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Growing at some 45% year on year, the need for storage seems unstoppable. While Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategies can reduce the data we store, and allow us to store it on the most appropriate storage tier, consolidating and virtualising our storage into shared resource pools can drive up utilisation and slow down the need for growth. Moving away from allocating a specific set of storage to a specific server is akin to our server virtualisation strategy above. If an application is barely using 5-20% of our server capacity, then we should expect similar underutilisation of the storage systems. Maybe the view has been that storage is ‘free', as disks have become continually cheaper, but as the rack space becomes congested and power and cooling becomes less available and more expensive, the technology now only accounts for less than 25% of our data centre costs, with power and air conditioning taking up the lions share. Providing storage to applications as a larger shared pool of resource complements server virtualisation perfectly, but if your racks are full to capacity with disks and those disks are underutilised it may be a starting point in improving the efficiency of your IT environment. |
