How To Get Out Of the Storage Hardware Buying Game

For many organizations the time may finally be right for getting out of the storage hardware buying game. The idea of consuming storage as a utility is nothing new. In fact, the premise of utility based storage was brought to market in the late 90s during the height of the dot com bubble but the idea never really gained traction and hence, it lay relatively dormant for nearly a decade afterwards. But now it is possible for IT organizations to leverage low-cost, secure cloud storage resources to save time, money and the aggravation of constantly going through the storage refresh cycle.

Endless Acquisition Cycles

The typical organization will refresh their storage infrastructure every 3-5 years. But between refresh cycles there is often the need to purchase additional disk shelves, array fibre port expansions, network switches, software licenses, etc. In recent years, there has also been a need to accelerate performance at the midpoint of a system’s life cycle in the form of a flash/SSD upgrade; adding even more cost to the storage infrastructure stack. In short, the storage infrastructure environment rarely remains static for long; it is subject to constant change. Therein lies the rub. The storage procurement process essentially never ends following the initial acquisition of a new platform; relegating many IT pros into storage procurement and implementation experts instead of information specialists that can help add to the company bottom line.

Short-Sighted Savings?

One of the fundamental issues with trying to manage the storage procurement process is that the cost of storage capacity constantly goes down over time. This is a good thing, however, it has a pronounced effect on storage purchasing decisions. For example, many organizations will purchase only what they think the business will need over a 12 month period. That way when additional storage capacity is added a year later, the acquisition costs may be significantly less than the previous purchase. The challenge with this approach is that if the needs of the business suddenly change and storage demands unexpectedly spike, IT can be left flat footed trying to meet this demand. In situations where time-to-market is critical, the “savings” realized by skimping on the up-front storage purchase could evaporate in an instant.

Storage Catch-22

As a result, many IT planners will purchase excess storage capacity “just in case” user demand outweighs the available supply. This generally results in businesses over spending – not just on the cost of the extra disk spindles but also for storage software licenses to manage this capacity, an increase in the cost of the hardware maintenance contract and the additional rack space and power and cooling required to maintain this additional “buffer” space. In fact, when excess storage capacity is purchased up-front, it is not uncommon for overall storage utilization rates in the data center to hover around 30-40%. This means that businesses could be paying up to 3x more for storage resources than they need to be. In this new era of relatively low-cost and abundant cloud storage capacity that can be served up rapidly on-demand, something has to give.

Hybrid Cloud Flexibility

One of the chief barriers for adopting cloud storage is the concern over local application performance. The network bandwidth required to support a rapid IO connection with cloud storage resources would simply be too cost prohibitive for most organizations. On the other hand, many businesses aren’t comfortable with the idea of deploying their critical business systems into a cloud service providers (CSP) facility; instead, they want to retain local control of these applications. What is needed is a way for businesses to implement a hybrid approach to consuming cloud storage – on premises command and control of business applications with the ability to leverage off-site, low-cost cloud storage resources for data protection, retention and DR.

Various industry sources estimate that only 5-8% of business data is active at any point in time. This means that only a small percentage of a company’s data actually needs to be on high speed storage capacity; the rest could reside on lower cost storage resources. A solution that could bridge the need for an efficient layer of local flash storage capacity with seamless connectivity to ubiquitous, low-cost cloud storage, could help businesses strike the right balance from an ongoing storage procurement perspective.

Making IT Strategic

Since most of an organization’s data could be securely protected off-site in the cloud, IT organizations could extricate themselves from the endless burden of manual storage capacity upgrades and technology refreshes. No more time spent poring through storage vendor data sheets, deliberating internally about storage decisions, negotiating acquisition terms with suppliers, etc. Instead, storage could be purchased and provisioned on-demand, in capacity increments that more closely mirror the real-time needs of the business. This could open up opportunities to lower capital and operational expenditures while freeing up IT personnel to focus their time on business revenue generating activities.

Another major side benefit with adopting this approach is that since business data is always protected in the cloud, IT can dramatically scale back the time they spend on data protection activities. Data stored in the cloud can be configured with various data retention and data snapshotting policies based on the recovery point objectives (RPO) of the business. This also would open up the door for non-disruptive DR testing since cloud protected data could be presented to CSP virtual server resources for application recovery testing. Data could even be mirrored across two different cloud providers, if needed, for an additional layer of data redundancy and availability.

Conclusion

The time has come for businesses to take a hard look at consuming cloud based storage. With solutions like those available from Nasuni, IT organizations can quickly deploy a hybrid cloud storage solution which provides the speed and performance of a local storage cache with the efficiencies and flexibility of low-cost cloud storage capacity. In so doing, IT personnel can reclaim back valuable time that may otherwise be spent analyzing storage technology and planning for storage upgrades and technology refreshes. By consuming storage-as-a-service, businesses can leverage the sliding-scale of low cost cloud storage, enhance their data resiliency and offload their experienced IT personnel from performing tasks that are not core to the business.

Nasuni is a client of Storage Switzerland

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About Colm Keegan

As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.