Businesses today need cost-effective storage solutions that enable them to address issues surrounding data retention, compliance, risk management, backup, recovery, archiving, and e-mail storage growth. Utility storage addresses these issues for an organization with a cost-effective approach and eventually helps the company to grow faster.

In today’s IT landscape, cost has become one of the most critical issues, enterprise information officers or datacenter managers are facing. Today storage landscape comprises many technology choices, and new technologies are always vying for market share. Enterprise storage is a costly purchase, however, the ownership costs of managing it, keeping it available, guaranteeing its security, and scaling it to the growth needs of the organization greatly outweigh the acquisition price of the infrastructure. A leading research and analyst group estimates that the initial purchase price of storage systems is only about 20% of the cost of ownership over the useable life of the capital asset. How to cost effectively manage the ever-increasing volumes of data storage implemented across an enterprise adds to the complexity to the equation.

According to most leading market researchers, enterprise storage requirements are growing at a staggering 50% per year. Information management becomes more challenging when factoring in the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure required to uphold the integrity of the Service Levels that are required in business critical environments. A lack of centralized tools adds to the complexity of storage management and drives the costs even higher. Business critical applications demand more information, which needs to be available continuously.

Automated storage utility services directly address these issues and provide the optimal solution to enterprises that need to solve these operational efficiency issues. Looking ahead, as the broader IT-as-utility concept becomes more widely adopted on both the supply side and the demand side; storage has become an important element in this business. SSPs that wish to compete successfully must be aware that ultimately they are competing with customers' established strategies and policies around storage and data management. When a storage utility provider can offer a service that is cheaper, more reliable, more scalable, and better managed than customers can accomplish themselves, these services will be purchased as a way of gaining competitive advantage. Until then, SSPs of any stripe will struggle to convince customers that they should turn over management and ownership of their storage infrastructure to a third party.

Evolution of utility storage

If you look at storage as an industry, it's probably one of the few things in an IT shop that is managed today as a utility. In other words, how much of storage is highly distributed anymore around enterprise management? How much of backup-recovery availability of storage is managed in a distributed fashion? Essentially, very little. It's pretty centrally managed, the hardware is commoditized, and customers are now starting to try to get better value out of storage they've already installed. It's generally pretty available; it's recoverable; and it's run on a shared, automated infrastructure; so as a building block, it's probably the closest thing the industry even has today toward [what] a utility's going to be in the future, being much more broadly deployed.

The two most significant contributors to today’s mounting storage costs are databases and e-mail. Most IT managers cite the growing number and size of databases and data warehouses as the main factors behind the rising costs. These large data repositories are a critical component of key business applications such as ERP, CRM and SCM. The ability to capture, share and quickly analyze data across the enterprise is crucial to business efficiency and staying competitive.

Another contributor to the growing size and complexity of storage resources is the increasing demand for availability of key business applications. Companies are looking for creative backup and recovery solutions to protect their data as well as eliminate downtime. Meanwhile, e-mail traffic volume is also expanding, as is the occurrence of data-intensive attachments. Companies can be hard-pressed to control these growing demands for storage, especially in light of government regulations and corporate policies requiring the retention of e-mail files for several years.

According to industry experts several models exist for utility computing in storage though all of them have some constraints which come in way of utility computing. One clear inhibitor obviously is that unlike other resources like CPU/RAM etc. and the second important aspect is that - storage cannot be geographically displaced form server by more than fiber channel distances as the bandwidth between server and storage is very important. Experts believe that four different models of utility computing in storage are accepted in industry and they are as follows:

1. Datacenter Model: Datacenter players who host the servers can purchase consolidated storage and offer on pay per use ($/TB/month). As all servers are in same place, very easily they can do it. Generally it will not be variable (or metered TB) but a fixed contracted TB for specific period.

2. Xerox Model: Xerox had started utility model for photocopying where they install and maintain the machine at customer site and a meter is attached to machine. At the end of month Xerox people send the bill to customer based on the meter reading from the site. Same way, vendors may keep storage boxes with additional capacity at customer site and specialized software will keep track of GB/TB usage and vendor can send a bill based on either average TB used in the month or Peak TB. This trend has already taken place in US but yet to reach in India.

3. DR model: The key storage investment which does not have a very good RoI is in DR storage. As the RoI comes true only when disaster happens, many companies are reluctant to invest in DR storage. As DR storage is not used on daily basis, hence it is very open to a shared model. This reduces the DR costs significantly and customer can pay a monthly fee based on amount of DR data and has freedom to discontinue anytime.

4. Strategic Outsourcing Model: This is not just for storage but total IT infrastructure outsourcing. It’s a much bigger game but achieves the same at the end, in terms of financial model.

Identifying the benefits

Without taking pain for management overhead besides keeping the performance absolutely tuned, utility storage takes the best of modular storage array design and enables it to scale massively, beyond today's high-end monolithic arrays. It adds "in-system" fine-grain virtualization such as thin provisioning and centralized volume management to eliminate poor resource utilization and operational inefficiencies. Finally, it adds granular instrumentation to provide accurate usage assessment and chargeback. It allows organizations to manage storage without thinking about it; to get as much as they need, only when they need it; and pay only for what they use, when they use it.

Thin provisioning is a key Utility Storage feature that eliminates the inefficiencies producing poor utilization results within traditional storage arrays. Thin provisioning is based on dedicate-on-write technology, as opposed to the traditional dedicate-on-allocation approach. This means that, during the initial provisioning activity, an administrator can allocate as much storage as an application is likely to consume over its lifetime. However, the thin provisioning approach only allocates physical storage capacity to a specific volume as an application actually writes data to it. As the application continues to write data, the system will continue to draw additional storage capacity from the common free space pool to service the volume.
Advantages

1. Multiple storage arrays can be aggregated into a single pool of storage that can be configured and assigned centrally using a simple intuitive interface.

2. Storage assignments are flexible. For example, if processing demands on a single processor database server exceeds its capacity at peak times, the database can quickly be reassigned to a four-way server .with greater processing capacity

3. Data can be shared, allowing many applications, such as web serving, to grow by adding additional servers sharing access to a single data set.

4. Data is available; no need to have expensive hardware tied up in active-passive high availability clusters.

5. Flexible connectivity: facilitate the possibility for users to select the best connectivity option based on their hardware and application needs and capabilities, leading to significant cost reduction and increased flexibility. Users can utilize a mix of iSCSI, 2GB fabric, 4GB fabric and upcoming 10GB fabric in the same deployment at the same time.
Conclusion

The strategic utility storage policies can enable an enterprise to focus less on day-to-day technology management and more on its core competencies and business activities. An effectively managed collaboration with a storage service provider can help the enterprise achieve benefits that include reduced costs, increased productivity, improved customer and vendor relationships, enhanced technology, assured business continuity, and renewed focus on innovation and excellence. Together, these benefits can help enterprise drive revenue, cultivate growth, and seize opportunities for improvement.

-By:‘InfoStore’ Bureau.