{"id":1522,"date":"2010-09-14T07:00:24","date_gmt":"2010-09-14T15:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=1522"},"modified":"2010-09-14T07:00:24","modified_gmt":"2010-09-14T15:00:24","slug":"storage-reducing-costs-and-improving-efficiency-with-storage-virtualization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/storage-reducing-costs-and-improving-efficiency-with-storage-virtualization\/","title":{"rendered":"Storage: Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency with Storage Virtualization"},"content":{"rendered":"

While unstructured Data in the enterprise is growing at a break-neck speed, the actual enterprise dollars being spent on hardware for new storage has remained relatively flat over the last 10 years. \u00a0Moore’s law when applied to the increasing storage density of storage media seems to be keeping costs down. \u00a0But Hitachi’s Hu Yoshida argues<\/a> that people aren’t looking at the big picture. \u00a0In reality, storage costs are spiraling because of huge increases in operational costs. \u00a0Yoshida estimates that companies are seeing increases operational expenses for storage to be as huge as 78 percent per year.<\/p>\n

One cost factor is infrastructure costs. \u00a0The cost to power and cool an ever increasing pool of storage hardware devices is rising rapidly. \u00a0Companies are also running increasingly on 24\/7 schedules that can wreak havoc on maintenance costs. Because of that, another factor is that maintenance and storage media migration projects are often \u00a0scheduled at low-volume off-peak hours, which can result in additional \u00a0labor costs.<\/p>\n

Yoshida suggests that companies need to start factoring in these additional types of overhead costs when calculating the true cost of operating a megabyte of storage. \u00a0Metrics tied alone to the cost of storage hardware at the time of purchase are deceptive.<\/p>\n

To reduce the total cost of storage, Yoshida advocates data virtualization. \u00a0Such an approach provides much more agility. \u00a0It allows storage to be provisioned as needed. \u00a0It is more efficient in allocating storage usage and doesn’t require the need to dedicate large blocks of storage to be set aside for anticipated future growth of application data. \u00a0Yoshida estimates that this kind of over-provisioning of storage with per-application allocations means that, on average, companies have 32 percent of their storage unused and allocated to support future growth. \u00a0And with technologies like hot backups, volumes set aside to replicate the primary copy of the data also include the unallocated storage space in their copy.<\/p>\n

Yoshida explained that their goal at Hitachi in the area of storage virtualization is “to try to create a virtual pool of resources that are easily accessible and can dynamically provision for today’s datacenter environment.<\/p>\n

He explains that IT managers also need to be able to have better insight in how they can rank the relative value of the data that they are storing. \u00a0Doing that would allow the administrators to be able to channel data into tiered storage layers to achieve better storage cost efficiencies.<\/p>\n

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While unstructured Data in the enterprise is growing at a break-neck speed, the actual enterprise dollars being spent on hardware for new storage has remained relatively flat over the last 10 years. \u00a0Moore’s law when applied to the increasing storage…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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