Storage Management - How Symantec's software can help optimise existing storage infrastructures
The current recessionary economic cycle has introduced a great deal of uncertainty into the business climate. Organisations are reluctant to spend any more money than absolutely necessary, which has limited or delayed the acquisition of IT equipment that otherwise might have been routine.
Symantec is unique among storage software suppliers in its ability to deliver the breadth of product capabilities to optimise existing storage infrastructure as well as the depth to utilise the latest technology to ensure the optimisation persists over time.
STORAGE MANAGEMENT: A STATE OF BENIGN NEGLECT
During periods of robust economic growth, organisations may be tempted to take the quick fix to storage management problems. The incremental cost of adding storage is relatively small and can be absorbed by the budget. Such a short-cut may facilitate faster project roll-out but it also leads to underutilised storage. Specifically, many organisations operate at only 30%-40% utilisation. Unfortunately, during periods of tight budgets, funds are not available for incremental capacity purchases.
Industry averages for new data growth are between 10%-20% compounded annually (CAGR), yet storage capacity grows at an average of 50%-60% CAGR. The difference is explained by the multiplier effect caused by data replication and over-provisioning. While data replication may be a necessity for business continuity, over-provisioning is a common practice and one rarely corrected.
Needless spending is the primary consequence of benign neglect. Having an array only 50% utilised is like paying twice as much for the storage needed. Idle capacity also consumes power, increases cooling costs and unnecessarily consumes floor space (which is often at a premium) and maintenance spend with no return on the investment. Moreover, storage array software licences are typically based on total (or raw) capacity, not utilised capacity, thereby needlessly driving up the cost of software. This scenario is simply not tenable during difficult economic times.
USING STRATEGIC STORAGE MANAGEMENT TO GAIN COST EFFICIENCIES
Benchmarking: The Place to Start
Managing storage without a storage resource management (SRM) tool is like going on a journey without a map. Having a clear plan, path, and objective before taking action is the best assurance of rapid progress and success. Before embarking on any cost-cutting endeavour, storage managers should first assess their situation by answering the following questions:
- What is the average utilisation rate?
- What is the utilisation rate by application?
- Which applications are growing fastest? Slowest?
Veritas CommandCentral Storage helps organisations make this assessment and provides an enterprise-wide view of the storage environment. Storage Managers can quickly identify problem areas, consolidation opportunities and create a priority list of solutions. Reporting on current operations accomplishes two things. First, it identifies problem areas with low utilisation that can be fixed immediately at no cost to the organisation. Second, periodic benchmarking empirically demonstrates tangible cost savings in ways that both technical and non-technical managers can fully appreciate. Managers can also monitor the system to be certain that it remains optimised.
Implement Thin Provisioning
While most major array manufacturers support thin provisioning, the management tools available from these manufacturers are usually highly vendor-specific. Moreover, some of the systems, especially Windows environments, are inefficient in a thin environment and lead to disk fragmentation.
Thin provisioning has four major benefits:
- Higher capacity utilisation
- Applications share a pool of available storage that reduces the amount needed for any individual application
- Storage is allocated to applications dynamically as needed, resulting in higher utilisation
- Eliminates the guesswork in newapplication provisioning
- Rapidly-growing applications can access space as needed while low-growth applications will not hoard empty space
- Reduces capital expenditures
- Requires less up-front storage than a 'stove pipe' environment
- Permits just-in-time resource allocation
- Reduces operating costs
- Avoid emergency allocation on evenings, weekend and holidays
While most major array manufacturers support thin provisioning, migrating to these new arrays is inefficient without leveraging intelligence on the server. Veritas Storage Foundation and its SmartMove feature automatically cleans up and reclaims space that has been vacated during the migration to thin storage.
Although hardware enables thin provisioning, Veritas Storage Foundation is necessary to effectively manage it. Veritas Storage Foundation is the only cross platform 'thin aware' file system in the industry. Its Veritas Thin Reclamation API, which enables the array vendors to leverage the intelligence on the host, assures that thin volumes stay thin over time. This links the thin volume management to the file system, unlike other management tools. Storage Foundation also has the broadest platform support in the industry. Inevitably, organisations will have both thick and thin volumes to manage and Storage Foundation makes it possible to manage both from a single point.
IT managers planning to use thin provisioning in Windows environments should be aware that NTFS is not thin friendly. That is, it simply writes new blocks, consuming storage, without reclaiming old and unused blocks of storage.
Thus, it does not actually use space efficiently and becomes fragmented and underutilised over time. Veritas Storage Foundation for Windows provides the solution for thin provisioning in Microsoft environments as it will auto-grow the volumes, reclaim empty blocks and prevent fragmentation.
