Data Tiering Is Crucial For Any Storage Strategy

Storage is at the crux of any enterprise’s Big Data strategy. Hence, how the organisation deals with this critical component will determine its success with Big Data. Subroto Das, Vice President – Storage, Systems & Technology Group, IBM India/ South Asia, in conversation with Biztech2.com, discusses Big Data’s impact on storage today. He also advises CIOs on how they should go about aligning their storage strategy to the continuously evolving storage requirements.

How is Big Data impacting storage today?

Big Data is mainly all about storage. Firstly, the data needs to be stored, and in an efficient manner. Then, the data needs to be optimised. In order to avoid incurring unnecessary costs on data storage it is essential for the data to be stored in an optimal manner. And, then deal with it from cloud perspective as well, as that is where a lot of cost optimisations comes in.

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Big Data impacts everything. So Big Data is storing that data, managing that data, retaining that data, and then figuring out a quality of deleting that data or moving it to a lower tier. This is the lifecycle of Big Data.

What are the key storage aspects to be considered with respect to Big Data?

There are multiple aspects to Big Data. One is that you have to store that data. So you capture that data, manage that data, retain the data and then deliver the data. Once you have the data stored, you have to use the data. The usage of that data is analytics. Then, there are multiple uses of that data. One is digging that data or mining it, to figure out how you can use that data to your competitive advantage.

How should an enterprise’s storage strategy evolve?

Every organisation goes through three steps of evolution, when it comes to building its storage infrastructure. The very first step in this process is building a service level agreement around storage, essentially making a connect between the two. The next step is to improvise on the organisation’s storage utilisation and efficiency. This is the phase that most enterprises are in currently. The third step is to integrate storage with the existing applications, which helps optimise the enterprise’s storage approach.

What are your tips for CIOs on how they need to align their storage strategy to the continuously changing storage requirements?

Depending on the stage of evolution that enterprises are in, the first thing that CIOs need to consider is storage consolidation, which is the primary driver for almost everything within the organisation. The second aspect that needs to be considered is that of efficiency building. Thirdly, CIOs also need to figure out how to effectively tier data according to its level of importance. It is crucial for CIOs to build a strategy around this.

What are the key pillars of IBM’s storage strategy?

IBM’s storage strategy is aligned to its philosophy of smarter planet. We believe that you can store your data in a smarter manner. There are essentially three pillars of data storage - storage efficiency, storage optimisation and cloud agility; all of which deal with how you store data in a smarter manner.

The first pillar is storing the data in an efficient manner. So, if you have around 100 TB of data you don’t have to buy a 100 TB hard drive to store it. We have recently introduced the compression technique that allows you to compress it to 50 percent so that you need only 50 TB of storage. So, that’s efficiency.

Then, the second pillar is optimising the data storage. In a disk array there are multiple tiers - high performance but high cost tier, mid performance and mid priced tier, and low priced but low performance and low reliability tier. Therefore, before storing your data, it is important to prioritise your data as per its relevance to your company. You can optimise your storage by placing the data that is used more often in the high tier, as this will give better performance, and placing the data that is not required for longer periods in the lowest tier, so that the cost for storing that data is low.

The third pillar is making that data cloud agile. With technologies like cloud and virtualisation coming up, it is important to make the data agile for these environments. So a part of the data can be stored in the cloud, which is lower cost, while the rest of it can be stored within the enterprise itself, which is at a slightly higher cost.