Unified Storage: Have Your Cake And Eat It Too

Nobody needs to be reminded that today’s economy functions on the expectation that organisations will be agile – able to adapt on the fly to changing business and market requirements. We also know that the ICT industry has fuelled this expectation because it enables fast, accurate and coherent management of an organisation’s most valuable pieces of intellectual capital – data.
The only snag in that scenario is that storage systems, which are the repositories for an organisation’s intellectual capital, have traditionally not been that agile themselves.

This is largely because storage technologies have evolved in a series of incremental steps over a long time and in response to changes in the way organisations have used other technologies. So, there’s tape storage and disk storage, network-attached storage, storage-attached networks and flash drives − all dealing in their own way with either structured or unstructured data.

The mistake, though, is to think that because they were created separately from one another, they have to remain that way and be managed as distinct technologies by people who have specialised in the differences rather than the similarities of their operational methodologies.

We forget that the end results of all storage systems are the same: secure, reliable encapsulation and protection of and access to data. The operational routes to that end result may need to be different because of the types and application of the data involved. Wouldn’t the ideal be to have one storage array that can be repurposed on demand for different workloads? Wouldn’t it be ideal to have unified storage?

Change On Demand

Unified storage means no longer having either under-utilised or over-utilised areas of storage, because, just by changing your configuration, you are able to allocate capacity and performance to under-utilised areas. You can spread the load from over-burdened areas to parts of the storage system you’d not have had access to while they were operated as silos.

Also, unified storage allows an organisation to get a lot more storage per administrator, cutting costs and improving productivity. It also massively reduces the number of points of failure. Because you have one storage system that is able to do all flavours of the work, when you need to do something, such as rolling out applications, the processes and procedures only need to be defined once – and the whole environment is provisioned. Whenever you need to run tests, they need only be performed once. All this essentially means unified storage reduces DC footprint, boosts storage utilisation and system performance and enables massive RoI- in storage as well as other technologies.

Removing Obstacles

Unified storage is key to organisational agility. Traditionally, the inflexibility of storage systems has been used as a reason why things cannot be done. With unified storage that includes integrated data protection, however, backups and restores, as one example, can be done in minutes instead of hours – and mistakes can be reversed easily, with the result that many of the reasons for resisting change, vanish.

Also, there’s a natural fit between the inherent efficiencies and flexibility of unified storage and virtualised desktops and servers. Unified storage, therefore, positions an organisation to move more easily to virtualisation and cloud computing.

Lastly, freeing up funds by driving storage efficiency, reducing the DC footprint and improving RoI have their own positive impact on business agility. Organisations gain both CAPEX and OPEX advantages as well as the ability to reallocate funds that would otherwise have continuously drained into data storage.

Safety First

Unified storage that includes secure multi-tenancy features provides a massive advantage. It enables the organisation to allocate only certain functional areas to specific virtual storage controllers. So, if one part of the system fails or becomes vulnerable for some reason, the rest of the architecture is automatically isolated from it and can continue to function. Identification of vulnerabilities and the related fixes can also be much more highly targeted than in a distributed system.

In short, unified storage means never having to choose between saving money and acquiring essential capabilities. You can have your cake and eat it too!

Politics

There are a few minor doubts- of which the least obvious are those of people management. The reason being, traditionally, IT has been managed in silos by different teams of specialists each with a claim on a particular technology. Having one array that works across both fibre channel and ethernet networks and can be repurposed for different workloads, takes the exclusive control away from those teams. For instance, the database team may have to share its storage infrastructure with the backup and archiving teams.

IT infrastructure teams need to be reassured and re-educated. They need to understand the benefits to the organisation of cross functional infrastructure such as server virtualisation and unified storage and learn to be collaborative. A proactive intervention by management is needed – well before unified storage is implemented – to eliminate disruption at the people level that might inhibit the comprehensive implementation of a unified storage strategy.

All Or Nothing?

There’s the rip and replace question. In most cases, unified storage solutions can be implemented incrementally. The unified arrays will look at legacy systems as part of the unified architecture, enabling older parts of the infrastructure to be brought under the control of the unified storage system and then allowing them to be reconfigured as easily as the new parts. If the business case requires a big bang implementation of unified storage, a significant number of reference architectures exist today that can be followed. And, as with all big implementations, the way to eliminate risk, reduce cost, and ensure best practice is to work with system integrators that have been trained by a unified storage provider and have a track record in implementing unified solutions.

Pace Yourself

The thing to remember, however, is that moving to any ideal state is an evolutionary process. It’s a journey that takes time and preparation. Unified storage is as much about an organisational mindset as it is about technology. If the organisation is the type that readily spots and grabs opportunities, then unified storage will be an automatic next step in the maturation of the organisation’s approach to business.

Start small and grow into unified storage at a pace that suits the organisation. Unified storage technologies, more than most, are highly suited to an incremental approach.

The author is COO, Dimension Data.