Storage Cat 08 3/10/08 17:07 Page 44
44 DATA STORAGE
KEEP YOUR DATA LEAN
What keeps you awake at night? Is it having to go to your Board of Directors or
CIO tomorrow and explain why your organisation cannot hit agreed service levels
around your storage infrastructure or perhaps beg for more capital expenditure to
increase your existing infrastructure footprint? If so, read on…
Words: By Peter Olding, General Manager, SAND Technology
We all know the challenge of retaining and maintaining the
vast volumes of data required for business and regulatory
requirements is one that faces every modern IT organisation.
“”
VERY FEW PEOPLE TEND TO
LOOK AT THESE
Increasingly, this puts pressure on IT budgets and data centre
infrastructure and is compounded by rising operational and
REQUIREMENTS FROM THE
energy costs.
PERSPECTIVE OF THE DATA
So in the current economic and environmental climate, should
we really be buying and consuming more storage? Somewhat OR CONSIDER A DATA-
controversially, but perhaps timely, I will discuss a way to buy
CENTRIC ARCHITECTURE
less storage - or do more with your existing infrastructure.
By way of example, let’s consider a 100 Terabytes (TB) of
structured data with varying requirements such as complex under 2 TB. That’s right - 2 TB – or a 98% reduction. Not
analysis, long term data retention and archiving. These may be only that, but it is optimised for fast querying and retrieval,
new requirements or extra load on an existing data warehouse. requiring little administration and can work with Oracle, SQL
Either way, you’re faced with a number of questions and Server, DB2, SAS, Business Objects and so on.
decisions and you will no doubt be bombarded by vendors and To demonstrate the benefits of this approach, consider an
consultants offering best advice - or their version of best advice organisation that retains and analyses huge volumes of retail
– which isn’t usually cheap. Either way you’re looking at an data in an ever changing, very demanding and thin margin
expensive system with some expensive consulting. Or are you? industry. They are constantly striving to introduce operational
Very few people tend to look at these requirements from improvements across the business. As a result of deploying a
the perspective of the data or consider a data-centric corporate information memory architecture, they reduced
architecture, as we are so used to deploying application- their storage infrastructure for their analysts by a factor of
centric architectures. In simplistic terms you’re looking at a thirty which resulted in:
large pool of data. And you’re not entirely sure what it’s • Lower administration costs enabling IT staff to creatively
going to be used for except that you have to store, manage support the business instead of constantly fire fighting
and retrieve it. In essence, this large pool of data is a • Improved operational efficiency to over deliver on service
corporate information memory – a primary repository of levels for operations and querying
enterprise data which will enable your company to face the • Increased productivity of their end user analysts by a factor
challenges mentioned earlier. of three
There are a number of approaches to deploying a corporate
information memory architecture but in essence it comprises And it fits the current green agenda as well. For years the IT
a mix of software, solutions and techniques which, when industry has been obsessed with size – who has the largest
combined, enables companies to deliver significant data centres, largest data warehouses, largest severs and so
commercial, competitive and environmental advantage. on. Isn’t it about time we got clever and applied innovative
By way of example, by combining deduplication, compression solutions to problems and brag about who has the smallest
and indexing techniques, this 100 TB of data can be held in data centre footprint and shortest batch windows?
15
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The most reliable, innovative name
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