SIMPLIFYING THE TRANSITION TO THIN PROVISIONING WITH SMARTMOVE
Organisations implementing thin provisioning soon learn that moving the data from 'fat' to 'thin' volumes risks system downtime and can require significant manual effort to clean up after the process and reclaim empty space. SmartMove takes all of the risk and effort out of the process. SmartMove moves data from fat to thin without downtime and does so in an any-to-any array environment. Throughout the process, SmartMove automatically cleans up and reclaims space that has been vacated during the move.
SmartMove is also useful when replicating or mirroring thin volumes and in the regular task of migrating arrays at the end of a lease. SmartMove can facilitate the mirroring activity between arrays and moves only changed blocks. Such a reduction in data movement not only saves time but also reduces the necessary bandwidth. Moving only changed blocks also reduces the multiplier effect that data replication has in bloating data growth rates.
DEDUPLICATION: DON'T STORE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE
Deduplication is a process that eliminates duplicate data even when such data is unrelated. Deduplication greatly reduces the data multiplier effect on data. Most data deduplication is directed toward backup and recovery, since the nature of that process is to backup the same data over and over. For example, if a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation is stored on different file servers multiple times, deduplication ensures that only one copy is stored no matter how many full or incremental backups occur. Organisations may consider specialised appliances to provide backup-to-disk and deduplication functions. These appliances, however, add complexity to the data centre with more devices to manage and actually add capacity to the environment rather than using what already exists more efficiently.
Veritas NetBackup PureDisk facilitates backup-to-disk using any disk in the data centre, saving tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds in appliance acquisition costs. Its built-in deduplication technology reduces data backup volumes by as much as 90% and reduces bandwidth needed by 97%. Microsoft Exchange backups can be reduced by as much as 98%. Deduplication is entirely transparent to the application.
The integration of PureDisk with NetBackup operations permits backup set on disk to be managed like any other backup, including individualised retention policies. At the time of expiration, space is automatically reclaimed for reuse.
DATA ARCHIVING - OUT WITH THE OLD
Thin provisioning and data deduplication are strategies for reducing the growth rate and space consumption of new data or finding more efficient ways of storing it. These strategies must be combined with addressing unnecessary data storage in order to fully utilise existing assets. The largest container of unnecessary and obsolete data is unstructured data.
Email, the biggest unstructured information pain point today, is the top target for data reduction via archiving. Although storage costs continue to fall on a per-unit basis, email is often stored many times - in the email server, on the user's PC, in a Microsoft Exchange PST or IBM Lotus Notes NSF file, on file servers, saved in SharePoint and in backups.
Across all business industries and public sector organisations, IT professionals are being called on to address the common management concerns around email and unstructured information, which is resource management. With sprawling file servers, SharePoint sites, email message stores, longer backup windows and out-of-control 'rogue' archives (such as Microsoft PST files), IT is struggling to manage unstructured information without breaking the budget.
Symantec Enterprise Vault acts as an online archive for older items that are moved from primary application storage (for example, Microsoft Exchange) according to company-defined policies. It also leverages optimised single instance storage and compression technologies to further reduce the data footprint. By controlling the size of the message store, the applications and servers hosting them remain focused on real-time transactions. The online archive also enables organisations to rationalise their storage resources and dedicate primary storage to dynamic and transactional data. Older, less frequently accessed content can be moved to a secondary or tertiary storage device, saving money for more strategic purposes.
Enterprise Vault utilises intelligent classification and retention technologies to capture, categorise, index and store target data to enforce policies and protect corporate assets while helping to reduce storage costs and simplifying management. It also provides specialised applications, such as Discovery Accelerator and Compliance Accelerator that mine archived data to support legal discovery, content compliance, knowledge management and information security initiatives.
OPTIMISATION, OPTIMISATION, OPTIMISATION
During the current economic downturn, IT organisations must take steps to optimise existing assets. Storage managers no longer have the luxury of cutting management corners. However, the situation presents an opportunity to complete existing projects while implementing processes, procedures and simple technologies to significantly improve the storage cost profile.
To begin the effort, CommandCentral Storage will benchmark existing operations and provide a clear path to operational efficiency. Then, with the judicious application of thin provisioning and data deduplication, IT organisations can significantly reduce the capacity needs of their infrastructure as well as the growth rate of stored data. Plus, with Enterprise Vault, efficient email and file system archiving can dramatically reduce primary storage costs and prevent unnecessary capacity growth. To effectively utilise that technology, however, administrators need effective tools that have the breadth and depth to provide automation and flexibility. Symantec is uniquely able to deliver these products that provide the immediate return on investment that the current financial situation demands.
FIND OUT MORE
For further information on the full range of Symantec products, contact your Phoenix Account Manager on 0845 265 1265 or email info@phoenixs.co.uk
