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.