| Research required | |
| “In the past we sold our storage to our customers. Now, increasingly, they are renting it. But they are not ‘renting’ it from traditional suppliers. Increasingly it’s from MS, Amazon, Google and the other very large ‘cloud’ providers” | 
CMS Distribution Tom Keane |
| There’s a mind boggling Array (pun intended) of storage options available. Why? There has been continuous research and development over the years, and our industry is constantly evolving but older technologies like Disk, Tape and even Optical are not dead. This means that there is an ever widening range of technologies available to choose from. Flash and other newer technologies have an important part to play in our industry’s future but the old stalwarts and methodologies are likely to be around for some time to come.We still either attach the storage directly to the machines that use it or access it over networks. Sometimes it’s clustered, sometimes it’s virtualised, sometimes we thin provision, sometimes we cache, sometimes we tier, snapshot or replicate. Most of it has been with us for quite some time. My advice is to do your research and don’t believe hype!
The big change in our industry is the supply model. In the past we sold our storage to our customers. Now, increasingly, they are renting it. But they are not ‘renting’ it from traditional suppliers. Increasingly it’s from MS, Amazon, Google and the other very large ‘cloud’ providers. Fifteen years ago we were all going to go to hosted environments, .com anyone? The market wasn’t ready then but certainly appears to be now. In the past I’ve described the channel pushing public cloud as ‘Turkeys voting for Christmas’. For the channel to survive and thrive we need to retain our customers, we do this by providing on premise kit, providing private cloud solutions, engaging with smaller cloud providers and doing what we can to remain relevant. Signing your customers up to the massive cloud providers is a short term game. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. CMS Distribution is an independent, trusted advisor, not reliant on one storage vendor and not having to sing off one hymn sheet. From All Flash Arrays, Hybrid Arrays, iSCSI and FC SANs, NAS, PCIe Flash, SSD, SAS and SATA, Tape and a channel friendly cloud offering we’ve got the full toolkit.
|
|
| Effective sizing | |
| “Storage and capacity requirements should be sized to meet current requirements, while also considering future growth needs. The key piece of advice is to always size for IOPS. This ensures performance can be optimised” |
Datapac Karen O’Connor, general manager service delivery |
| Irish organisations are storing fast increasing volumes of data. Research carried out by Datapac in association with TechPro magazine highlighted that the average increase in data stored over the past year is 42%, with no signs of slowing down.Faced with this data explosion, there are key criteria which need to be considered to have the best approach to storage. Firstly, it’s essential that effective sizing is carried out for any planned roll-out. Storage and capacity requirements should be sized to meet current requirements, while also considering future growth needs. The key piece of advice is to always size for Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). This ensures performance can be optimised.
Secondly, some organisations roll out new storage with lots of capacity and experience great performance but backup solutions may be over running or not happening at all. Back-up, recovery and storage should be designed holistically and implemented as a unified solution. Tiered storage also needs to be considered. Many organisations pursue the costly approach of storing all business data, whether mission critical or not, on expensive high performance disks. Only mission critical and active data, where response times and performance are important, should be held on high performance Tier 1 disks. All other data can be stored on low cost, high capacity Tier 2 storage environments. This can save a lot on storage costs by reducing the need to purchase expensive disks to manage growing data volumes. Regarding leveraging existing assets, that should always be looked at carefully, considering support and warranties. Sometimes it’s costlier to retain older kit than it is to purchase a new storage platform. A good service provider should be able to offer you expert advice on your organisation’s unique needs. Datapac provides customers with a wide array of storage solutions, advice and proactive support. It partners with and has advanced levels of accreditation with the leading players in the storage market.
|
|
| Effective sizing | |
| “Only if an organisation can classify its data can it get the best out of storage options” | 
Trilogy Technologies Simon Grant, chief technical officer |
| IT organisations are looking to streamline their data storage infrastructure so that it can respond to emerging business requirements. Storage solutions remain a top priority in IT budgets precisely because the integrity, availability and protection of data are vital to business productivity and success.Organisations need to get a handle on real data growth within the organisation and identify where it is coming from. A challenge for businesses is the constant growth in data storage requirements and they need to identify whether it provides a business benefit. If it does, IT needs to support it and if it doesn’t this data needs to be deleted. Uncontrolled data growth is the greatest challenge. Storage choices available to organisations have diverged with a myriad of options from Flash arrays, SAN storage with SSD, SAS and SATA tiers down to inexpensive SATA based tertiary storage. Only if an organisation can classify its data can it get the best out of these options. Hot, highly used, business critical data needs to be on the fastest storage required while other data can live on slower, less expensive, storage. At Trilogy, we identify the different types of data then design the best solution for the organisation. This data classification is also part of any good DR strategy to enable fast recovery of the more important data.
Organisations store the same data over and over. Huge efficiencies can be gained by investigating compression and deduplication technologies. Data deduplication reduces the amount of data that needs to be physically stored by eliminating redundant information and replacing subsequent iterations of it with a pointer to the original. While these may push up the initial cost of a solution, the long term wins can be significant. Trilogy designs, implements and manages agile infrastructure helping clients to enhance their operations, mitigate risk and enable business strategy. The company incorporates expertise in both infrastructure transformation and Managed IT as a Service to deliver business-wide IT services.
|
|
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers