Consolidation is the Key

Information is the lifeblood of any organization. In current times,
information, and its usage has become a business critical factor and has a
direct impact on the survival of a business. Applications like CRM, business
intelligence, and data mining, ERP, web servers, email, knowledge management
etc. are being widely and effectively used across organizations worldwide. All
these business enablers generate and depend on information. This has caused an
exponential growth in the volume of information to be stored and managed. Older
architectures for storing information are no longer enough to maintain such
volumes of information across disparate applications and geographical locations.
But if you foresee a significant growth in storage requirement, you should
develop your storage consolidation strategy now.

Storage consolidation makes good business sense. It will facilitate drastic
reduction in storage costs (if planned and configured well), and improves the
overall quality of storage. Storage consolidation is the pooling and allocation
of shared storage resources among numerous application servers. Instead of
directly attaching devices to workstations and servers, the network provides
access to storage which is on a need/access rights, and timely basis. Storage
consolidation architectures are designed to address limitations associated with
DAS.

In an environment clustered with servers, it makes sense to consolidate
storage and thanks to a high-speed fiber channel infrastructure between storage
pools, disaster recovery can be reduced from hours to a few minutes. Many
organizations throughout the world have embarked on storage consolidation
initiatives. Worldwide market trends indicate an awareness and a migration by
many organizations towards consolidated storage. However in India storage
consolidation and management is yet to pick up. Most companies are satisfied
with the traditional tape backup and offsite backup, which in any case is a
basic prerequisite of a disaster recovery plan. Most organizations still operate
in storage silos and as storage requirements and applications increase, it
becomes extremely costly to organizations to maintain, backup and repair
hundreds of distributed storage devices. The demand for more and more storage is
on the rise, as information hungry organizations need richer and additional data
for conducting business.

Storage management must address some fundamental needs. For instance aspects
like high availability, accessibility, scalability, and manageability has to be
addressed in totality. Storage management is no longer the need of large
organizations alone, it is equally important for mid size and smaller
organizations who have moderate storage requirements. Storage solutions that are
available now are flexible enough to be scaled up and protect business
investment over a couple of years.

A recent market study indicates that the direct cost per megabyte of server
attached storage is less than the direct cost per megabyte of consolidated
storage, which is probably deterring many corporates from embarking on the
storage consolidation exercise in the cost sensitive Indian market. However, the
study indicated that the advantage is on indirect cost savings like supporting
fewer storage devices, less facility space, improved data access and
distribution, reduced risk of data loss, enhanced security, saving on time,
hands-off policy based access etc.

From a business perspective, consolidated storage will provide critical
business value such as, improved top-line revenue, return on IT investment, and
overall reduction in direct and indirect costs.

The author is GM (IT) at Redington (India).

mail@dqindia.com