How do an orange, a monkey and a bicycle give you consolidated storage?
OK, it’s an attention grabbing headline – but it’s there to illustrate a problem that many data centre managers face on a daily basis. In the data centre world the orange, monkey and bicycle get replaced by their technological counterparts: legacy systems, scheduled activities and the latest and greatest technology.
Legacy systems and scheduled activities are both doing a job. Not always the best job and, from a data centre manager point of view, not always the way you would like to do it, or as efficiently as you would like to do it. Read any IT publication or any technology vendor’s literature and they’ll tell you how much more efficient your storage and backup can be, how much power you can save and how you can reduce CO2 emissions. How? Simply by moving to the latest and greatest technology.
And that’s the hub of it, simplicity is the key point. It implies smooth transition, easy upgrades and one hundred percent knowledge of everything that has been implemented in the last ten, possibly fifteen, maybe twenty years of IT infrastructure building. If it was simple, everybody would do it!
But we must consider how we overcome this. Let me ask you one simple question: Hand on heart, do you know exactly what you are backing up, and when and if it is the right information? If you answered yes, then I take my hat off to you. Because research carried out shows that 97% of data centre managers don’t. It’s not because they are lax or bad at their job. They are suffering from the orange and bicycle syndrome. Vendor Y systems add in new technology to complement the incumbent vendor X systems. But Vendor Y backup software doesn’t recognise Vendor X systems so you end up with two backup activities. Multiply that across five, ten, twenty years and the problem becomes magnified and dare I say it, out of control. Add regular staff turnover to this equation and all the knowledge disappears, further compounding the problem, because it’s easier to leave everything working as it is than to try and figure out what has been setup previously. Going back to my earlier point – yes, it is working but you can bet your life there is duplication, missed data and redundant backup.
Extend this same principle to storage and the situation is magnified. Storage is and will continue to be the fastest growing technology in the data centre. It’s getting faster, smaller, less power hungry and is contributing less and less to CO2 emissions. Storage changes rapidly, as does its capacity and performance, and as it changes so does the ability of applications to analyse and optimise more of the available space. The result is that when you have 1 TB of storage, with the right configuration you can really start to use 80-90% of the available space. That said, the top 200 companies in our survey, when analysed, utilised less than 40% of available space. Yes, you read that right. Less than 40%! And again a lot of this redundant space is down to growing pains. Older, fixed operating systems allocated space for projects and systems that was never used; space was allocated for expansion that never happened and operating systems and applications grabbed space they didn’t need, but thought they would take while it was available.
So what to do? As a data centre manager you have several options:
1) do nothing and bury your head in the sand,
2) analyse what you have, utilising software solutions to look at redundancy, duplication and migration requirements,
3) commission a consultancy to assess what you have and advise what to do and finally
4) hand over large amounts of money to Vendor Z to replace everything you have with the latest technology for storage and backup and get them to migrate everything across to their hardware and software platforms.
I can’t advise you, I can only assess what our survey has uncovered:
- Bury your head in the sand – it’s going work for a while but at some stage you’ll be dug out and have to look at what is happening
- Appoint a consultancy – there is no doubt this can work, but the overheads of time to assess and deliver a solution combined with the impact on your time, operation and your staff is enormous. At the end (our survey found that the end was a long time coming) you have a full analysis, but in reality that is just the start of more decision and implementation work for you.
- Vendor approach – this can work, but again from the respondents we analysed, vendors can commonly be tempted to overstate the need and requirement and while a solution will be specified, your budget won’t reach to it or you can end up overspending unnecessarily.
- Software solutions – can provide the same as a consultancy; but make sure that you implement a solution that does not add in any processing overhead otherwise your figures will be skewed and your daily operation compromised. Make sure that the software embraces total operation from backup to storage to archive to off-site.
I work for a software vendor, so yes, I am biased. However, during my career I have worked with and for some of the largest global organisations managing their storage and backup environments and for major hardware vendors – so I do understand their requirements and approach and our analysis bears out what I have experienced: only software has that power to act swiftly and accurately.
Software is, in our experience, the better solution – but ensure you choose the right software solution. Make sure that it does have truly light touch, virtually invisible with minimal overhead. This is what you absolutely require to get a true, detailed picture. And a solution that gives you fast, accurate results – you should expect and experience analysis results in hours, not weeks or months. Don’t stop at software that just analyses – you need a solution that analyses and gives you a way forward; a business case; a methodology; a process – the last thing you need from any activity is more statistics to review. The analysis report should show you a detailed migration path, the hardware cost savings and space consolidation effects (from de-duplication and migration), a detailed route of how to achieve this and finally, but today very importantly, your environmental savings of CO2 emission from reduced hardware overheads.
Our analysis identified potential savings on hardware of over $100 million, savings on storage of over 65% and reductions in emission of 3,162 kVA/CO2 tonnes. And this didn’t take into account any space savings associated with the data centres themselves. These savings all came about without throwing out the old to replace with the new but optimised existing platforms and systems in conjunction with new technology.
So, I said you had a choice, but really you don’t – if you want to end up looking like a monkey peeling an orange while riding a bike, then take option 1 and bury your head in the sand – it won’t help, but you’ll get a few laughs. Or alternatively you can carry on fire fighting problems on a daily basis, increasing your overheads, your stress and compounding the problems even further. But if you want to benefit and implement savings for a leaner, meaner, cost effective and efficient data centre, analyse and plan now – it is in my opinion, and borne out by the results of our analysis, the only way.
I’d like to know what you think about my thoughts on this topic – what are you seeing in your organisation’s data centre (if you’re an end user) or with your customers (if you’re a vendor)?
This blog article, by Ian Smith, was first published as a guest blog on IBM Smarter Computing
6 Responses to “How do an orange, a monkey and a bicycle give you consolidated storage?”
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I like it. It makes sense to me. The fact is that we have over complicated things but having no long term plan for these environments. I always try to stress to IT managers to create a 1 3 and 5 year goal to work towards. This gives them a vision of where the “want” to be (not what mat actually happen.
Hi Jarrett, thanks for your comment, I’m glad you like what we’re saying here. The goals for different time periods are definitely a good idea. Please follow us on Facebook at ButterflyUKCom if you’re not already.
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I create a comment whenever I like a article on a site or if I have something to valuable to contribute to the conversation. Usually it is caused by the sincerness communicated in the post I browsed. And after this article How do an orange, a monkey and a bicycle give you consolidated storage?. I was excited enough to post a thought
I do have a few questions for you if you usually do not mind. Is it only me or does it look like a few of these remarks look as if they are left by brain dead folks? 
And, if you are writing on other online social sites, I would like to keep up with anything new you have to post. Would you list every one of your social sites like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
I rarely leave a response, but after reading through a few of the comments here How do an orange, a monkey and a bicycle give you consolidated storage?. I do have some questions for you if it’s okay. Is it only me or does it look like some of the comments look like they are left by brain dead individuals?
And, if you are posting at additional online sites, I would like to follow everything fresh you have to post. Would you list of every one of your social community sites like your linkedin profile, Facebook page or twitter feed?
I usually do not comment, but after reading through a few of the responses here How do an orange, a monkey and a bicycle give you consolidated storage?. I do have 2 questions for you if it’s okay. Is it simply me or does it look like like some of the responses look like they are left by brain dead visitors?
And, if you are writing on additional online social sites, I would like to follow anything fresh you have to post. Could you list of the complete urls of all your social pages like your twitter feed, Facebook page or linkedin profile?