Traditional fightback may be tough

Savenet Solutions Lorcan Cunningham, CTO

There is too much emphasis on speeds and capacity tiering with new storage platforms and not enough common sense in terms of analysing what exactly is being stored and how much can be deleted or archived

The one thing we consistently find ourselves bringing to customer’s attention is the importance of archiving off-site. Every single customer is storing far too much data unnecessarily. The plummeting cost of storage over the years has enabled some bad habits where the simple cheap fix to a problem is buy more storage – rather than really looking at the issue of data growth and retention. Most customers are still storing archive data on their live SAN, and many still use tapes.

We find that taking the time to carry out a data audit is the best thing you can do before you decide what storage to buy. We typically find that around 30% of the data being stored can be deleted and at least another 40% can be archived off all the production storage systems.

By availing of low cost cloud object storage, customers can benefit from having all their archives off site, but safe in the cloud for as long as necessary. This has the obvious benefits of freeing up a huge amount of space in the SAN environment and also allows the customer to maintain a consistent backup size. This keeps the cost and footprint of the backup set consistent, as the archive data pool grows. Users may never see any difference as the data looks like it is still where it always was.

We can supply cloud archive storage at a price point that makes it much more economical and infinitely more efficient that keeping archive data on your live SAN. A final benefit is that the archive data is easily available in a DR scenario because it’s stored in our cloud environment.

So, once you remove all the unnecessary data cluttering up your SAN and backup environment, you can really understand what your true requirements and growth rates are, leading to a better decision in terms of what storage platform to choose. For example, Savenet have recently chosen the Tegile platform to upgrade our storage infrastructure as it delivered outstanding IO performance at a very competitive price point and is ideal for the extremely demanding performance and reliability requirements we have.

Our advice is simple; clear out the archives into a low cost cloud storage platform, then buy what technology is designed for the future needs of your business.

Canon Ireland Philip Brady, director, head of Canon Ireland

Another factor that complicates this is storing data in the cloud – which some companies have seen as an alternative to tape back-up. Data storage compliance is having a tremendous impact on the storage organisation, as well as the management practices employed to retain, search, certify and destroy data. It’s not just regulations like SOX or HIPAA that influence storage — there are well over 10,000 regulations that affect data storage, backup and protection across a range of industries. When data is moved beyond an organisation’s technological and geographic borders, the organisation runs the risk of losing control of how that data complies with regulatory compliance.

By addressing legal and regulatory challenges up front through technology, an organisation can begin architecting an off-premise, cloud-based storage solution that meets the business’s needs as well as keeps regulatory compliance at bay.

Triangle Brendan Healy, head of core infrastructure

2015 has seen a movement towards Software Defined everything. Storage is no different here, separating the cost of storage into hardware and software enables organisations to significantly reduce the TOC of their storage platform. Day 1 costs are similar, however, when a refresh is required, organisations now have the flexibility to select multiple hardware vendors while retaining the storage software. Software Defined Storage has, in the past, been perceived as a platform for low end low data value platforms. However, with IBM delivering the Spectrum storage family line and VMWare VSAN continuing to develop some of the largest storage deployments in the market, these are delivered by a software platform.

In general, the same rules apply, storage solutions must deliver value to organisations in terms of lower operational costs, reuse of software and the option for a flexible hardware platform while delivering a scalable robust platform.