Storage is a complex and costly issue for organisations. Ingran Africa is changing this by revolutionising the traditional approach to storage with the introduction of Compellent's Storage Centre. It is a complete Storage Area Network (SAN) with automated tiered storage within a single disk enclosure that makes use of Dynamic Block Architecture (DBA) and thin provisioning, maximising existing disk space.
Ingran Africa is the first to deliver a storage solution to the South African market that features a DBA where storage is allocated and managed at block level rather than with disks.
Says Andre M"oller, director at Ingran Africa: "Many businesses expand their storage in an ad-hoc fashion that results in a patchwork of point solutions. Compellent's Storage Center is a complete disk-based solution that includes storage management software to meet the storage needs of the entire organisation. In addition, it can cut costs by up to 74% by managing a company's data differently through DBA and thin provisioning."
M"oller explains: "These two storage approaches are revolutionising the way companies can manage their storage. If we look at traditional storage solutions, they make use of a number of disks that employ RAID technology. A 'set' of disks is usually allocated to a particular application and/or server with the appropriate RAID format - i.e., RAID 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10.
However, if more disk space is required for a particular application or server, the 'spare' disk space allocated to other servers or application cannot be used. More disk space must be purchased, a percentage of storage space allocated to collect and manage the planned snap shots, and only once this is done can disks receive data. The architecture is tied to disk space."
This means storage is not best utilised if managed at a disk level. In addition, disk-managed storage cannot allocate space over a variety of RAID permutations as the formats are not interchangeable. For example, one cannot save data across RAID 2 and 5 from one server."
DBA employs a completely different approach. It converts disk space to 'intelligent blocks' and manages the storage at this level.
M"oller adds: "What is so significant about this solution is that it creates a 'virtual' environment that maximises usage of allocated storage space, contributing to a saving and providing ease of allocation of storage space."
When allocating more disk space within a DBA, once the disks are installed and the servers are connected, volumes are created and management is done at 'block' level. If you consider that each drive features 400 tracks on each disk, these tracks are now broken down into 2 Megabyte (MB) blocks. Compellent's Storage Center manages these blocks, creating virtualised disk drives, tracking data and metadata (data about the data).
New volumes can be created across many RAID subsets. Sound impossible? It's not. Businesses can now write to RAID 5 and 10 on the same physical disk drives. This allows businesses to effectively manage how much space they have and how much space can be used. If more space is needed, simply plug in more disk drives. These new disks are brought into the system and re-striped across all drives without having to do backup, all on a single user interface, offering a 'build as you go' approach.
The solution further optimises storage space through thin provisioning whereby the physical disk is only used when data is written rather than allocating the capacity upfront, thus controlling cost and growth.
M"oller explains: "With thin provisioning, storage space is not wasted. For example, when using RAID 10, storage costs are significantly higher if the traditional approach of storage management of disk is taken since an additional 100% of the disk overhead is required. With thin provisioning, this is no longer necessary, allowing businesses to fully utilise all their storage space."
So what does this mean for businesses? With Compellent's Storage Center, they have a scalable hardware solution that simplifies storage management and allocation of disk through a virtualised environment featuring management and allocation of storage at block level - i.e., it offers 'build as you go' functionality. Fewer disks can be purchased and businesses don't have to allocate storage 'upfront'. In addition, the integrated software enabled data to be recovered and features 'data instant replay' which means data can be recovered in seconds rather than hours.
Platform independent and based on open architecture standards, the Storage Center allows companies to mix and match their server interface or drive technology.
M"oller continues: "Driving the business case for automated tiered storage is the prioritisation and often compulsory issue of compliance and corporate governance of which data retention is an important component. The Storage Center combines multiple tiers of Fibre Channel(FC) storage by mixing high performance FC, mid-tier FC, SAS and SATA on a single controller. The built-in intelligence automatically classifies data and migrates idle data to the appropriate tier of storage based on usage."
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