Storage Mag Online April 2013 V 3

STORAGE
IS YOUR. .StORAGE ARRAY. .OBSOLEtE?.

Unchecked data growth, server virtualization and the need for more speed are new demands that traditional storage systems may not be able to meet.
Managing the information that drives the enterprise
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Storage techs new evolution

Storage technology may not seem to be moving very quickly when measured by old criteria. But a new perspective shows its actually developing quite briskly.
T MAY SOMETIMES seem that you need a seismic instru-
ment to detect the subtle shifting of storage technologies. A faint tremor might indicate that the data storage industry is heaving slightly in a new direction, but only at the glacial pace were accustomed to. New storage techs may burst on the scenelike dedupe about a decade ago, or solid-state over the last few yearsbut then they ease into a fairly leisurely pace of adoption. Its like enjoying a big, glitzy opening night and then waiting a couple of weeks, months or years until the next performance. Deduplication is a case in point; while its arguably a mature technology and it practically monopolized the attention of the storage market for years, our research shows that more than 60% of companies arent using dedupe in their backup operations. Solid-state storage
seems to be following a similar arc. The marketplace grew up fast and was populated with a slew of products in a variety of form factors, but four or ve years into this surge our surveys show that two-thirds of users havent implemented any solid-state storage. Dedupe and solid-state are pretty disruptive technologies, and if they cant ratchet up the data storage industrys typically slow evolution, nothing can. Maybe were just expecting too much change too soon. Or perhaps were looking at the wrong indicators of change. Take, for example, some recent end-of-the-year reports that indicate hard disk drive (HDD) sales are down and will continue to drop this year. One report says HDD sales dipped by 7% in 2012, while another predicts approximately a 12% drop in HDD revenues in 2013. That seems strange given the spiraling growth of data and how
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E D IT O R IA L | R IC H C ASTAG NA
the big data mania is causing companies to hoard more data than ever before. Still another industry report tells us that the number of solid-state devices shipped in 2012 grew by 129% and speculates that the growth of solid-state drives (SSDs) will continue in 2013 at 113%. That means twice as many solid-state units were shipped last year versus 2011, and by the end of 2013 that number will double again. Is that why hard disk sales are agging? Maybe not. A lot of that solid-state is going to places HDDs have never been and never will be, such as in phones and tablets. And given the premium price of solidstate, you have to assume that replacing hard disks with SSDs is still a performance maneuvereven with new relatively high-capacity SSDs, solid-state isnt about to be used for bulk storage. So the rise of solid-state is pretty straightforward; its gaining more converts as its price dips and reliability rises. But if thats not the main reason why fewer hard disks are being sold, there have to be other factors at work. Those other factors are the lessons we all learned when the economy headed south and storage budgets contracted, namely that we had to manage storage better and gain greater efciencies. We had to make better use of the storage we already had andhopefullybuy less new stuff. Hence the decline in disk sales. Our Purchasing Intentions survey offers some proof that storage pros are paying a lot more attention to how
theyre using their installed capacity these days. In last falls survey, 47% of respondents said they now use thin provisioning to help them avoid squandering disk space. Thats nine percentage points higher than just a year before. If you look at the newer efciency techs, the uptake there is just as impressive: 31% have tiered their storage, while 29% and 27%, respectively, have implemented primary storage dedupe or compression. With all these efciency tools in place, data storage managers are using only 54% of their installed storage capacity according to another survey we elded recently. No wonder hard disk sales are sinking. With effective belt-tightening it looks like a lot of companies have plenty of room to grow so theyre purchasing less (if any) new disk capacity. And if they do need something speedier and more up to date than what they have, a little solidstate storage and some caching or tiering software can handle new performance demands without having to replace or radically rework existing systems. So the storage industry may actually be advancing at a fairly lively clip, once you consider the drastic and lasting impact of economic forces and the resulting pressures on corporate IT teams. Storage managers appear to be adjusting well and actually setting the agenda for storage technology development. I hope the vendors are listening. n
RICH CASTAGNA is editorial director of TechTargets Storage Media
Group.
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S T O R A G E R E VO L UT I O N | JO N T O I G O
Not-so-open systems stymie storage management
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With few standards and little inclination to give up their proprietary ways, storage vendors make managing storage tougher than it should be.
AST MONTH I talked about the present situa-
tion in storage infrastructure management using a term derived from ancient Greek: anarchy. Anarchy is a convenient catchall for the challenges that have existed since rms began abandoning mainframe computing, with its centralized approach to managing storage and data assets, for a more decentralized model. While unseating IBM as the reigning IT monarch may have sounded like a revolutionary idea, the rhetoric of the open systems movement never really panned out. Those who bought into the idealistic Rousseau-ian world view (hierarchical order corrupts) forgot to read their French history and Hugo and Dickens novels. Revolutions tend to eat their own and generally produce a lot of unintended consequences.
Following the open systems revolution, things quickly got pretty oligarchic, or downright anarchical, as IBM rivals swarmed into the void left by a retreating Big Blue. Taking a page (and paraphrasing) from Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, the self-interest of each storage array vendor led it to seek a stick big enough to raise over the heads of all the others, making life in the process nasty, brutish, and short for many tech startups. Of course, as my bureaucratic friends like to remind me, there were a few alliances along the way, some of which led to de jure standards such as SCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI and the Storage Management Initiative Specication (SMI-S). But even those successes (when more closely examined) illustrate the foibles of standards-making by vendor committees. Vendors did work together from time to time
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to set some ground rules, but usually only when consumers expressed a preference for open standards that insulated them from the quick entry and exit of vendors into the market rather than proprietary cobbles that exposed them to vendor lock-in. Mostly, those standards had to do with signaling, handshaking and plumbingnot any sort of agreed-upon management paradigm for the ever-expanding storage infrastructure. Instead, each vendor sought a scheme of element management that, coincidentally, let the vendor host other value-add services directly on its array and charge signicantly more for what was increasingly becoming a collection of commodity components. Storage management took the form of running reports to discern trends, obtaining current status information, and perhaps doing some conguration and maintenance. The approach was acceptable at rst, especially to server admins who only needed to deal with a single directattached storage rig. It became a signicantly more challenging modus operandi when the number of storage devices proliferated and were interconnected into FC or iSCSI fabrics. Note that I dont call these SANs because they werent. A storage area network, by its earliest denition, was supposed to have been a true network, described like other networks using the OSI layer cake model in which one functional layer provides common management for all interconnected devices.
But FC didnt provide a management layer, so storage boxes were interconnected by both serial SCSI interconnects (FC, iSCSI and SAS) and IP connections. The latter were required to provide access to onboard monitoring
Each vendor sought a scheme of element management that, coincidentally, let the vendor host other value-add services directly on its array and charge significantly more for what was increasingly becoming a collection of commodity components.
and conguration controls for delivery out of bandentirely separate from storage I/O trafcto storage admins. This bifurcated design reected the willingness of the industry to cooperate with SAN standards only up to the point where it made nancial sense to do so. SANs provided more connection points for serial SCSI-compatible storage rigs, which was good for vendors. Rudimentary SANs also provided a way for former mainframe channel extension vendors to sell a new family of products (SAN switches) at enormous prot.
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Vendor technology evangelists said SANs would change everything by creating pools of storage that would enable a more elegant and simplied management approach. But they stopped short of delivering on that promise. Agreeing to a common interconnect was one thing; enabling common management was quite another. SNIAs SMI-S started out as an earnest effort to create a grand management scheme, but it became much watered down, difcult for vendors to implement and subject to less-than-enthusiastic promotion. Digital Equipment Corp., and later Compaq, articulated a real SAN strategy in 1997 with common management built in as a feature. It was called the Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA), but it was never implemented. Once Hewlett-Packard got hold of Compaq, ENSA disappeared. In the words of a former ENSA developer: If we had fullled the ENSA vision and placed all value-add functionality on a switch or some other device where the functions could be shared across all spindles in a managed way, our bosses worried that the Asian developers would swoop into our market selling rigs with element management and lots of value-add software on their array controllers. They would eat our lunch. That may also explain why the box-makers worked so hard to scare customers away from the likes of DataCore Software, FalconStor Software and other early pioneers of storage virtualization. Those companies recognized
that the SAN management vision hadnt been fullled and they set out to do something about it by creating a software-based super controller that would sit over the physical storage fabric and provide more efcient sharing of services across all systems. By doing that, they revealed the hardware guys secret: despite the logo on the bezel plate, everybody was just selling a box of Seagate hard drives. Moreover, storage virtualization advocates noted that managing an infrastructure of heterogeneous boxes on a one-off basis was a lot more difcult and expensive than managing them as a centralized resource with ondemand service provisioning. A lot of money was spent to squelch the upstarts. At the same time, companies like Tributary Systems were creating interesting niche management products, leveraging existing infrastructure to non-disruptively insert engines of service management into the data path. Tributarys Storage Director is such an appliance, performing the role of a virtual tape library, but also brokering other data protection services to data that companies stand up in a disk-to-disk-to-tape architecture. Next month, well look at how these innovations in storage management are becoming even more relevant in contemporary storage infrastructure. n
JON WILLIAM TOIGO is a 30-year IT veteran, CEO and managing
principal of Toigo Partners International, and chairman of the Data Management Institute.
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cover storY | Storage SYste Ms
ARE STORAGE ARRAYS OBSOLETE?
Cloud storage, virtualization and the relentless growth of unstructured data have all contributed to a rethinking of the way storage is packaged and presented.
A CHANGING COMPUTE WORLDwhere physical data center infrastructure is yielding to virtualized systems and clouds, and desktops and laptops are supplemented with mobile devicesis challenging traditional computing paradigms and reshaping everything computer related, including storage architectures. While trying to t into a virtual world, storage has also been tested by a relentless deluge of unstructured data, with voracious contemporary applications and services demanding more data storage capacity. The traditional SAN and NAS shared storage systems that have become so familiar typically consist of storage processing hardware, attached disks (or solid-state devices) and proprietary storage software that delivers a set of storage features; theyre accessed via block- and lebased storage protocols. These systems are relatively rigid and complex (SANs more so than NAS) and limited in their exibility and scalability.
By Jacob Gsoedl
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THE SEARCH FOR STORAGE SIMPLICITY

