The new economics of storage management

07 Sep 2012

It is hard to avoid media buzz around big data. For IT professionals, it is even harder to avoid the increase in demand for storage capacity and performance, regardless of big data. While new requirements and analytical efforts correctly prioritise applications and alignment with business, engineers dealing with the delivery infrastructure have been quietly deploying innovative architectures to build sustainability and greater resilience.

Earlier this year, we started looking at the role of storage hypervisors in large storage installations. Where is the pain line, and how are storage architects designing for the new economic environment? What adjustments should in-house storage designs incorporate to work with data 'in the cloud' to ensure seamless user experience? And are storage vendors keeping up with the unravelling complexity facing their customers? Interviews thus far reveal significant but fragmented investment and activity. There are fundamentally four places where the storage performance and cost efficiencies are:

1. Disk array: The array controllers continue to become more powerful and vendors are adding code to provide advanced storage virtualization functions into the array. Initially the industry adopted a proprietary vendor-by-vendor model, but more recent moves have opened access and management on a heterogeneous basis. Favoured by in-house teams that provision storage in piecemeal fashion.

2. Appliance: Typically running on x86 specialised servers, storage virtualization code manages externally attached disk arrays. We saw this most frequently where the integration between server and storage management teams was tightest.

3. Network: Since storage is networked with servers, storage virtualization can be executed in the network. This in-band network based approach was most popular with organisations with large numbers of branch operations.

4. Server hypervisor: Storage-aware server hypervisors have grown to execute more control especially as performance of the server workload depends on storage and vice versa. Although this was explored by a few of our respondents, none could report production experience.

We estimate that since 2010, global spending on storage has been greater than spending on servers. And yet the market remains wide open with multiple philosophies governing architecture, purchase, deployment and management decisions. We should expect even more diversity in this yet-to-mature market as questions about virtualization costs continue, the need to bridge data held in the cloud and management utilities available as-a-service.

The overwhelming response to our initial interviews was request for more discussion and exchange of views. We are therefore delighted to announce the 'New Economics' roundtable at IPEXPO, to be facilitated by Martin Hingley and Puni Rajah. Discussion will focus on strategies for higher performance and resilience in large installations. We have eight seats available for IP EXPO Online readers, and these will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.

If you would like to be involved please email editor@ipexpo.co.uk