The Business Issue
Operational Challenges:
• Disruptive Infrastructure Changes – constantly adding and changing storage resources to cope with this growth causes major disruption to mission critical applications, which in turn means loss of revenue during these periods of downtime.
• Uneven Utilisation – some resources may be reaching full capacity, while others have plenty of space available, but administrators have no way of moving data around easily to balance the load.
• Exploiting Tiered Storage – many customers would like implement tiers of storage resources to support their Information Lifecycle Management strategies (and to better align IT with the business), but they have no easy way of defining and managing these tiers.
Cost Challenges:
• Explosive Data Growth – this causes a corresponding growth in disk storage resources, and although the cost of disk is decreasing by at least 25% per annum, the exponential nature of data growth causes an overall increase in storage-related expenditures.
• Increasing Labour Costs – growth in storage resources is not matched by the equivalent growth in human resources to manage it, which results in too much time being spent on operational tasks instead of revenue generating tasks; since up to 70% of the CIO’s budget could be labour costs, this is financially inefficient.
• Ensuring Business Continuity – this is critical to all organisations, but is becoming prohibitively expensive as a result of the sheer volume of data that needs to be protected; so less critical data may be ignored, which can lead to revenue loss in the event of a disaster.
The Solution
IBM has developed solutions based on the idea of “Resource Virtualisation”, which applies to the entire IT infrastructure, including the server and network layers (for example, through the use of Virtual Machines, Ethernet and I/O), and the storage layers (for example, through the use of Tape and Disk Virtualisation, and Array Partitioning).
In particular, the Disk Virtualisation solution, IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), allows IT administrators to address many of the storage resource challenges described above, which benefits the organisation as a whole, both in terms of lowering overall IT expenditure, and in terms of increasing IT productivity. These benefits are as follows:
Benefits of the IBM Solution:
Coping with Growth (of storage and human resources), and Change:
• SVC allows changes to be made to the storage infrastructure without disrupting host applications, thereby minimising downtime, the costs of changes and revenue loss.
• Administrators can use SVC to manage the entire storage pool, and different types of storage, from a central point, which makes provisioning of capacity easier and improves personnel productivity, and hence the ROI in terms of labour costs.Improving Utilisation:
• Administrators can use SVC to combine the capacity from multiple arrays into a single pool of storage, and then use common services, such as copy services, across the entire storage pool.
• This results in more efficient use of available storage resources, helping to defer future purchases.
Easing the Implementation of Tiered Storage:
• SVC can be used to move data between arrays without disruption and apply copy services from any type of storage to any other type.
• The net result is that SVC helps to match the cost of storage to the business value of the data, thus supporting ILM strategies.Driving Down the Cost of Business Continuity:SVC’s SAN-wide API does not change as storage hardware changes, and it uses a common multipath driver for all arrays, thus minimising the impact of changes on business continuity.
• Administrators can use SVC to define replication targets on lower-cost disks, thus reducing the overall cost, whilst maintaining the recovery time/point objectives (RTO/RPO) of the business continuity solution.
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