Latin America. In the IT infrastructures of medium or large companies, traditionally there are and coexist several storage systems for specific purposes. This is why professionals in this area are continuously involved in the consolidation of IT projects. Against this background, Fujitsu provided 5 recommendations that can help companies at the time of starting when they start a new storage consolidation project.
1) If it is big, it is very expensive!
A typical situation in storage consolidation projects is that the systems selected and purchased are larger than required. They tend to have higher prices than small ones. Companies end up wasting money and wasting space. A better tactic to solve this scenario would be to consider families of storage systems that will facilitate scalability from a small to a larger one at the time the business demands it.
2) Performance is the key – Use official benchmarks
The more data you have, the higher performance it takes to have the ability to read and write data simultaneously. However, there are many performance benchmarks using unrealistic values. References from official publications such as the Storage Performance Council (SPC) should therefore be used in order to select the appropriate product. Not only are you guided by the figures of the IOPS storage benchmark (Input/Output Operations per second) but also by how much information the system can handle per second (bandwidth). After that, the value that really matters is the response time at a time when the workload peaks. If the IT vendor does not publish official SPC references, it is best to ask for an actual performance test before purchasing.
3) Consider all-flash storage
Until now, even a consolidated storage system requires continuous effort and resources when numerous applications access data with different patterns. The low latency of all-flash storage no longer requires as much optimization. At the same time, maintenance work will be reduced, since, unlike hard drives, Solid State Drives (SSDs) do not need to be replaced continuously. In addition, they also save a lot of space and energy. Imagine that you can store more than 6 Petabytes in a single rack. Certainly the price per capacity of SSDs is still more expensive than SAS disks, but it saves more in the long run. So we recommend focusing on total costs.
4) Automation
A hybrid storage system with SSDs and large capacity disks are ideal when planning to host data for high-demand applications such as virtualization, databases, online transaction processing along with unstructured data, online files and other important information in a single system. This allows you to balance speed, capacity and costs in a single system. However, it also means having to rely on performance tuning efforts again. The remedy lies in the quality of the service management features, which allows prioritizing the allocation of performance by volume of data in an automated way. This becomes even more effective when combined with automatic tiered storage.
5) Beware of the dark side of consolidation
If you put all the eggs in a single basket, the negative impact in case of a disaster is greater. Therefore, every storage consolidation project should include disaster recovery options and concepts. The storage system should have replicas of the data on a second system. It's even better if safe mode is turned on automatically once the storage system fails completely. Ideally, vendors offer capabilities to mix different systems and hybrid storage with all-flash storage in DR configurations. So, if not all of your data is critical, you can use a smaller storage system as a backup system. This can be a great saving to counteract failures and errors.
Text written by Rafael Martín, Service Director of Fujitsu Mexico.
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