The complexity of SANs, their inherent lack of simultaneous data access to multiple hosts (requiring clustered le systems to orchestrate shared data access) and their management overheadfrom conguring zoning, LUN masking, virtual SANs and ISLs to provisioning LUNs to hostsquickly became an impediment to virtualized in-
has opened a window of opportunity for new storage architectures and vendors to challenge the status quo. These emerging storage architectures are likely to shape the DNA of coming storage systems:
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Traditional storage systems are adopting scale-out architectures, supporting HTML-based protocols and revamping storage back-ends to more efficiently support flash.
frastructures and an even bigger obstacle when used as cloud storage. Block- and le-based protocols of traditional storage systems that have worked well with a limited number of hosts accessing data center storage across private links have proven inapt for the boundless connectivity requirements of mobile devices and a growing number of cloud services. Traditional storage systems are slowly adjusting to a changing computing and application landscape by adopting scale-out architectures, supporting HTML-based protocols and revamping storage back-ends to more efciently support ash, but the pace of change
Object storage Cloud storage Software-dened storage (SDS) and virtualized storage All-ash arrays
OBJECT STORAGE
Unrestricted scalability, ubiquitous access, cost-efciency, the ability to support custom metadata, and a security framework that safely supports multiple tenants and heterogeneous, dispersed clients are the key characteristics of an object storage system. Instead of les and blocks, the basic data elements of an object store are objects with unique identiers and custom metadata. Unlike le-based storage with its hierarchical data structure, objects are stored in an easy to manage, virtually innite object namespace. Autonomous storage nodes that provide both processing and storage resources comprise an object store, and it can scale proportionally as nodes are added. To keep costs at bay, storage nodes are typically built with off-the-shelf commodity components, such as x86-based systems with
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attached JBODs, that are glued together by the object storage softwares secret sauce. Sophisticated data protection mechanisms of traditional shared storage systems are replaced by a multi-instance object philosophy that calls for storing copies of objects on multiple nodes, with the number of copies depending on service levels and the criticality of the data. Finally, object storage is accessed via HTML-based protocols such as Representational State Transfer (REST) that enable access to object storage from any device anywhere. Object storage is best suited to storing vast amounts of unstructured data that needs to be readily available to a wide range of clients. It has become the preferred storage architecture of Web 2.0 applications and websites that deal with a high volume of unstructured data, from images and videos to any other le types. Its also nding its way into corporate data centers to help with the explosive growth of unstructured data that has overwhelmed traditional storage systems. Object storage is unsuitable for structured data and transactional applications where traditional storage systems have excelled and will continue to dominate. While early object stores were proprietary (built by the likes of Yahoo and Google), established storage vendors have been offering object stores such as Caringos Object Storage Platform, Dells DX Object Storage Platform, EMCs Atmos, Hitachi Data Systems Hitachi Content Platform and NetApps StorageGrid.
CLOUD STORAGE
For a storage platform to be considered cloud storage, it needs to be:
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Network accessible. Similar to object stores, cloud stor-
age is typically accessed via Web protocols, such as REST.

