Bladewatch.com

http://www.dell.com/business/storage

Dell now offers a suite of end-to-end consulting services to help customers understand deduplication technology, quantify the benefits, and design a deduplication solution to best meet their needs. Dell’s consulting services are different in that they provide practical, action-oriented plans to deliver specific, predictable and measured outcomes through high-impact, short duration projects.

• The Dell Storage Simplification Workshop helps customers cut through the marketing clutter surrounding deduplication and develop a clear understanding of the considerations and potential benefits.  In a free, half-day session, Dell consultants work with customers  to determine a potential solution or technology areas that can yield measureable results with predictable outcomes, pricing and timelines.
• The Dell Backup, Recovery, Archive Assessment helps customers avoid wasting resources on improper or overly optimistic solutions. While general ROI numbers pervade the industry, benefits can vary widely across environments, applications and methods. This assessment delivers a detailed report built upon metrics and insights from the customer’s own environment showing an impact analysis with estimates of storage and/or network traffic reduction, amount of backup data, backup frequency, retention periods and frequency of data changes.
• The Backup/Restore Stabilisation, Optimisation and Deduplication Design service helps customers avoid one-size-fits all solutions that fail to understand their unique requirements.
• These services design a tailored solution for each customer environment with specific product recommendations, service catalog and implementation plan.

Dell offering additional consultancy services in the storage space could create further opportunities in the enterprise and SMB sectors. Data storage demands continue, keeping more data available for legislative requirements, email mailboxes being used as reference points, at the same time managing duplicate data, with the data storage and recovery issues can be a significant part of your costs and failure to delivery.  Dell were explaining their approach to consulting, involving the business sponsors through workshops, looking at the provisioning, the backups and archive activities as part of a wholistic approach which does sound cool. There was a lot of talk on data de-duplication which is a significant part of the solution, working out where we can reduce duplication within the storage, be more efficient with the storage we use and need can help re-claim unnecessary storage and prevent unnecessary spend.

Anything Dell and the other vendors can do to aid business achieve their goals with energy efficiency and operating costs in mind has to be a good thing, when looking at issues relating to data, to data duplication we need to look at is infrastructure and application and data design.

• Application design – how much logging is needed, what level of data needs to be kept online and available – how we can share the information/results between applications to reduce the amount of duplicate code and logging on the network. By this I mean we might have Front Office making it’s purchases, this being written to a Front Office database and a deal capture application or database, do we not need one database doing both functions? How do we manage the need to split business tasks but share common infrastructure?
• Infrastructure design – how configure the infrastructure, what range of storage platforms we provision, scale and provide storage. Could Tier 1 application systems use the Tier 1 storage, and have separate environments? How do we manage the need to replicate development or uat with ‘live data’ for testing? What different technologies do we use, SAN boot is fine, but is it not a very expensive way of providing storage for an operating system?
• Data design – by this I mean when you ask a user how available their data needs to be, how long they want to keep the backup, often they don’t know or they say archive everything, we need to introduce the concept of cost when it comes to data. We can archive everything but there is an operating cost and infrastructure cost of doing so.  At the same time we need to see how we can be moving users’ data around to the most efficient data platform, for example, restrict user profiles to say 300MB to reduce the amount of space and data following the user around the network, and put it on a filer to shared storage, rather than Tier1 production storage.

Related to this though is the rules surrounding charge-back/costings and user buy-in of storage coupled with investment. I’ve got three main examples from a few different organizations to illustrate this and it shows you how good practice gets undermined by process and investment.

Investment

Medium sized business with several large sites around the UK, four hundred servers operating in the investment sector. The CIO and architects agreed to separate development and production storage, then implemented new storage SANs and migrated the relevant servers to the new relevant  SANs.  The problem was that there was a lack of investment on the development SAN, it had not been scaled and the budget could not be signed off to increase the storage on the development SAN. As a result development/uat data and applications got moved on to the production storage to meet the storage requirements, resulting in the same position that the organization was previously.

Chargeback

The challenge of making SAN attractive in terms of delivery and cost, whilst defining a difference in cost between production and non-production storage, the prime example was the team that requested 300Gb of Tier2 storage for ‘UAT’ only to then try and apply the storage to production in order to save the difference in cost. Also the need to manage volume purchasing, that it might actually be cheaper to buy more expensive SAN rather than buy different types of storage for the different tiers.

Buy-in

We need business buy-in and commitment to the storage, both in terms of adoption, of managing storage demand and using appropriate storage for the appropriate application or use. The understanding that we can continue to buy as much storage as you require, but it comes at a cost, and maybe we need to look at how we are using the storage, implement the:

• Non-critical/scratch data – build disks, application packages archive etc – could this be a filer or shared file cluster?
• Medium data – user profiles, application data which is recoverable from tape/snapshot – some kind of filer and SAN solution.
• Critical – Tier1 data which can be recovered immediately, which is replicated and backed up in line with requirements – trading data, email, applications and web portals? Probably a SAN solution – but local data where appropriate – we don’t need web server logs kept on this storage as it’s transitional and point in time data.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.