The advantages of storage consolidation, better utilization lowered operational costs, seem like compelling reasons for IT to consolidate all their storage systems down to a single system. Why then is the data center becoming more and more storage diversified?
There are several challenges facing organizations that try to consolidate storage systems. The first is the continual addition of new workloads and applications to the environment, and the possibility that the current storage system may not be able to meet the capacity, performance or cost requirements of the new workload. IT may also not have the insight into the utilization of the current system to know the current capacity distribution.
Second, a storage system that can handle the mixed requirements of multiple workloads (IO, bandwidth, capacity) is expensive and often has a very high upfront cost. There is also the cost in time to migrate data from the multiple storage systems in the data center to the new consolidated system as well as the time to test that everything still works once consolidated.
Finally, there is no guarantee that the consolidated system will meet the future needs of all workloads. It seems there is always one workload that is the exception, and once IT makes an exception, the data center is well on its way to another multi-vendor storage environment.
Many IT Planners decide to embrace storage diversity and buy another storage system each time a new workload arises. They’d rather deal with the extra management headaches of a multi-vendor storage data center to avoid the risks involved with consolidation as well as concerns about migration.
In our latest white paper “How to Deal with Storage Diversity” Storage Switzerland provides ways to manage the multi-vendor storage data center so that IT can have the best of both worlds, workload-specific storage that is better managed and more fully utilized.
The paper is available in the attachments section of the on demand webinar “Three Steps to Multi-Vendor Storage Excellence”.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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