Storage Unpacked

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".)

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