• Home
• Articles Archive
• Features List

• Media Pack
• Contact Us
• Subscribe

The business end of consolidation

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 3 - May 2007

How exactly do organisations identify, and deal with, the main issues and challenges around consolidation? Editor Brian Wall has been finding out

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:

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

Most of all, 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?

Most businesses recognise that file sharing, database and messaging applications are all critical to successful enterprise operations. System downtime, unavailable data or hindered processes affect a company's success. To support increasingly complex and distributed environments, many organisations are having to face up to the challenge of managing a growing proliferation of servers and dispersed data storage.

"As far as an organisation's data goes," says Phil Tee, CTO Njini, "the issue is the granularity at which consolidation and business continuity decisions need to be taken. One of the principal issues faced by businesses today is the alarming growth of unstructured data, which possesses no organising index.

The upshot of this is that the IT manager is forced into taking action at the volume level. This, however, will apply the same policy to all kinds of data resident in the volume - be it data relating to confidential documents or data relating to personal files. At best, this can result in poor optimisation through storing or archiving data of little business value, which for some organisations constitutes up to sixty per cent or more of stored data. At worst, the business may inadvertently commit a regulatory offence, or expose itself to continuity issues.

"The solution is a file level policy engine driven by data content that allows files to be consolidated in an accessible, controlled and cost-effective system," he argues.

As IBM points out, an enterprise may have data on many different distributed systems. "Retail companies have data at each store. Manufacturing companies have data at each plant. Insurance companies have data at each branch office or on each salesperson's laptop computer. Data consolidation is needed to migrate data from several database servers to one central database server for centralised data analysis, audit and decision supporting. Data consolidation is also used to help protect data by administering the backups centrally from remote locations, which will reduce the hardware cost of decentralisation and the risk of data loss."

Here is a scenario that encapsulates this. A company's global 'customer' table data resides at its headquarter (DB1) and is distributed across branch offices (DB3, DB4 and DB5, for example). On a daily basis at the headquarter office, customer data is analysed for the whole company and, whenever appropriate, the data is updated to reflect the new customer status/rating/outstanding offers information. Every evening, the DB3 and DB4 branch offices replicate the changes that occurred for the customers who live in their area, only if such changes exist. Assuming that the two branch office sites are already synchronised with the headquarter site.

"Replication is a key solution for data consolidation," adds IBM. "It copies changes from each of the distributed sites to a central site for analysis, reporting and for enterprise application processing."

Replication - the copying of data from one place to another and maintaining the synchronisation of different databases - is distinguished from caching. Though both of the technologies are common strategies used in scaling up computing in a distributed system, replication is related with server site behaviour.

Replication is also distinguished from backup. Backup normally copies file sets to removable medias (disks or tapes), organising multiple versions of files by time; the copies of data cannot be automatically overwritten when the original data is modified. Replication normally creates a second copy and is continuously updated along with the primary data; thus it can be accessed directly by an application in case the primary data is unavailable or corrupted, and give very rapid recovery times.

"Increasingly, organisations need to deploy many applications that require the ability to use and manipulate data," states IBM. "Replication enables users to work on a subset of a database, while disconnected from the central database server. Later, when a connection is established, users can synchronise local replicas on demand - to update the central database with all of their changes and receive any changes that may have happened while they were disconnected. Replication is requested to create multiple replica environments quickly and be able to use variables to customise each replica environment for its individual needs."

Nexsan points to how consolidation helps users make more efficient use of their resources, thus lowering TCO, reducing costs and increasing ROI. "A less complex IT environment frees up your expert staff to work on more strategic business objectives and it also frees up valuable floor space," it says. This enables organisations to:

• Reduce software license fees and associated maintenance costs

• Lower the costs of multiple, inefficient systems by consolidating to a common environment

• And, for larger backup operations, consolidate to a SAN environment to reduce costs through improved efficiencies.

"Data growth and management has exploded for many companies, many of which are still using a distributed storage infrastructure," Nexsan adds. "NexStor's broad product portfolio and common operating environment enable customers to consolidate to a consistent architecture for increased availability and manageability. You can dynamically reallocate system resources on the fly to meet changing workload demands using Dynamic Reconfiguration and Dynamic System Domains.

"Consolidation can help you to increase overall security by implementing highly secure operation environments, moving assets into controlled data centres.

Simplifying business continuity plans and enabling disaster recovery can also help ensure that your systems are up and running, and reduce interruptions to your business.

"By standardising your data centre, NexStor can help you reduce complexity, significantly improve efficiencies and increase utilisation of resources in the data centre. Architectural consistency simplifies management and maintenance, and having a standardised infrastructure simplifies staff and end-user training. Consolidation leverages staff and simplifies implementation of management best practices."

Consolidation is an area in which Sun Microsystems also excels. "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,” says the company.

“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 much improved through virtualisation. "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."

According to Paul Hargreaves, consulting systems engineer, NetApp, there are many benefits to be had from consolidating data from a large number of general-purpose servers to virtual filers. “The data can be centrally managed, backed up, easily scaled and replicated to other filers for recovery purposes,” he points out. “In addition, powerful features become available to simplify management and empower the IT manager.

“The delivery of integrated hardware and software solutions that simplify storage deployment and management will boost efficiency. With unified storage solutions a single storage platform can meet all the storage needs of an environment. IT managers need to manage only a single storage platform - a platform widely recognised for its ease of use. Dramatically reducing the complexity of a storage environment makes it possible to deploy and manage more storage with fewer personnel.”

Effective data management is the key to the successful deployment and operation of storage consolidation. “The management of large storage pools through the elimination or simplification of most common storage tasks is simple,” Hargreaves adds. “One of the design goals for unified storage is to ensure that storage can be managed.”

A recent survey by Gartner estimated that 60% of companies are in the process of consolidating their infrastructure and almost 30% are planning or considering consolidation. Certainly, reducing complexity, facilitating management and providing a clear path for future growth are the keys to successful storage deployment and management. “A combination of innovative software, simple, reliable hardware and enterprise-class service and support will meet all storage needs now and in the future,” states Hargreaves. “And while consolidating storage requires spending money in the short term, in the long run it can reduce the amount of staffing expertise and training required. Supplying storage to a virtual server environment, such as VMware ESX or Microsoft Virtual Server, should be simple, flexible and cost effective.”

The future for consolidation looks highly promising, what with with the ability to provision virtual machines rapidly, quickly replicate and move workloads, and cost effectively scale out and non disruptively add capacity as needs arise. It is transforming business operations in the best possible way. ST