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Shared. Shared, secure access across different clients
with multi-tenant capabilities that allow sandboxing different tenants is expected from contemporary cloud storage.
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Service based. Cloud storage is consumed as a service
and paid for based on usage.

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Elastic. It needs to dynamically grow and shrink as
needed.
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Scalable. Cloud storage needs to dynamically scale up and down based on demand, without an upper limit.
The majority of todays cloud storage offerings are powered by an object store on the back end, so its no surprise that object and cloud storage share many of the same characteristics. While object storage is storage infrastructure, cloud storage is a storage service. Cloud storage is available as a public service from companies like (Continued on page 14)
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Emerging storage architectures

MERITS
CHALLENGES
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USE CASES
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OBJECT STORAGE
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Very scalable Very flexible Cost efficient Distributed architecture
New storage protocols and APIs Not good for structured data and transactional applications
Storage for Web 2.0 and websites/services that manage large amounts of unstructured data Corporate storage for large amounts of unstructured data Storage for Web 2.0 applications and websites/ services that manage large amounts of unstructured data Corporate storage for large amounts of unstructured data Virtual storage appliances Many object and cloud storage systems are based on software-defined design principles High-performance applications
CLOUD STORAGE
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Service based (pay-as-you-go) Very scalable Cost efficient Simplified storage management
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Security concerns Only accessible via storage APIs Not appropriate for structured data and transactional applications
SOFTWAREDEFINED STORAGE
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Abstraction of software from the underlying hardware Improved interoperability Enables more flexible storage configurations An order-of-magnitude better performance than disks Sturdier than disk systems
Not necessarily in the interest of storage vendors, since it devalues their lucrative storage hardware business High price Challenges of traditional storage arrays to support the high performance of NAND flash
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ALL-FLASH ARRAYS
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(Continued from page 12) Amazon (S3) and Rackspace; it can also be deployed internally to service corporate departments and users, and charged back by usage. It can be deployed as a hybrid storage cloud that combines internal and external cloud storage. Its benets are usage-based consumption, eliminating the need for storage infrastructure, the ability to dynamically adjust and scale to any storage demand, and unfettered access via Web protocols. The security concern of handing off condential and private data to an external storage cloud is still the main reason hindering cloud storage adoption. Akin to object storage, cloud storage is best suited for unstructured data and isnt appropriate for structured data or as a data store for transactional applications.
SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE AND VIRTUALIZED STORAGE

Storage systems have for the most part been a combination of proprietary storage software running on storage vendors custom hardware, with the infrastructure components optimized for their storage software stack. Software reuse has been limited, often even within vendors own storage systems, and rarely ever across vendor boundaries. The move toward a virtualized infrastructure that started with server virtualization and has since extended to other areas, such as networking, is actively
reshaping storage architectures. One of the main benets of decoupling the software stack from the underlying hardware is the exibility of being able to mix disparate platforms that may vary in size, capabilities, performance and price, depending on requirements. Even though software-dened everything has recently caught the attention of the storage marketing machines, it has existed in various forms in the storage realm for a while. A virtual storage appliance (VSA), where the storage software runs on a virtual machine (VM) and is distributed as a VM image, is one example of softwaredened storage. For instance, NetApps Data Ontap Edge VSA no longer requires a NetApp ler, but its VM image runs on any server with the appropriate hypervisor, and it seamlessly integrates with other NetApp systems. Today, VSAs are primarily deployed in remote ofces and for use cases that dont merit hardware appliances, such as embedded applications and mobile military systems. VSAs can be put directly into the cloud to enable elasticity at a low cost, said Val Bercovici, NetApps cloud czar, citing another use case of VSAs. In general, the majority of object stores and cloud storage systems are following the SDS model, where the software stack runs on low-cost commodity components. Without question, the abstraction of storage software from the underlying hardware is a trend that will continue. Over time, standards like the Storage Networking Industry Associations Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI),
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and frameworks provided by the likes of OpenStack and CloudStack will eventually enable interoperability between storage components from different vendors.
formance, [and theyre] missing many enterprise features and maturity, said Mohit Bhatnagar, NetApps senior director of ash products. But within two to ve years, reliability and capabilities such as QoS will be there.
ALL-FLASH ARRAYS
Solid-state storage has been a disruptive and gamechanging storage technology. An order-of-magnitude faster than mechanical disks, NAND ash-enabled new storage designs are displacing expensive techniques like short-stroking to lower access times and improve I/O. Semiconductor based and void of mechanical components, NAND ash is positioned right between DRAM and mechanical disks, both from a price and performance perspective. Many contemporary storage arrays now offer solidstate storage, either as cache or as a substitute for mechanical disks. However, very few all-ash arrays are available because of the relatively high cost of NAND ash and performance limitations of traditional storage arrays that are optimized for mechanical disks. Contrary to hybrid disk/ash arrays, all-ash arrays can support hundreds of thousands of IOPS and are used for very high-end applications where minimal latency and maximum IOPS are needed. All-ash systems are available from companies such as Nimbus Data, Pure Storage, Violin Memory and Whiptail. At present, all-ash arrays are mostly about high per-
DARWINISM IN THE STORAGE REALM

Traditional storage arrays are far from dead, but theyre evolving to support the requirements of a changing compute landscape thats fraught with cloud and mobile computing. The move toward scale-out architectures, an increased use of solid-state storage and adoption of new storage protocols are evidence of this transformation. File-based storage is trending toward becoming object storage and is already competing with object-based storage to power cloud services. Block-based storage will continue to be critical for structured data and transactional applications, but vendors of those systems are adopting scale-out back-ends and evolving their storage architectures to better cope with the requirements of NAND ash and other emerging semiconductor-based storage technologies. In the meantime, the storage world is full of opportunities for new vendors to emerge that are able to move more quickly and are willing to gamble on innovative and unconventional technology. n
JACOB N. GSOEDL is a freelance writer and a corporate director
for business systems.
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Memorizing RAID level denitions and knowing which level does what can be:
Confusing Hard to Remember Useful All of the above
So how much do you think you know about RAID? Find Out For Yourself and Test Your Knowledge with Our Exclusive RAID Quiz! And dont forget to bookmark this page for future RAID-level reference.
Test your knowledge at SearchSMBStorage.com/RAID_Quiz
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A PRAcTIcAL GUIDE TO cLOUD BAcKUP

