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CONSOLIDATING YOUR FORCES

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 4 - May 2006

In today's competitive business environment, you can't afford to have a fragmented I.T. environment spread across different regions, departments or business units. Equally, you need a single integrated, consolidated version of all your data in order to make the right decisions. Brian Wall reports

No one would argue with the fact that IT managers need simple and scalable storage solutions that enable them to consolidate IT assets and information more easily and cost effectively. But how can your business ensure that the systems it is using:

• Enhance the availability and accessibility of data for local and remote users?
• Enable painless backup/recovery and long-term archiving across all applications?
• Make it easy to deploy and control IT assets, boosting IT management efficiency?

Most of all, how exactly do organisations identify, and deal with, the main issues and challenges around consolidation? What are the right strategies to adopt, moving forward? And how can the latest technological innovations tap into that need and enable businesses to achieve their consolidation goals?

Chris Gomersall, general manager, PolyServe EMEA, has strong views on the technology aspects of consoilidation and where it is bound. "We believe the era of the appliance is coming to an end. We think that file-serving appliances are just like any other proprietary technology. Price performance is terrible, but there is rich functionality. However, over time, price-performance always wins, and the vendors who provide standards-based solution will always catch up on the rich functionality."

PolyServe believes in the 'utility computing model' - ie, that computer services, such as storage, should be delivered to the business out of a centrally managed utility, which is always on, always available, scalable and low cost. "We do not believe that departments or groups of users should all have their own silo of information, on their own storage device, which is not accessible to anyone outside that workgroup," he says.

So, how can businesses make it easy to deploy and control IT assets, boosting IT management efficiency? According to Gomersall, they need to:

• Stop data replication - every authorised user or client should see all data without the need to replicate across multiple storage devices

• Base their systems around multi-server architecture, which is either highly available or fully fault tolerant and so can continue running in the event of a server failure

• Have the freedom to choose whatever storage, servers and switches they want, and even the ability to mix and match these in the overall solution

• Be able to continue to add low-cost servers (whilst the file serving utility is running) to achieve low-cost, modular throughput increases. With appliance-based solutions, a 'fork-lift' upgrade is needed

• Avoid expensive, proprietary lock-in. Building storage solutions based on industry-standard components is inexpensive, but also offers freedom of choice.

Companies want to see "the best of both approaches (Windows/Intel based) - being based on low-cost platforms, but with file systems specifically designed for high throughput".

With respect to database consolidation, Gomersall comments: "We believe that, as large organisations embark on huge server consolidation projects, it becomes quickly apparent that virtualisation tools such as VMware are great for test/dev, web servers or lightly used apps. But SQL server demands high performance and throughput, and so cannot be consolidated using virtualisation. The overheads of running essentially two operating systems on Windows servers are just too much."
PolyServe, he says, provides an environment for consolidation of SQL server "and high-availability comes as a natural by-product of consolidation. There are lots of companies out there providing high-availability solutions for the Windows market, but this often requires investment in additional servers and storage, so this is at odds with the consolidation initiative. PolyServe provides the high-availability capability, and reduces server and storage footprint at the same time."

One view, one vision
As organisations look to outsource business processes to service providers in today's bustling climate of mergers and acquisitions, the need for a single consolidated view of data is essential in avoiding fragmentation, says Martin Warren, product marketing manager, Sun Microsystems. "With the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory mandates, companies are charged with proving the existence of critical data and for improving the efficiency of their controls - the emphasis is on auditable accountability.

"Virtualisation, as a tool for achieving consolidation of storage islands, cuts out the need to implement the 'traditional' secondary back-up processes and helps streamline efficiency. For example, rather than manually managing data migration processes - ie, when data should be migrated to tape/disk - virtualisation tools streamline this operation. As a tool, virtualisation helps IT managers fully utilise existing assets so resources are not dictated by the length of the backup window. As such, all tape/disk and library resources can be shared between any number/type of application."

Data availability and reliability can also be improved through virtualisation, Warren points out. "IT managers can dramatically increase the number of 'available' resources by intelligently redirecting data to storage with available capacity; rather than having to buy more storage because one server is full, virtualisation tools allow users to spread data across multiple storage devices. This helps increase network performance and capacity by using all available resources, in turn reducing running/ maintenance costs and wastage.

