Stephen Jones featured in Processor Magazine - Storage Shopping 101
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Storage Shopping 101
Tips for Evaluating Storage Solutions
Friday, November 19th, 2010 – Storage environments exhibit a no-two-alike nature. Huge variances in company size, IT environments, and business requirements in turn make the task of selecting storage products a highly tricky affair that ultimately demands a precise investigational strategy when choosing a storage platform.
Know Your Needs
The challenges inherent in shopping for storage revolve around several elements, according to Jeff Ready, CEO of Scale Computing (www.scalecomputing.com). Perhaps the most important element is cost, because storage systems not only can be pricey up front, but they can also come with multiple hidden, or soft, costs. The obvious price-per-terabyte metric is a start, but Ready recommends running through several scenarios and determining how a potential storage solution will impact those scenarios.
“What happens when you outgrow the storage? Does downtime need to be scheduled? How expandable is the system? Will expansion trigger additional licensing fees? Will I be locked into a particular hardware profile? What are my most common tasks, and how long will it take to perform them on my system? Adding a storage system can solve one problem, but it may create others. Thinking through these things will help [companies] understand the true costs of a storage system, which are often people costs due to administration and maintenance,” Ready says.
Although there are several factors related to a storage purchase, there are universally two needs—scalability and flexibility—among storage buyers, Ready says. Whereas companies used to forecast their storage needs three to five years from the present, the steep growth of storage requirements has spawned major challenges that make such assessments far more difficult. As such, Ready advises thinking about the longer-term impact of adopting a particular architecture when it comes to growth, as well as flexibility.
“Not only will your capacity needs grow, but it’s inevitable that the way in which storage is used, the best practices for implementing that storage, and the applications which rely upon the storage will all change,” he explains. “An IT professional should think about their architecture in terms of how easily they can control the storage system in order to have the storage adapt to their needs now and in the future, rather than be forced into a situation where ideal practices must be changed in order to conform to the requirement of the storage.”
On a more technical level, it’s also important to gain a factual understanding of your applications needs, says Stephen Jones, vice president of storage architecture and strategy at Corus360 (www.corus360.com). This includes determining your appropriate data repository type (such as active storage, backup, archive disaster recovery, etc.), appropriate storage connectivity options (FC, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, etc.), the space needed today and anticipated for the future, and the I/O requirements (both the amount and read/write ratio).
Different Storage Strokes
Although many storage platforms can accommodate requirements in varied environments, it remains useful to understand the different needs across different sectors. According to Ready, virtualization and rich media are the two biggest drivers in the storage world today, but those drivers are affecting organizations in different ways. For example, advances in medical imaging in the healthcare market are increasing the use of high-definition video, which consumes a tremendous amount of storage space, and the steady climb of electronic medical records is also contributing to an increased need for storage capacity.
“Likewise, we’ve seen adoption of technologies like virtual desktops in education, which can simplify system administration but puts a burden on storage systems by moving from a distributed to a centralized storage model. In government, financial services, and legal, there are an increasing number of regulatory requirements which require the archival of documents, email, and other such files for great periods of time,” Ready says.
Unique needs for enterprises and other organizations in different sectors can be obvious to those working in specific areas, but it’s also critical to think about storage in terms of how future changes will affect storage needs. For example, Ready notes that advances in school media technologies will inevitably require additional storage, but those changes tend to be gradual, and the process of integrating them into existing storage architectures can be taken in steps. On the other hand, he adds, the introduction of a regulatory requirement or the purchase of a new piece of medical imaging hardware might have a huge, immediate impact on storage requirements.
Despite the varying ways in which storage is used in different industries, Jones stresses that the same applications are often run in similar and disparate enterprises with different storage-specific needs and speeds. Therefore, he recommends conducting individual, manufacturer-independent analysis efforts with the goal of agnostically understanding your organization’s specific storage needs.
“These include, but are not limited to, the amount of data to be stored, the lifecycle of the data, how quickly it needs to be accessed, the cost of such solutions, and the support of them over their intended lifecycle plus one or more years. Regulations and legalities surrounding the storage, retention, and lifecycle access to data should also be included in the analysis process that an enterprise must face when considering storage options,” Jones says.
by Christian Perry