Advertisment

Hot trends in Information Storage and Management

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

For the last 15-20 years organizations have been stockpiling technology, with

multiple apps running on multiple stacks. An audit of most of the existing

infrastructure reveals problems of under-utilization, existence of too many

silos and too much complexity in managing it and  backing up of even apps that

had become redundant long time back. Along with this is arising the issue of

information explosion. By 2020, information is said to shoot up by about 44

times but  organizations won't be able to increase their IT budgets by

manifolds. So there is a pressing need to find ways to effectively manage this

spurt in information and also consolidate multiple silos into a single

repository and simplify things.

Advertisment

Developing and maintaining an efficient private cloud is all about

simplifying such IT infrastructure. Major steps to be taken to move to the cloud

include — increasing efficiency in current datacentre, driving quality of

service and driving IT as a service.  Many organizations have already ventured

into virtualization and have been successfully bringing down the number of

physical servers. But most of the times, they are not followed by steps that

can  maintain the same level of apps performance so that the end user does not

feel any difference in response time and performance. Two new technologies that

are resolving these are data de-duplication and data tiering.  Here we look at

some such hot technologies.

Data de-duplication : This is a compelling technology that would make

sure that similar info doesn't  get stored multiple number of times.  It ensures

that one piece of info is stored very effectively in a way that it is optimally

made available. For example : A 10 terabyte can be de-duplicated to 1 or 2

terabyte.  This technology drastically brings down the storage needs, reducing

the amount of data that has to be backed-up by, 95% and also leads to

significant cost saving.

Tiered Storage : A recent technology that enables maintenance of

storage of various performance characteristics within the same or across

multiple arrays. Tiered storage gives administrators the flexibility to utilize

their resources effectively by aligning high end storage technology to the

appropriate information value. For example highly active data can be placed on

high performing storage tiers like enterprise flash drives or 15 k rpm drives

that provides improved performance and user experience. This technology

automates the provisioning of hot or cold information across high, low and

lowest tiers of information storage based on application and business

perspective, eliminating the manual migration process.

Advertisment

Federation : Using federation technology multiple active data centres

can run applications simultaneously and seamlessly from anywhere from the world.

The key to Virtual Storage is the federation of distributed storage arrays,

which is a major component of the new VPLEX technology. Federation leads to

pooling of the resources of multiple storage systems locally and over distance,

allowing them to work together. This technology enables leveraging all assets

simultaneously and pool all the available storage and compute resources and

enables apps to utilize these resources in a dynamic manner.

Foundation for infrastructure behind cloud : VMWare, Cisco and and EMC

have collaborated together and are providing pre-engineered IT units called

Vblock that takes care of computing, storage and networking of

small/middle/large businesses as the selection of IT units depends on the number

of virtual machines. Vblock is said to provide the foundation for

infrastructure behind all cloud services. Where something like a  Vblock 0 is

ideal  for organization that need entry level configuration for small data

centers, remote locations etc,  Vblock 1 delivers performance and virtualization

for mid and large size companies and Vblock 2 delivers high-performance and

large-scale virtualization. Levi Strauss has used Vblock to build SAP in their

organization and this led to cost saving and easy system management. Over the

old IT infrastructure a lot of savings were achieved and led to driving

enterprise efficiency.

“You may be interested in:”

1.      What's in 'Store' for You? 

http://tinyurl.com/yh3oe42




Managing information over years 
http://tinyurl.com/3ye28l7

Advertisment