"By consolidating resources, businesses can improve efficiency. An example of this is a virtual tape solution such as StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM). It can isolate media errors, so they do not affect the tape applications, and eliminates drive-sharing requirements. The result is more efficient use of tape drives, increased productivity and lower management cost."

Growth and change
IT - and storage - consolidation are well-known buzzwords, of course. As organisations grow and change to meet business demands, so do their IT environments. "For many businesses, this growth has resulted in a disparate array of IT infrastructure and storage islands that are poorly utilised and costly to manage," states Steve Watson, storage commercial product manager, HP UK.

"At its core, the consolidation process centralises data access and replaces these isolated storage systems and unique processes with common management procedures, resulting in dramatic improvements in equipment utilisation and operating costs."

Consolidation advocates cite several other benefits, among them higher availability, improved response times and service levels, non-disruptive growth and the flexibility to respond rapidly to change.

"But storage consolidation is changing to continue to provide real payback for the businesses that invest in it," adds Watson. "There is a noticeable move,
that will continue over the coming months, from tactical to strategic consolidation. Businesses that consolidated their IT infrastructure several years ago are already seeing the need to take further steps. Customers are demanding - and the market will need to provide - simpler, streamlined management solutions for online, backup, email and remote office consolidation, both for HP and multi-vendor IT environments. Storage management through a 'single pane of glass' will be key."
Consolidation was always the domain of the enterprise at the high end of the scale. There is also growing demand from mid-sized business, and even SMEs, who have issues to address and the same cost reduction pressures.

"The continuing business need, at all levels, to drive costs down and improve management capabilities will carry on driving IT and storage consolidation. Management will be pushing IT harder to become more of an asset to the business, to drive competitive advantage and allow the business to utilise IT cost savings. For any business, large or small, the key is, as ever, to reduce cost and retain control - and IT consolidation continues to offer the promised land."

Winners and losers
Naturally enough, as IT budgets are getting tighter, companies are looking for different ways to improve efficiencies, while reducing costs. Storage consolidation is one way that companies can integrate their mission critical applications to increase administrator productivity. Paul Klinkby-Silver, VP Europe at EqualLogic, is clear as to who the winners will be: those businesses that apply the time, effort and expertise to develop consolidation strategies based on the most sound principles and effective implementation.

"A consolidation strategy, if effectively implemented, can bring a number of benefits to an organisation," he says. "By centralising IT, companies can easily deploy, manage and access assets, even from remote locations.

“Consolidation can simplify backup and disaster-recovery strategies, enabling painless back-up, delivery and archiving across all business-critical applications. When you add the fact that consolidated storage costs can be divided between disparate departments and groups using the storage, it becomes more attractive by the minute."

While storage consolidation expands device connectivity and reduces points of management, virtualisation can deliver centralised, flexible control that masks the complexity of storage infrastructures and reduces the administrative overhead. The key, therefore, to realising cost and efficiency benefits might well be found in a SAN (Storage Area Network) solution that couples the benefits of best-of-breed consolidation and virtualisation methods with iSCSI connectivity.

"iSCSI-based SANs holds the key to the benefits that can be secured through storage consolidation - it's affordable, it's based on standard protocols, and it's easy to deploy," states Klinkby-Silver. "Additionally, it provides backup from a central storage pool, eliminating or reducing the backup window, whilst providing disaster recovery with no expensive channel extension equipment, add-on software or the need for in-depth (and often costly) staff training.

"Companies do need to be aware that vendor solutions in this emerging market vary in the level of features and capabilities offered. To ensure IT managers are implementing the best solution to meet their specific business objectives, a checklist of key capabilities for their iSCSI SAN should be created. This might include seamless expandability, automatic load balancing, automatic storage provisioning, disaster tolerance and replication.

"Additionally, an iSCSI SAN deployment is an ideal solution for a data centre seeking to depart from Direct Attached Storage (DAS) to realise the advantages of consolidated storage, without the complexity and cost of conventional high-end, Fibre Channel SANs."

IT managers need to design storage strategies that couple cost considerations with the overall system management and longer-term objectives for their individual organisation. "Evaluating SANs for storage consolidation and virtualisation is critical to finding a solution that delivers the management capabilities needed to lower the total cost of ownership, increase storage utilisation and streamline system administration, which, in turn, leads to a boost in IT management efficiency."
Building powerful organisational structures around their consolidation needs is paramount for all businesses. In other words, the effectiveness of the solution chosen is inextricably related to the way in which it is implemented. ST