10 March 2010
Wednesday
Storage tiering cuts expensive storage and file access hassle
By Khoo Boo Leong | Jun 23, 2009
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PrintRegardless of the economic climate, the cost of managing storage and the amount of storage enterprises have to manage continue to balloon. But the reality is that data decays in value over time. Yet, much of these data is retained -- often on expensive primary storage -- due to business and compliance policies or plain neglect.
Not surprising, the cost of storing data, backing it up, restoring it if some data is lost, and replicating it to separate sites for disaster recovery has overwhelmed IT budgets.
"The economy is definitely impacting IT budgets, with 47% of Fortune 1000 organizations interviewed planning to decrease their storage spending," said Robert Stevenson, managing director of Storage Research at TheInfoPro. "At the same time, these companies are actively looking for ways to boost storage utilization, which hovers at about 50 percent.”
Tiering benefits
To free up expensive disk space and reduce storage and backup costs, many of these companies are considering file virtualization systems and storage tiering solutions.
The latter automatically moves non-critical data from expensive storage resources to lower-cost alternatives based on pre-defined policies. It also shrinks backup and recovery windows by reducing the amount of redundant data backed up on a regular basis.
In this regard, F5 Networks’ ARX file virtualization system with Data Management OS version 5.0 and Data Manager version 2.5 “allows organizations to determine the value of the data based on easily observable characteristics,” said Kirby Wadsworth, vice-president of Global Marketing at the application delivery networking vendor.
“For instance, you could say mp3 files are not valuable. We can institute a policy to put these music files in the least expensive storage. We are not backing them up or replicating them to a disaster recovery site.”
Similarly, files that have aged out over time or files that have not been accessed for a period of time can be moved to less expensive storage and deduplicated. At the same time, administrators can set policies to replicate all files or specific groups of files to a specific storage tier, the cloud or another site. They can implement policies for users, groups of users or, volume or specific drives.
"There are operational and economic benefits to storage tiering, but the challenge for many companies is to find a way to implement tiering in an easy-to-manage and non-invasive manner," said Dave Russell, Research vice-president at Gartner. "Solutions such as file virtualization help overcome these challenges."
