In theory, and from the outsider's perspective, storage should just work without needing too much intervention, to respond to the following needs:
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Firstly, its role is to deliver data to applications and users consistently and efficiently: that is, as and when needed, at the required levels of performance and an appropriate cost.
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Second, storage should also be able to recover from failure situations. It is one thing when things are going right; quite another if things go wrong. Here we can think about backup and recovery as well as the ability to replicate between storage arrays, and indeed across sites.
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And finally storage needs to be manageable in a way that suits the people trying to manage it. This is not just about having visibility on what storage exists, but also to respond to changing conditions and changing requirements, preferably as automatically as possible.
Best practice suggests that such needs can be met by building a well-architected, well-managed storage environment. However, few organisations have ever had the luxury of implementing storage infrastructure from scratch. Indeed, most struggle with a number of generations of storage. While each might have been procured with the best of intentions, it has led to storage environments being far more complex than they need to be.
It's not just about complexity, but the reliability of storage must also be held to account. Storage is one of the few areas of IT that relies on mechanical devices, and as such disk failure is a common theme in most IT environments. Indeed, some common storage technologies (RAID for example) exist largely to counter the fact that disks can, and will crash without warning.
Meanwhile of course, we are seeing continuingly high levels of data growth. Video and other forms of unstructured content, the democratisation of business intelligence, the increased demand for collaborative working and remote access, each is driving increased demand for raw storage. Data growth is exacerbated by many organisations having a ‘keep everything' policy when it comes to electronic information. As well as being most likely illegal, this puts additional burdens on the storage infrastructure, not to mention the people and processes to support it. Putting the complexity and reliability of storage together with the very real challenges of data growth does lead to a bit of a doomsday scenario.
The question is, are any of the latest developments in storage and elsewhere, going to have an impact?
To cover reliability first, it may be that we are seeing the last generation of spinning platters, as solid state disks (SSDs) arrive at a point where they become cost effective enough to become the norm. While we are not quite there, the mood resembles that of the TV and monitor market just a few years ago, when flat screen displays tipped from being a luxury to an expectation.
Next we have storage virtualisation – which enables storage resources to be treated as a single pool, and then provisioned as appropriate. The phrase in vogue at the moment is ‘thin provisioning', in which a server or application may think it has been allocated a certain disk volume, but in fact the storage array only allocates the physical storage required up to the specified maximum (which may never be reached). This makes for a lot more efficient use of storage.
Speaking of efficiency, another trendy term is de-duplication, in which only variations in files or disk blocks are retained, transferred, backed up or whatever. De-duplication can get quite complicated of course: for example, an index needs to be maintained of everything that is being stored or backed up, so that files can be ‘reconstructed' as necessary. But it can have a considerable impact on the amount of disk being used – this also has a positive impact on reliability (less disks, less risk). Other storage related developments worthy of note are on the networking side with iSCSI (bringing together block and file storage, a.k.a. storage for databases and unstructured content respectively), and at the higher end, the merging of data and storage networking using 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
While all such developments hold their own promise, they cannot solve the problems of complexity and data growth by themselves. To do so requires an architectural view of storage, but we know from various research studies that funding can be hard to come by, particularly when it comes to the business case for higher-availability features and management tools. In other words, the things that enable better-architected storage infrastructure to exist.
What to do? Perhaps the point is that it is never too late to get your organisation to think about storage in the right way. It may seem oxymoronic but even cost-saving initiatives can be used as a stepping stone. For example, while it still isn't cheap (though it's getting cheaper), implementing de-duplication might provide immediate savings in terms of bandwidth and latency reduction. However, by considering its impact a little more broadly, the bandwidth savings may now allow (for example) data replication to another site, making disaster recovery possible whereas in the past it was not.
Certain initiatives may not appear to be about storage initially, but quickly prove otherwise. For example adopters of virtualisation on both both server and desktop have discovered just how important it is to get the storage right up front.
Virtual servers can quickly become the cause of storage bottlenecks, for example, and meanwhile, early adopters of virtual desktop infrastructure have learned how important it is to co-locate the storage used for user data, with that for the virtual desktops.
With such things in mind, it is difficult to see how the storage architecture will become any less important over the coming few years.
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