Rethink the storage infrastructure

CIO - When Marty Garrison became chief technology officer of ChoicePoint Inc. three years ago, the storage situation was messy. That's no small matter at a company that manages 16 billion records, such as background checks and insurance applications, eating up 2 petabytes of storage -- that's 2,048TB. And growing. Like many IT leaders, he faced lots of data in lots of silos.

 "Storage had grown organically by project, and it was not managed in terms of cost. So we had eight to 10 [storage-area network] infrastructures as islands, none of which could talk to each other. We couldn't share storage space across islands, and we couldn't tier our data," he recalls.

The silos meant there could be no cost efficiencies from bulk purchases, better utilization of the existing storage capacity or a unified management approach that would lower staffing needs. So Garrison created a central, common storage architecture and strategy. He removed storage management responsibilities from local Unix administrators and hired dedicated storage experts to manage responsibilities globally. He consolidated the SANs into one, reducing management costs and allowing more efficient data utilization. He pared down the vendors to just a couple for each type of technology. That let him simplify management and buy in bulk to get greater discounts. When you buy hundreds of terabytes of storage each quarter, Garrison says, "it really does drive costs down."

He also introduced tiering, which uses cheaper, slower drives for data that doesn't need the highest level of availability. "Before that, we had done no performance testing to determine service requirements. The staff played it safe and got Tier 1 Hitachi and EMC disks for everything," Garrison recalls -- at nearly double the price per terabyte as Tier 2 or Tier 3 disks. Altogether, he has slashed storage costs by 40%, both for the disks themselves and for the management overhead. And he's not had to significantly grow his staff despite escalating storage requirements.

Garrison is now exploring new ways to keep costs in check, including storage virtualization and single-instance storage. "Now it's time to go into the next phase," he says.

You must move to a simplified storage architecture to reduce total cost of ownership, analysts say. Even as the cost of new storage media decreases at up to 34% annually, the cost of rising capacity and service-level demands can exceed 60%, says Stewart Buchanan, an analyst at Gartner. "Enterprises need more business discipline in IT asset management of storage," he says.

Lay the right foundation

The good news: CIOs have more storage choices, and more mature choices, than they did just a few years ago. Some approaches that were once novel and untested, such as tiered storage and its related archival approach of hierarchical storage management, are now proven, says Nik Simpson, an analyst at the Burton Group. This is also true for the use of SANs.

One increasingly popular category of savings comes from replacing tape backup with disk backup (also called virtual tape libraries), says Dave Dillehunt, CIO at the integrated delivery network FirstHealth of the Carolinas. Tape capacity has not kept up with hospital storage requirements -- about 185TB at FirstHealth -- and physically managing the tapes has become too burdensome, he says. A caveat: One danger in relying on disk-based backup is the temptation to keep the data online (which can overload storage networks, because people will use the data if it is available). That's why Dillehunt keeps the disk backup disconnected from the rest of the network.

If your storage needs are modest, tape does continue to make sense because the medium cost is so much less, notes Rich O'Neal, senior vice president of operations at the online rewards-tracking site Upromise. That's the case for his 4TB of data. Of the established approaches, tiering offers the most significant bottom-line benefit, says Gartner's Buchanan. It not only lets you increase the amount of cheap storage relative to expensive storage that you use but also forces you to understand the service levels for all your data. Then you can reduce costs by deleting or at least not backing up unneeded data. You can move rarely used data to offline storage to keep network traffic under control. And you can begin to manage demand by users, by showing them the entire data life-cycle costs for their requested applications. "Tiering lets you find the total cost of ownership of your storage," he says.

A good target: Keep 30% of your data in Tier 1 storage and the rest at lower tiers, advises Burton Group's Simpson, though the exact ratio depends on the performance and availability requirements for your data.

It's critical for the CIO to make sure that the business takes responsibility for its data demands. "It's not the role of the storage team to define the data requirements -- that has to go to business management," Buchanan says. But the CIO has to lay the groundwork by having effective asset management in place and exhibiting efficiency.

Cheaper storage networks through iSCSI