The latest market trend in storage is the ever-growing popularity of external storage solutions. With technologies freely available, such as virtualisation, consolidation, availability, archiving and backup, the need to move data to an external, traditional server chassis, while establishing the provisioning of a shared storage resource, is becoming a necessity in the data centre.
This shared consolidated storage beast has brought its own challenges into the data centre. One of these challenges storage administrators face today is trying to balance how much storage space will be required, and the multitude of applications in the environment.
Unfortunately, many administrators are forced to make this decision based on anticipated storage growth. This generally results in the over-provisioning of storage capacity, which leads to higher costs, increased power requirements, cooling and floor space. It also has a negative effect on lower capacity utilisation rates.
Typical strategies that improve overall capacity utilisation rates include the implementation and consideration of:
* Storage Tiering - The ability to provide different levels of disk segments, with each segment characterised by its own service level agreement, or SLA. This could be in terms of performance, capacity, availability, expandability and protection.
* Thin Provisioned LUNs - These types of LUNs provide on-demand storage growth. Physical storage is allocated to these types of LUNs as and when it is required, thus providing an efficient alternative to over-allocating disk capacity at the initial volume creation state.
* Storage Pools - Pools are somewhat analogous to a RAID group, which is a physical collection of disks on which LUNs are created. Pools can contain few disks, or be expanded to incorporate hundreds of physical disk drives. Pools can be comprised of several disk types, including SAS, Flash, near-line SAS and various different spindle speeds can be included as well. Homogenous and heterogeneous pools can be created to provide the relevant characteristics of the pool, which will be transferred to LUNs created on the particular pool.
* Unified Access - Consolidate your NAS (file) and SAN (block) level data into a single unified storage array, freeing up your typical unstructured data to benefit from SAN availability, de-duplication and replication.
* Data Archiving - Archiving and removing aged and irrelevant data out of production pools or volumes onto inexpensive archive storage could postpone the acquisition of expensive production disk spindles.
In summary, there are many other strategies that could be considered in order to gain more efficient storage utilisation. These are just a few real-world solutions that are currently delivering solid solutions to our customers.
For more information, contact info@ubuntusa.co.za, or visit www.ubuntusa.co.za, or call Sarel on +27 12 347 7944.
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