STORAGE SWITZERLAND HOW TO GET OUT OF THE STORAGE HARDWARE BUYING GAME Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst For many organizations the time may finally be right for getting out of the storage hardware buying game. The idea Short-Sighted Savings? 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 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 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 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 aggravation of constantly going through the storage refresh cycle. 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 Endless Acquisition Cycles 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 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 could evaporate in an instant. Storage Catch-22 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 As a result, many IT planners will purchase excess storage capacity “just in case” user demand outweighs 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 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 many IT pros into storage procurement and implementation experts instead of information specialists that can help add to the company bottom line. maintenance contract and the additional rack space and power and cooling required to maintain this additional “buﬀer" space. [1] In fact, when excess storage capacity is purchased up-front, storage capacity upgrades and technology refreshes. No it is not uncommon for overall storage utilization rates in the more time spent poring through storage vendor data sheets, 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 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 served up rapidly on-demand, something has to give. 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 Hybrid Cloud Flexibility generating activities. One of the chief barriers for adopting cloud storage is the concern over local application performance. The network Another major side benefit with adopting this approach is 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 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 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 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 to implement a hybrid approach to consuming cloud storage be presented to CSP virtual server resources for application - on premises command and control of business recovery testing. Data could even be mirrored across two applications with the ability to leverage oﬀ-site, low-cost diﬀerent cloud providers, if needed, for an additional layer of cloud storage resources for data protection, retention and DR. data redundancy and availability. Conclusion 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 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 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 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 cloud storage, could help businesses strike the right balance doing, IT personnel can reclaim back valuable time that may from an ongoing storage procurement perspective. otherwise be spent analyzing storage technology and planning for storage upgrades and technology refreshes. By Making IT Strategic consuming storage-as-a-service, businesses can leverage Since most of an organization’s data could be securely protected oﬀ-site in the cloud, IT organizations could 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. extricate themselves from the endless burden of manual About Storage Switzerland Storage Switzerland is an analyst firm focused on the virtualization and storage marketplaces. For more information please visit our web site: http://storageswiss.com/ Copyright © 2014 Storage Switzerland, Inc. - All rights reserved [2]