The Storage Vendors
The storage vendors of today make huge sums of money by selling, maintaining and installing huge disk cabinets. These can be in the form of network attached appliances, direct attached or fibre channel attached. As shown earlier these cabinets are sold into companies that require additional and ever increasing disk space, because data is always needed online! These cabinets also need backing up, consume huge quantities of energy and in storage terms become outdated relatively quickly.
A common phrase used by storage vendors is storage on demand, which means you pay monthly for a given amount of disk or tape space, once you exceed your quota, the storage company either sends you an unlock key or sends an engineer to configure more space.
New legislation is also being drafted in regarding the disposal of computer equipment as it normally contains, harmful metals, precious metal and other toxic substances. These disposal costs will also be called the “Green Tax” which will ensure the safe disposal of all computer equipment. The car makers at present have to make cars that are recyclable and these costs are passed on to the consumer at the time of disposal.
Centralising Storage
Today we have distributed networks of servers and storage. Whereas 25 years ago all data and software was held on mainframes / mini computers and users had terminals on the desktop. This information was easier to manage, controls were in place that only allowed users to perform clearly defined tasks, the internet, CD/DVD drives, mobile phones, USB drives, PDA’s, notebooks and many other things we take for granted today never existed. A consequence of this is the computers/networks contained nothing more than business information.
The emergence of the Storage Area Network and Network Attached Storage now removes the need to have Direct Attached Storage. The benefits of these technologies allow:
- applications to run better and more efficiently
- disks to be added on the fly
- greater disk utilisation
- computers can be upgraded/replaced with no data loss
- higher levels of business continuity
- cost savings on servers
- reduced maintenance costs
- reduced management costs
Storage Costs
The cost per Gigabyte of storage is coming down along with the space it takes up. The problem is that the intangibles of storage are:
- Additional hardware/software to support proposed solution
- Installation costs
- Training costs
- On-going maintenance costs
- Data management
- Human resources
- Backup
- Power consumption
- Cooling requirements
Data Archiving
File archiving can remove on average between 60%-80% of this aged data that has not been accessed within the last 90 days, which is being backed up every night. By reducing our backups by 70% would mean we now have to backup only 1.5TB’s of data using a single drive LTO-4 autoloader and 2 tapes.
The saying goes "for every £1 spent on storage you spend 5-10x the initial cost managing it". Therefore at the rate of data growth that is currently occurring the cost of managing storage is becoming a huge budgetary problem and little wonder that IT departments grow faster than any other in your organisation.
Effective storage management is therefore becoming more and more critical to ensuring not only cost effective data retention but also the ongoing availability of information.