Cloud backup providers have grown up from their consumer product roots and now offer services that can meet the needs of enterprises. Heres what you need to know.
CLOUD BACKUP SERVICES can truly change the way your IT
department protects company data, but theres more to do than just sign up with cloud backup providers in the market. You may have discovered that your end users have grown frustrated because the company lacks an effective, easy-to-use backup system for their mobile devices or desktops, and have taken the issue into their own hands by installing cloud backup or le synchronization software themselves. You may have also run into problems backing up remote sites or branch ofcesthe process has become too difcult to manage or youre unable to meet what you consider to be a reasonable recovery time objective. Finally, you might be interested in cloud backup because youre considering outsourcing all your companys backups to a cloud provider. For all these cases, cloud backup might be an appropriate alternative, but youll have to determine if its a feasible and affordable option for your particular environment.
By W. Curtis Preston
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CLOUD BACKUP HAS MATURED

Cloud backup isnt all that new; such services were around long before the term cloud was even considered. A few changes in technology, however, have brought cloud backup to the forefront. The rst change is in the backup software itself, including technologies such as continuous data protection (CDP) and source data deduplication. They reduce by one or two orders of magnitude the amount of data that must be sent from the backup client to the backup server to enable the backup process. (Both CDP and source dedupe technologies are block-level incremental forever and never need to do a full backup.) The next change falls into the area of the consumerization of IT, because technology advances in the consumer space are once again driving technology in the enterprise arena. Consumer products have helped make broadband Internet access ubiquitous; many people have better bandwidth at home than they do at their ofce. Widely available broadband communications make cloud backup far more accessible compared to when previous iterations of cloud backup services were available. Another consumerization-induced change is the impact of the way cloud backup providers have aggressively marketed their services to consumers, luring them with pricing thats almost impossible to turn down. Many consumers spend less for a year of secure, off-site backups than they do for a single month of basic cable.
Are file sync-and-share services good enough for backup?

SMALLER COMPANIES sometimes use file-
synchronization services in lieu of traditional backup or cloud backup. Its possible to do this responsibly, but it can also create a disaster. The difference between the two is the existence, or lack thereof, of file history. If you dont have file history, you are one CTRL-ALT-DEL away from disaster. That command would select and then delete all your companys data. The file-synchronization service will then replicate that deletion to every device youve set up to replicate to as well as the cloud copy. With three keystrokes, all your company data is gone. However, if you went with the optional history feature, a few more keystrokes could regain all your data. Word to the wise: Dont use file-synch services that lack a history option or some other backup mechanism. n
Combine the low bandwidth requirements of todays cloud backup software and huge amounts of available bandwidth with aggressive pricing, and you begin to
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understand why the leading consumer backup services boast of tens of millions of subscribers. These customers then go to their workplace and say, If this works for my home data, why cant it work for my work data? The answer is that it probably can, so lets take a look at whats available.
cloud backup service may use its software to store your backup data on Amazon S3 or Glacier. Depending on the cloud backup provider, all services including storage may be included in a single bill, or you may be billed for their software and required to set up your own account with a compatible cloud storage provider.
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AVAILABLE SERVICES FROM CLOUD BACKUP PROVIDERS

All cloud backup options offer the ability to get data offsite in a secure fashion. The only questions are what you use to get the data off-site, and what off-site storage youre going to use.
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Cloud gateway appliances. Cloud gateway appliances
are available as physical or virtual devices and act as a go-between between your data center and a cloud storage provider. Theyre not backup systems any more than le-synchronization services are, but theyre marketed as a storage and backup offering because they offer syn-
Their software, their storage. The most common option
is a full-service cloud backup service provider that provides both the software you install on the computers you wish to back up, as well as the storage that will be used to store your backups. Most people choose this option because its the simplest. You simply download and install some software, set up automated billing and start your rst backup. Backups couldnt be any easier.
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The very first thing you need to examine when considering cloud backup services is the financial and technical viability of the company.
chronization and history (see Are le sync-and-share services good enough for backup?). Think of this as a cloud version of the model that NetApp made so popular: snapshots and replication as both a storage and backup solution. Some of these vendors describe what they do by calling themselves the NetApp of the cloud.
Their software, cloud storage. This option is functionally
very similar to the previous option, except that your backups arent stored on the cloud backup providers storage but on another cloud providers storage. For example, the
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Any data you store on an appliance is cached locally and replicated to the cloud, along with snapshots for history purposes. If you delete all your data or lose the appliance itself, a copy of your data is in the cloud. If you delete or corrupt one or more les, previous versions of those les are stored in snapshots, which may be in the cache or in the cloud.
Cloud backup of cloud-based data

