Data overload

One of the most pressing issues facing organizations today is also one of the most universal: how to store ever-increasing masses of data and information. The simple day-to-day accumulation of data creates a significant storage crunch. But now, other forces are adding to the problem. For example, new government regulations require agencies to archive data for extended periods of time. In addition, the public sector is moving from manual to digital processes, which create more electronic data and rich media content.

IT departments have no choice but to constantly increase storage capacity and develop innovative ways to manage massive amounts of data. As a result, many are wrangling with a dispersed, complex and heterogeneous storage environment.

At the same time, organizations face pressure to get ahead of the competition by reducing costs and accomplishing more with less. How can you cut storage costs when you must also accommodate more and more data?

In the earliest wave of storage consolidation, agencies replaced direct-attached storage (network-attached storage or NAS) with networked storage (storage area networks or SANs) and reaped benefits such as higher utilization and data availability, fewer systems to manage and faster backup. But often, the consolidation addressed an immediate need without considering the larger IT picture.

Today, with fewer IT dollars to spend, IT departments must invest in strategic programs that view the IT environment as a whole, creating greater competitive advantage and reaping a larger ROI in the long term. Accordingly, one way to deal with increasing data is to consolidate the storage environment as part of an overall strategic plan that can include servers, applications and databases, influencing processes and the way people work along the way.

As part of a strategic plan, organizations can take their consolidation efforts to the next level by consolidating SAN islands, backup and storage management, as well as servers and storage in branch offices and remote locations. In addition to easing storage management and helping reduce costs, consolidation increases flexibility and allows IT departments to focus on innovation rather than maintaining a complex environment.

But tackling such big tasks—and even knowing where to begin—requires a thoughtful methodology and the understanding that only a strategic approach can yield long-term benefits.

The first step in developing a master plan for strategic storage consolidation is to get a clear understanding of your environment. Ask these questions:

• How much storage do we have, and where is it? Do you have a storage sprawl problem? Consolidation often involves an excess of machines, but not always.
• How is your storage connected? Is it mostly direct-attached storage, networked storage or a mixture of both? Is important data left out in remote or branch offices to be managed and maintained?
• How do you use your storage? What applications access each piece of storage, and which of those applications are mission critical? Determine target levels of availability for each application—how far from those levels are you today?
  

Storage consolidation is a strategic process. It requires a partner that sees the whole IT environment and can deliver a holistic solution that reduces total cost of ownership, allocates resources efficiently, reduces complexity, improves performance and availability and reduces business risk.

To determine whether a vendor is up to the task, consider these questions:

• Can the vendor see beyond storage? Storage is only one part of the complete IT picture.
• How much storage consolidation experience does the vendor have?
• What partnerships or alliances does the vendor have with software companies or systems integrators? Will these relationships benefit your storage initiatives?
• Does the vendor have deep expertise in your industry?
• Does the vendor offer point-product solutions for storage or end-to-end IT consolidation solutions? Tactical, storage-only solutions may not address your long-term goals.
• Does the vendor want to “rip and replace” your current infrastructure, (a costly and often unnecessary approach), or can they start with what you already have?

Storage consolidation is a long-term strategy to reduce costs, not a one-time fix to a tactical problem. Because data will never stop growing and your environment will never stop changing, your efforts to consolidate storage will be a continuous process. After the initial storage consolidation, subsequent projects will run more quickly and smoothly; however an effective strategy requires ongoing attention. That’s why it’s critically important to develop a master plan and identify a partner with the expertise to turn your plan into a reality.

HP has led more than 5,000 storage consolidation projects worldwide, along with many partner-led consolidation projects. And now, with the recent acquisition of AppIQ and its StorageAuthority Suite of SAN and storage resource management (SRM) tools, HP offers a true multivendor management solution. Drawing on years of experience consolidating heterogeneous, multivendor environments, HP encourages customers to take advantage of existing infrastructure as a way to get a fast return on investment.

"By consolidating information in a central data center, we could relieve users of the burden of storing, managing and backing up information,” says Ron Hunsberger, director of information technology, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. “The HP StorageWorks 3000 Enterprise Virtual Array fit our needs perfectly for capacity, performance and virtualization."

HP has also invested significant research and development into virtualization technologies, and  now offers virtualization at the tape, array and fabric levels. (For more on virtualization, see “Fact or myth: Storage virtualization” .) 

As a partner who understands that customers must make a commitment to ongoing storage consolidation, HP stands ready to commit to the long-term vision of the enterprise.