducting business.

Storage management must address some fundamental needs. For instance aspects
like high availability, accessibility, scalability, and manageability has to be
addressed in totality. Storage management is no longer the need of large
organizations alone, it is equally important for mid size and smaller
organizations who have moderate storage requirements. Storage solutions that are
available now are flexible enough to be scaled up and protect business
investment over a couple of years.

A recent market study indicates that the direct cost per megabyte of server
attached storage is less than the direct cost per megabyte of consolidated
storage, which is probably deterring many corporate from embarking on the
storage consolidation exercise in the cost sensitive Indian market. However, the
study indicated that the advantage is on indirect cost savings like supporting
fewer storage devices, less facility space, improved data access and
distribution, reduced risk of data loss, enhanced security, saving on time,
hands-off policy based access etc.

From a business perspective, consolidated storage will provide critical
business value such as, improved top-line revenue, return on IT investment, and
overall reduction in direct and indirect costs.