WITH ALL THIS talk of backing up to the cloud,
WHAT YOU NEED TO CONSIDER

Like any other area of IT, there are options to consider when youre thinking about adopting cloud backups in one form or another. Consider the following:
Viability. Theres an old adage that says on the Internet no one knows youre a dog. Similarly, anyone with an Internet connection and a little bit of know-how can become a cloud backup provider. On the Internet no one knows the service might just be one person in a garage with a computer and some USB storage hanging off it. So the very rst thing you need to examine when considering cloud backup services is the nancial and technical viability of the company. If a cloud backup provider has a signicant list of current customers and is nancially viable, you should be able to nd a lot of published material about the service. The articles you nd can offer some insight into the size of the company and the direction its taking. In
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you may be wondering about backups of the cloud. That is, backups of data already stored in a cloud service. For example, your company may use Salesforce.com, Google apps or similar Web-based services where the only copy of your companys intellectual property is stored on someone elses servers. You can trust that the online app provider is protecting your data adequately or you can take action to protect it yourself. Having data restored by one of these services can be expensive; for example, the cost of having Salesforce.com restore data due to your companys error starts at $10,000 per account. The good news is that companies like Backupify can back that data up for you, ensuring you have an additional copy thats not stored with the original. n
particular, look for any news stories that describe past incidents where the service might have lost any customer data. Your organizations legal department should be able to help investigate the nancial viability of candidate
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cloud backup providers. You should learn as much as you can about how the service will protect your data. Most services offer encryption, but youll want to know if data is encrypted before its sent, and if the encryption key is known only to you. Youll also need to ascertain whether backup data is stored in one or multiple locations, especially if regulatory compliance is an issue for your company.
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while the cloud copy ensures your data will survive a major disaster. The other option is for the cloud backup service to perform a reverse seed by restoring your high-volume data to disks or tapes that they then ship
Tape or disk seeding. The most difcult hurdle your
company will have to overcome is the rst backup. It could take months if you have a lot of data and are using a typical Internet connection. To get started in a reasonable fashion, nd out if the cloud backup provider offers a seeding option. This allows you to make your rst backup on your premises to a set of tapes or disks that you then ship to the cloud vendor for them to load onto their storage system.
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Just because youre using a cloud backup provider doesnt mean theyre managing your backups for you. If youre looking for a fully managed provider, make sure your expectations are clear when youre in discussions with providers.
to you. Make sure youre aware of what options cloud backup providers under consideration have for large restores and how quickly they can respond when a restore is required.
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Large restores. Another situation you must consider
is what will happen when you need to restore a large amount of data in a timely manner. Its one thing to restore a few gigabytes; its an entirely different matter to restore a few terabytes. There are two ways of handling this particular challenge. The rst is to have an on-site cache of your backups. You back up to a local appliance, and that appliance replicates your backups to the cloud. Large restores come directly from the local appliance,
Insourcing. Larger companies may be interested in the
possibility of insourcing their backups after theyve outsourced them. Cloud backups can be a wonderful thing, but the bill can sometimes get quite large. Companies that nd themselves in this position may be able to insource their backups by reverse seeding the entire backup set back to their infrastructure and licensing the software
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for internal use. If repatriating your backup operations to in-house systems might be a possibility for your organization, make sure to address your alternatives during sales negotiations with any cloud backup service providers.
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nish. They may, of course, ask you to do the initial installation of their backup software, but they take it from there.
Fully managed or self-managed. Just because youre using a cloud backup provider doesnt mean theyre managing your backups for you. If youre looking for a fully managed provider, make sure your expectations are clear when youre in discussions with providers. Some of them merely provide the infrastructure for you to perform and manage your own backupsthey dont even tell you if backups worked properly or not. They might provide email notication, but its up to you to read those emails and act accordingly. No one is going to do anything if you dont. Fully managed cloud backup providers, on the other hand, manage the entire process from start to
TREAD LIGHTLY
Outsourcing your companys backups to a cloud backup provider may indeed bring you the peace of mind that comes with knowing your companys data is adequately protected and that the costs for those backups are predictable and reasonable. Choosing the wrong provider can also get you red. Do your research. n
W. CUrTIS PrESTON (aka Mr. Backup) has been singularly focused on data backup and recovery for more than 15 years. He is the webmaster of BackupCentral.com, and the author of hundreds of articles and the books Backup and Recovery and Using SANs and NAS.
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APRIL 2013
S torage Manage M ent
EFFEcTIvE STORAGE cAPAcITY MAnAGEMEnT
Poor allocation and provisioning, and a lack of effective capacity management tools, can lead to underused storage systems. But new tools and improved processes can make storage efficiency a reality.
STORAGE MANAGERS RARELY admit they have a capacity management problem. Instead, theyre more likely to talk about how big a slice of their IT budget storage eats up or the unpleasantness of unplanned purchase requests. In some cases, the conversation focuses on the high cost per gigabyte of storage. Other managers may be preoccupied with seeking a solution to seemingly unattainable backup windows or impossible disaster recovery scenarios. Some are looking for capacity management tools or processes that can identify and prune obsolete data, while others are buying storage in large chunks annually to get quantity discounts. What do all of these scenarios have in common? In each case, storage managers are trying to address a symptom without taking a holistic view of a fundamental problem: the lack of an effective storage capacity management regimine.
By Phil Goodwin
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APRIL 2013
DONT LOOK TO THE CLOUD FOR ANSWERS

Lets state up front that cloud storage is not the solution to a capacity management problem. Increasingly, cloud is portrayed as the cure-all for what storage ailments are aficting companies. Cloud may mask the pain with a somewhat lower cost per GB, but it does nothing to fundamentally address uncontrolled capacity expansion. Cloud has a role in storage service delivery, but solving capacity problems isnt one of them. It would be charitable to say that some organizations storage utilization is less than stellar. Many companies have as little as 20% to 30% average utilization as measured by storage actually consumed. Those organizations whose consumed utilization is more than 50% are the exception. This metric is one of the fundamental obstacles to better utilization. There are three basic ways to measure storage capacity:
l
provisioning. Its a legitimate perspective, but it can cover an insidious incentive to overprovision because it allows that portion of storage to be ignored for a long period of time. Some administrators will tout an 85% utilization rate, even though perhaps only 20% of the array has actually been consumed. Such poor utilization, however, ultimately drives up the average cost per GB consumed by 2x or more with management none the wiser. Moreover, most capacity purchases are triggered when allocated capacity hits 85% regardless of how much is really being consumed. Responsible teams husband an organizations resources more diligently.
WHY IS DATA GETTING SO BIG?

