Simplifying the tiers

Optimizing on
storage environments is what every CIO wants to achieve. Many enterprises are
looking at ways and means of optimizing their storage assets; while many have
taken the virtualization route that is consolidation through virtualization is
an important first step towards realizing many of these benefits. One of the
most pressing issues facing organizations today is the need to reduce storage
costs. Simultaneously, single vendor management tools and isolated pools of
storage fragment the infrastructure, making it difficult to share resources,
improve operational efficiency. By implementing virtualized tiered storage
architecture, an IT organization can dramatically improve storage capacities and
lower capital and operational expenses. Virtualized tiered storage better aligns
data on storage systems by allowing users to efficiently match storage
attributes with the service level needs of individual business applications.

Configuring Tiered Storage

There are some key factors enterprises should consider while configuring,
managing and designing the tiered storage. When we look at design elements
oriented towards higher performance, the key things one should look at are
response time and throughput. The finer elements that need to be studied here
are aspects like I/O operations per second per gigabyte and megabyte capacity.
The second design element should factor in the critical two
parameters-reliability and availability. So, the things to be studied here are
aspects like the extent of modular storage and whether it's sufficient, and the
kind of RAID required. The major thing that needs to be considered is the
Logical Unit Number (LUN) and the kind of sizes required. The final design
element is the capacity management and the ability to scale the tier in the most
efficient manner.

The underlying design must facilitate certain key and
critical storage deliverables. First, such deliverable is the storage
performance. As we look at the individual parameters that impact the storage
performance, a major downer that ushers in inefficiencies comes from the storage
being not tuned to the demands. If the storage is not tuned to the demands it
can dramatically erode any benefits derived from virtualization. Storage needs
to respond quickly to increased workloads and overcome I/O bottlenecks
automatically. But, administrators do not have the time or resources to
constantly tweak the performance characteristics of their storage systems.
Meanwhile, another key area is managing disk capacity that has a direct bearing
on reliability and availability as well. For instance, managing the same in
virtualized environments can be time consuming, complex and costly. Many
companies over-provision the storage for virtual machines as a result, and
depend on machine templates to allocate space, hoping that one size will fit
all. Also, setting up storage that must host multiple virtual servers can
require significant configuration to achieve optimal performance. The third
important thing is whether your management approach enables you to get the best
solution at the most economical TCO. So, reducing capital and operating costs is
an essential benefit of virtualization. But, many companies under-utilize their
storage capacity and spend little time researching that how fast their storage
really is in their virtualized environments. Companies need storage systems that
are easy to expand, yet deliver the best possible performance value.

The design elements must also usher in the much needed
flexibility. Virtualization deployment is growing. More applications are moving
from traditional, physical servers to a virtual pool of resources. Storage is no
different. Companies need storage systems that scale as the virtualization
demand grows, without sacrificing the savings that virtualization provides.
Storage systems as an integral component of virtualization infrastructures
should easily scale, preserve virtual resources and adapt to changing
conditions. As a bottomline, the key thing one needs to factor in the design of
a virtualized tiered storage system starts with the applications. It is the
business needs that drive the storage requirements which guide tier
configuration.

Points to Ponder

Operationally it is not efficient to configure unique tiers for each
application. Individually configuring a unique scheme for each application leads
to extra work, cost and provisioning delays. Instead, the recommended practice
is to develop a catalog of pre-defined tiers with pre-defined characteristics,
and then allocate storage to applications as needed. Minimum upgrade steps
should be defined for all storage tiers to make sure that the defined
performance levels can be guaranteed at any time. The ultimate goal for any CIO
is to put in place a tiered architecture that can consolidate heterogeneous
storage solutions into single manageable pools. It eliminates fragmentation of
the storage environment caused by disconnected islands of storage and
interoperability problems, and creates stranded capacity and duplicates storage
networking equipments, contributing to escalating hardware costs. Eliminating
barriers to sharing, storage recovery and improving capacity utilization rates
can deliver sustainable long term savings by allowing future purchase of storage
assets to be deferred.

Meanwhile, with heterogeneous configurations the norm in
enterprise data centers, managing storage requires the use of many software
tools from different vendors. These tools frequently do not communicate well
with each other, complicating the process of provisioning, optimizing, moving
and protecting data, and increases the training costs. Hence, to avoid
heterogeneous storage management it's a good idea to migrate to a universal
storage platform that can weed out the inherent storage pain areas.

Shrikanth G

(Source: DQ)