The case for simplifying your storage infrastructure The signs of complexity are everywhere in the modern data centre—firewalls, routers, servers and multiple operating systems are just the beginning. Server environments, networks and storage are typically silos of resources dedicated per application and grow with only a loose connection to one another—and usually with no regard for overall system complexity.

Infrastructure simplification is a method of looking at the whole environment— end-to-end—and finding ways to eliminate the complexity that can inhibit the free flow of information necessary in today’s fast-paced business world. The storage environment offers numerous opportunities for simplification that can help unlock the value of information to your business. The ability to simply and easily share and manage information is a key requirement for integrating business processes end-to-end, and is a key requirement for an on demand business.

In many cases, storage products come from different vendors and represent different generations of technology. Copy services, recovery and backup processes, volume and information management and other management tasks may incorporate different software from different vendors. This environment makes it hard to deploy resources where they are most needed and respond to customer needs in a timely fashion.

Infrastructure simplification helps to enable business growth, reducing operational risk and reducing costs by optimising IT resources and improving productivity. Simplification enables the free flow of information across and within an organisation. Most important, with a highly efficient, highly automated environment you can help reduce your enterprise’s total cost of ownership (TCO). Or, as a 2003 report by the International Technology Group said, “Five-year costs for storage, hardware, software, maintenance, personnel and facilities are reduced between 2.4 and 3.9 times by transitioning from inefficient to efficient scenarios for storage utilisation.”

Three proven methods

1. Consolidation. Consolidating the storage environment is a logical first step in your efforts to simplify the infrastructure.

The general goal of consolidation is to reduce the number of points of management, as well as the number of physical devices. Consolidated storage environments have fewer elements, helping to reduce the chance of error or failure, avoid the creation of islands of storage and take better advantage of economies of scale for owning software, disk and tape. Consolidated environments can be more resilient and more cost-effective to manage, reducing planned downtime and TCO.

2. Virtualisation. Effective virtualisation is an essential part of a simplified storage environment and involves a shift in thinking from physical to logical, treating IT resources as a single, logical pool rather than as separate physical entities.

Virtualisation can help your enterprise:

• Increase resource utilisation by combining the storage capacity of multiple disk arrays into a single reservoir of storage
• Improve administrator productivity through centralised management
• Enable a tiered storage environment in which you can match the cost of the storage to the value of the data

Virtualisation in storage is a key component of creating a multi-tier storage environment that is managed separately from the application and server layers. By insulating the file and/or volume layers from applications, it helps make it easier to enact data lifecycle management, the enabling infrastructure for information lifecycle management.

3. Automated management. Automating tasks such as provisioning new space for applications even if they involve a significant number of complex and timeconsuming steps. This can help produce increased reliability and personnel productivity for your business.

There are four important applications of automated management:

• Driving resource provisioning and workload management with policies based on business goals helps better align the IT infrastructure with the business.
• Scheduled free space provisioning when someone in your enterprise asks for additional storage space. Enterprise-wide reporting and monitoring can be done through the automated tracking of capacity, utilisation, performance, file and device health, and integration with systems management software.
• Emergency management can be useful when your device runs out of space or an application suddenly fails in the middle of the night. With automated management and virtualised storage pools, instead of trying to cobble together the storage you need from different areas you may remotely draw from one big virtual pool of free space.

This article is extracted from a comprehensive paper by IBM, which can be found here.