The biggest driver of storage growth is secondary data, copies of original data or primary storage. Secondary data includes snapshots, mirrors, replication and even data warehouses. The secondary data multiplier can be as high as 15:1. It would seem the obvious solution is to reduce the number of data copies, which may indeed be the case. However, the secondary copies were likely created for a reason, such as for data protection or to reduce contention for specic sets of data. The unintended consequence of optimizing storage capacity management may be reduced data recovery capabilities or worse performance. Thus, storage managers must be aware that theres an inverse relationship between data recovery,
F ormatted (sometimes referred to as raw,
l l
though there is a technical difference) Allocated (sometime expressed as provisioned) Consumed (or written)
When asked what their utilization rate is, most storage administrators will quote the allocated gure. From their perspective, if its allocated to an application, its as good as consumed because its unavailable for new
24 STORAGE
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performance and capacity management; if you improve one, youre likely to impede the other. Consequently, its important to start with service-level requirements for recovery and performance. Capacity management can be optimized only to the point that other service levels arent jeopardized.
Tools to take control of capacity management

+ Eliminates overallocation and increases utilized capacity from 30% to 60% + Cuts the cost per gigabyte (GB) stored by 50%
COMPRESSION THIN PROVISIONING
CAPACITY MANAGEMENT TOOLKITS

Fortunately, storage managers have numerous tools to assist them in tackling capacity management. These include two general categories: utilities and reporting tools. Array vendors have a number of useful utilities that are now available with most systems. Perhaps the most common of these is thin provisioning capability, which is supported by nearly every vendor. Thin provisioning allows administrators to logically allocate storage, but automatically keeps the physical allocation only slightly above the actual capacity used. Storage is automatically allocated from a common pool as a volume demands more space. Because the array itself may be logically overallocated, its possible to have an outof-space train wreck if administrators dont ensure that enough physical capacity is available as data grows. This is uncommon, however, as automated alerts should keep administrators on top of the situation. Thin provisioning alone can largely alleviate the problem of high allocation/low utilization. In most cases its complemented
+ A 2:1 compression allows twice as much data in the same array, for another 50% reduction in cost per GB stored
DEDUPLICATION
+ A 2:1 deduplication rate further halves the cost per GB of storage and the deduplication rate could be higher for some data types
STORAGE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS
+ Manages storage as an enterprise, not
as individual arrays + Measures storage metrics to drive best practices + Spots trends that could become serious problems without proper attention n
25 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
by a space reclamation feature that returns unused space to the common pool. While array vendors may offer this feature, reclamation can also be performed by Symantec Corp.s Veritas Foundation Suite for those who use that product. Another useful and near-universal utility is compression. Most vendors are willing to guarantee a 2:1 compression on primary storage, or a 50% space savings. Compression is normally applied at the LUN or volume level, depending upon the vendors specic implementation. Compression does incur some performance penalty, though it can be as little as 5%. Of course, your mileage may vary, so a proof of concept is worth the effort. From a management standpoint, the benet of compression is cutting the cost per GB stored by 50%. Compression is complemented by data deduplication, though deduplication is not yet supported on primary storage by every vendor; EMC Corp. and NetApp Inc. are examples of vendors that do. Here again, deduplication differs in its implementation on primary storage versus backup appliances. On primary storage, data deduplication is an idle-time process and isnt nearly as aggressive in eliminating duplicate blocks as deduping backup appliances. Because its a background process, the compression itself doesnt impact operations. Decompression, known as rehydration, may have minimal or signicant effect on performance, so a proof of concept is advised. Rehydration is more like reassembly of parts. Unlike
compression where vendors make efciency guarantees, there are no such guarantees with deduplication because its highly dependent upon data type. Media les generally dedupe poorly, whereas text les may dedupe quite well.
CAPACITY MANAGEMENT REPORTING TOOLS

The other category of tools is reporting tools, or more accurately, storage resource management (SRM) products. Both array vendors and independent vendors offer SRM products, examples of which include EMC ControlCenter, Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co.s HP Storage Essentials, NetApp OnCommand Insight (formerly SANscreen) and Symantecs Veritas CommandCentral Storage. All of them offer the ability to comprehensively manage and monitor an enterprise storage environment. Yet few organizations leverage them, largely because SRM has gained a reputation as being unwieldy and resource-intensive. These limitations can be overcome by focusing on only those aspects of an SRM application that are truly benecial, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. In the context of storage capacity management, you should focus on the following:
Thresholds. Individual arrays provide threshold alerts,
but SRM applications can consolidate them and give an enterprise-wide picture to administrators. This allows far
26 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
more comprehensive planning and provisioning to prevent one array from being oversubscribed while another is undersubscribed, for example.
Utilization. Again, SRM consolidates information that oth-
erwise must be manually aggregated (and who has the time to do that?). Utilization gures to monitor include: l Consumed as a percent of raw. Know how much the array is truly utilized. Target 55% or higher as a best practice, though this will vary with the age of the array and growth rates. l Consumed as a percent of allocated. Know whether or not the array is overallocated. Target greater than 70% (85% if thin provisioning is used) as a best practice. Allocations lower than 70% may be acceptable for newly provisioned LUNs or those with high, unpredictable growth. l Secondary data. Know how much data is consumed by snapshots, mirrors and the like. Target no more than 3x the primary storage. More than 3x may be justiable for various reasons, but this ensures that space isnt consumed unnecessarily. This feeds into data/information lifecycle management.
Trends. Thresholds and utilization are points-in-time.
rowth rates. Knowing growth rates fosters accurate G forecasting, thereby avoiding unnecessary safety factor purchases. Storage prices decline approximately 10% per quarter on a per-GB basis, so delaying an organizations purchases can yield substantial savings over time. Days storage in inventory. Using growth rates, calcu late how many days of storage growth capacity is on the oor. Target 90 to 180 days. Less than 90 days doesnt give purchasing enough time to do their job most effectively. More than 180 days and you could have purchased the storage later at a cheaper price.
Organizations can dramatically cut the cost per gigabyte stored by using the array utilities that in many cases are already paid for. Implementing thin provisioning, compression and deduplication (where applicable) can reduce this cost by 50% to 75%, which isnt bad by any measure. However, best-practice organizations will implement SRM products to take their storage management to the next level. With it, storage managers can balance and optimize performance, data protection and capacity utilization simultaneously. n
Identifying trends is the key to optimizing capacity.
pHIL GOODwIN is a storage consultant and freelance writer.
27 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
hot s P ots | J ason BuF F ington
Theres still a place for tape, even in the cloud
A
l l
Although the role of tape in traditional backup operations might be diminishing, it still has a place in long-term data retention and even cloud storage services.
CCORDING TO THE Enterprise Strategy
l l l l
Groups Trends in Data Protection Modernization, tape is in use in 56% of data protection strategies today. That represents a lot of tape users, suggesting tape is far from dead as some have declared. If you look at archiving solutions (not to be confused with longterm retention during backup), the use of tape would be even higher. But since our focus is on data protection instead of data management, consider the following stats derived from surveying 330 users, with a 60/40 mix of enterprise and midmarket respondents. Data backup methods currently used: To disk; copy sent off-site on removable media: 31% To disk; no off-site copy: 15%
l l
To tape; copy sent off-site on removable media: 15% To disk; copy sent to off-site disk via WAN: 15% To tape; no off-site copy: 10% Over WAN directly to second corporate site; no on-site copy: 7% To disk; copy sent to cloud storage provider: 5% To third-party cloud storage provider; no on-site copy: 2%
Today, 25% of companies use tape as their only medium for recovery, which includes 10% backing up directly to tape, and another 15% having tapes both on- and off-site. Even compared to a collective 73% of folks who use disk as their rst tier of recovery, the tape number seems high. As a rst tier of recovery, I expect the tape numbers will continue to gradually shrink, with even
28 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
more companies moving to disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) and using disk as their primary recovery medium, before storing data on tape for longer-term retention. In contrast, with all the cloud storage hype we hear, only 7% of respondents use cloud in their data protection strategy, including 2% going directly to backup-as-a-service (BaaS) offerings. Another 5% back up to local disk (presumably for faster recovery scenarios, deduplication and buffering) before shipping backup data to a cloud provider through an enhanced BaaS scenario or by leveraging cloud-based storage attached to their on-premises backup application.
tape look like disk, effectively creating virtual disk devices as the antithesis of VTLs.
THE ROLE OF TAPE IN A CLOUDY WORLD

If the number of users who employ tape as their primary backup target dwindles and cloud use grows, what will be the role of tape? One of tapes roles will be economical data retention. Even with deduplication, compression, disks that spin down and other very compelling disk-based retention and archival technologies, its hard to economically compete with the two-or-three-cents-pergigabyte economies that tape offers. There are, however, two trends that could contribute to a renewed interest in tape:
l
NOT YOUR FATHERS TAPE

To be fair, with newer tape formats, tapes speed and unreliability issues have been resolved, but the bad rap against tape persists. And in some cases, the old rules have actually reversed themselves. Twenty years ago, people wanted faster/better backups than what tape could provide at the time. But backup software didnt know how to use disk effectively, so disk vendors created virtual tape libraries (VTLs), disk systems that presented as tape. Fast forward to today, and those who want cheaper/ cooler/greener storage than their existing disk solutions may be surprised to discover that tape cartridges (LTO-6 with LTFS) can be mounted as le systems. LTFS makes
ore people understand theres a difference between M archiving and long-term backups. As e-discovery scenarios and regulatory requirements continue to evolve, content-savvy archival apps are becoming more mainstream to meet those needs. Archive vendors (and their customers) seem to be of the mindset that the colder the data needs to be, the more applicable tape might be as part of the solution, often with high-performance disk or ash in front of it. s cloud-based storage and backup providers conA tinue to mature, tape tiers within their infrastructures
29 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
may become more compelling. The main attraction of cloud storage services is that they can scale, and providers can offer capabilities less expensively than what subscribers could do on their own. And since the usual bottleneck between a subscriber and a provider is the Internet pipe (not the storage media), service providers may embrace tape tiers within their storage services to deliver scale while lowering their own cost models. Tape versus disk is as tired an argument as snapshots versus backups. In both cases, it shouldnt have to result in an either/or decision; rather, they should be viewed as being better when used together. The same way that you might use snapshots for faster recoveries and traditional backup for restoring previous versions, disk is the
preferred deduplicating rst tier as a recovery solution, while tape has a role as economical, long-term retention. Sure, there are disk-based products that can dwarf the applicability of some tape implementations, just as there are some snapshot technologies that can appear to diminish the need for traditional backups. Whatever the case, understand how you need to protect, retain and recover your data, and then keep an open mind while considering the myriad technologies that might meet those challenge while keeping an eye on costs. n
JASON BUFFINGTON is a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy
Group. He focuses primarily on data protection, as well as Windows Server infrastructure, management and virtualization. He blogs at CentralizedBackup.com and tweets as @Jbuff.
30 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
read / W rite | A run Taneja
The evolution of data deduplication continues
N
31 STORAGE
n
Data deduplication for backup has evolved enormously in the last decade, and its poised to go beyond just backup.
EW TECHNOLOGIES OFTEN come to mar-
ket as value-add features for existing mainstream products that are then later merged into these products. Its often the only way a new vendor can bring a product to market, like what happened with data deduplication technology. In the early 2000s, data deduplication came in the form of appliances from companies like Data Domain, Diligent Technologies, ExaGrid Systems, Quantum and Sepaton. The appliances worked in conjunction with existing backup software and the value proposition was simple: install the appliance, point the backup software to it and instead of backing up to tape the backup app would stream the data to the appliance. Backups and restores got faster and more reliable, and with deduplication, disk costs were close to that of tape.
The market for the appliances soared in terms of revenue and acceptance. But why not merge dedupe functionality into the backup software itself instead of using a separate appliance? Today, most backup software vendors offer deduplication as a standard feature in their products. But the technology continued to advance and sourcebased data deduplication technology emerged. Rather than dedupe data in the backup software, it could be done at the application server under the control of the backup app. Then only deduplicated data would traverse the network, reducing congestion and improving performance. This concept was introduced by Avamara startup at the timeand because its method meant using a brand new backup app, few enterprises wanted to risk their valuable corporate data with a product from a relative unknown. But then Avamar was acquired by EMC, and in the hands
APRIL 2013
read / W rite | A run Taneja
of a big, well-known company, product sales took off. And now conceptually similar source-based deduplication backup software is available from most major players. The fundamental evolution of value-add feature to mainstream is now complete. What can you expect next? While it seems as if there are a lot of data deduplication technology choices to make, for new IT initiatives, it makes little sense to go back to 20th century data protection methods. I believe data should be reduced at the point closest to where its created and kept in its reduced form through its entire lifecycle, except when its needed in its full format to be viewed for audits, compliance, analytics and so forth. That logic dictates that all new IT initiatives should use source-based backup software to seal in maximum efciency from the outset. This approach also works very well for virtualized server environments, given the level of duplication found in virtual machines. For existing environments, its trickier. The particular situation will determine whether a dedupe appliance, new backup software with target-based data deduplication or source-based backup software is most appropriate. The main point, however, is that data deduplication is now mainstream and should be treated that way. Make decisions around data deduplication at a strategic level and not as a patch to an existing problem. Were in a different phase of technology, but it doesnt mean the era of data deduplication appliances is over. The amount of data under the purview of legacy backup software is immense
and needs to be tamed. Whether you choose to tame it via a data deduplication appliance or with new backup software depends on factors that are unique to your environment. Most backup vendors can now offer source-based, target-based and appliance-based products as options. And some startups offer unique solutions that make up for the lack of breadth in offerings. Eventually, we wont need to talk about data deduplication technology as it will simply happen when the data is created by the application and stay deduplicated through its lifespan. But, despite some promising starts, this primary storage data deduplication approach hasnt happened at a pace I expected. NetApp has had this capability for a long time but its not inline and requires post processing. IBMs Storwize technology is compression based and solves an important but adjacent problem, but its still not available across the entire product line. Dell bought Ocarina, but little has been done with that technology in almost two years. Still, without question this concept will come to pass and we will quietly put data deduplication to sleep. Until then, work needs to be done and IT life must go on. When you have to make a data deduplication decision, make that decision as strategic as possible given the state of technology and its evolution. n
ArUN TANEjA is founder and president at Taneja Group, an analyst
and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies.
32 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
sna Pshot
Backup isnt as hard as it used to be

Backup and recovery is, by its very nature, a pain point, noted one of our less optimistic but maybe more realistic survey respondents. Backup is an uphill battle, but it looks like storage pros are getting the upper hand. A year ago, 61% said their biggest backup problem was how long it took to complete a backup; this year, only 46% are eyeing the clock. Another of our users biggest backup issues is the amount of data to back up; on average, our respondents will add 44 TB of disk capacity for backup, which is way up from last years 35 TB and 2010s piddling 13 TB. Backing up the same stuff repeatedly is another backup bugaboo, with 41% saying theyre backing up redundant data. But thats a drop from last years 56% as more shops use dedupe: 48% use it now and 40% will evaluate. Three-quarters of our group back up virtual servers or virtual desktops. Asked to rate their virtual machine backup experience on a 1-to-5 scale, our gang gave it a 3theyre not crazy about it, but its also not driving them crazy. Rich Castagna
APPROXImAtELY HOW mUCH tOtAL DAtA VOLUmE DO YOU BACK UP IN A WEEK?
Less than 10 TB
43%
More than 200 TB
19%
+15419 43
11 TB to 50 TB
15%
101 TB to 150 TB
4%
WHAt BACKUP AND RECOVERY PROBLEmS DO YOU mOSt OFtEN EXPERIENCE?*
51 TB to 100 TB
15%
151 TB to 200 TB
4%
61% 51% 46% 46%
56% 41% 44%
50% 35
%
n 2010
n 2012
n 2013
41% 33% 29% 29% 33% 24%
Backup takes too long
Backing up redundant data
Too long to recover data
Inadequate reporting/ monitoring
Too many backup failures
PLAN tO PURCHASE ADDItIONAL DISK CAPACItY tHIS YEAR tO COPE WItH BACKUPS
66
* UP TO ThREE SELEcTIOnS PERmITTEd.
33 STORAGE
APRIL 2013
TechTarget Storage Media Group

StORAGE mAGAZINE
StORAGE DECISIONS TechTarget Conferences

DIREcTOR Of EdITORIAL EvEnTS EdITORIAL EvEnTS MAnAGER
Rich Castagna SEnIOR MAnAGInG EdITOR Kim Hefner EXEcuTIvE EdITOR Ellen OBrien COnTRIbuTInG EdITORS James Damoulakis, Steve Duplessie, Jacob Gsoedl
EdITORIAL DIREcTOR
Lindsay Jeanloz Jacquelyn Hinds
SUBSCRIPtIONS
SEARCHStORAGE.COm
Ellen OBrien SEnIOR NEwS DIREcTOR Dave Raffo SEnIOR NEwS WRITER Sonia R. Lelii SEnIOR WRITER Carol Sliwa SEnIOR MAnAGInG EdITOR Kim Hefner ASSOcIATE SITE EdITOR Ian Crowley
EXEcuTIvE EdITOR
www.SearchStorage.com Storage magazine 275 Grove Street Newton, MA 02466 editor@storagemagazine.com TechTarget Inc. 275 Grove Street Newton, MA 02466 www.techtarget.com
SEARCHCLOUDStORAGE.COm SEARCHVIRtUALStORAGE.COm
EXEcuTIvE EdITOR SEnIOR MAnAGInG EdITOR
Ellen OBrien Kim Hefner ASSOcIATE SITE EdITOR Ian Crowley ASSISTAnT SITE EdITOR Sarah Wilson
SEARCHDAtABACKUP.COm SEARCHDISAStERRECOVERY.COm SEARCHSMBStORAGE.COm SEARCHSOLIDStAtEStORAGE.COm
2013 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group. About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts.
Andrew Burton Ed Hannan ASSOcIATE SITE EdITOR John Hilliard FEATuRES WRITER Todd Erickson
SEnIOR SITE EdITOR MAnAGInG EdITOR
coVer image anD page 10: Vetta/iStockphoto
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STORAGE

IS YOUR. .StORAGE ARRAY. .OBSOLEtE?.

Managing the information that drives the enterprise

APRIL 2013 VOL. 12 | NO. 2

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A PRAcTIcAL GUIDE TO cLOUD BAcKUP

CLOUD BACKUP SERVICES can truly change the way your IT

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Are file sync-and-share services good enough for backup?

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WHAT YOU NEED TO CONSIDER

Tape or disk seeding. The most difcult hurdle your

Large restores. Another situation you must consider

Insourcing. Larger companies may be interested in the

S torage Manage M ent

EFFEcTIvE STORAGE cAPAcITY MAnAGEMEnT

S torage Manage M ent

DONT LOOK TO THE CLOUD FOR ANSWERS

WHY IS DATA GETTING SO BIG?

F  ormatted (sometimes referred to as raw,

S torage Manage M ent

Tools to take control of capacity management

CAPACITY MANAGEMENT TOOLKITS

+ Manages storage as an enterprise, not

S torage Manage M ent

CAPACITY MANAGEMENT REPORTING TOOLS

S torage Manage M ent

Identifying trends is the key to optimizing capacity.

pHIL GOODwIN is a storage consultant and freelance writer.

hot s P ots | J ason BuF F ington

Theres still a place for tape, even in the cloud

CCORDING TO THE Enterprise Strategy

hot s P ots | J ason BuF F ington

Very scalable Very flexible Cost efficient Distributed architecture

F ormatted (sometimes referred to as raw,

+ Manages storage as an enterprise, not