5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

Executive Brief

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a QuinStreet Excutive Brief. 2011

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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

As an IT administrator youre likely well aware of the pressure to keep costs in check even though the amount of data you need to store keeps growing and application service levels need to be maintained or improved. Youre probably already dealing with these issues with regards to your server infrastructure by exploring or introducing scale-out virtualization to consolidate your servers. Virtualization increases server utilization rates and helps control costs like power and cooling. multiple applications in a shared pool Your storage infrastructure needs the same attention. There are at least three reasons IT departments are exploring storage consolidation projects today. The first is the need to reduce costs both capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx). A consolidated storage environment when its done right helps reduce CapEx because your IT department is buying fewer storage resources. Instead of adding storage for each application and using only a fraction of the capacity thats available, todays consolidated storage systems let you buy and use a central pool of storage capacity that is shared by your applications. OpEx is reduced because you have fewer systems to manage and fewer systems to power and cool. The second reason businesses explore storage consolidation is the increased capacity of todays disk storage. Its simply easier to store the data from
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storage consolidation project. Were also going to explore the features of Oracles Pillar Axiom 600, an industryleading SAN storage system that helps solve many of the problems you might face as you consolidate your storage environment. Lets get started.

because theres sufficient capacity available at an affordable price to make it work. That wasnt the case a few years ago. Finally, as we touched on earlier, server virtualization is driving a move toward storage consolidation projects. Once youve consolidated your server infrastructure, you need to consolidate your storage to reap the full benefits of your virtualization investment. If you virtualize your servers and leave the storage infrastructure alone, youre leaving in place bottlenecks that can negatively affect application performance. To reap the benefits of storage consolidation, you need to do the job right, which means asking the important questions that will help you find the right solution for your business. Weve put together a list of five such questions you should consider as you embark on a SAN

1. Will Your Storage Consolidation Project Support Multi-Tenancy?

Chances are your data center and the IT professionals that manage its resources are already familiar with multi-tenancy. If youre virtualizing the servers in your data center, then youve already consolidated your applications from the old model of server computing where each application had its own server to the virtual model, where many applications can reside on a single piece of hardware.

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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

Storage is following the same path. Applications are no longer relying on dedicated, direct-attached storage resources. Storage is now a shared resource that uses a highperformance storage area network (SAN), or at times a Network Attached Storage (NAS) architecture, to keep management time and costs low while increasing utilization rates. The reason youre exploring storage consolidation for your business is because you want to buy less storage capacity, use what you buy more efficiently and make the management of your storage resources easier. You might think multi-tenancy is the easy part of a storage consolidation project. Given the dramatic growth in the capacity of modern disks, its hardly a challenge to get the data from multiple applications on a single storage resource. The problem with multi-tenancy is that not all of your business applications are equal. Inter-application interference is what happens when multiple applications are essentially fighting over the same storage resources. If youre planning to consolidate your storage and take advantage of multi-tenancy, the applications will essentially be lining up for I/O performance on a first-in, first-out (FIFO) basis. A business-critical application that processes orders and contributes revenue to your business, for example, could compete for storage resources with a less-critical human resources application, such

as the one that allows employees to submit time off requests. Its important that you support multi-tenancy with the ability to align performance with business value. Most of todays storage controllers were not built in a way that allows Quality of Service (QoS) to be controlled while under load. They allocate storage resources such as disk access, controller bandwidth, controller CPU cycles and command queuing priorities using simple FIFO prioritization. They cannot dynamically manage QoS to give business-critical applications the appropriate level of I/O performance independent of what other applications are doing on the storage system. The only way to control how applications access storage resources is manual intervention, i.e., moving data to different drives or arrays. In the past, many businesses dealt with the issue of application interference by buying more storage capacity (over provisioning), which helped solve the

problem but didnt help control costs or increase utilization rates. Your storage consolidation project will deliver the most benefit to the organization if it includes a way to prioritize workloads. The Pillar Axiom 600 SAN storage system uses its integrated, dynamic I/O priority management to optimize the business value of the application environment. In short, it prioritizes I/O requests based on the business requirements for performance and the value of the application. It is application-aware storage. Because your workloads and business priorities can and do change over time, all QoS policies in the Pillar Axiom 600 can be modified nondisruptively at any time. Application QoS can be increased or decreased as appropriate so seasonal workloads, such as quarter-end reporting or an increase in transactions around the holidays, can benefit from a temporary increase in QoS settings.

The Pillar Axiom 600 SAN storage system uses its integrated, dynamic I/O priority management to optimize the business value of the application environment.
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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

The Pillar Axiom also supports Storage Domains that allow users to physically isolate specific data to specific storage resources to ensure that there is no inter-application interference. Were going to discuss how the Pillar Axiom 600 can help you get the most out of your storage consolidation project, as we examine more questions you need to ask, but here are the key takeaways for now: Your storage consolidation project needs to support multi-tenancy to be successful Multi-tenancy can lead to interapplication interference You need to align application performance with business value The Pillar Axiom 600 lets users dynamically adjust its settings for data prioritization

2. Will Your Storage Consolidation Project Have NonDisruptive Scale?

If you wanted to find one advantage in the way data centers relied on directattached storage to support each application in the data center, it might be that it was easy to scale. The IT staff simply added more storage resources when they were needed, which they did, and eventually found themselves over-provisioned with low utilization rates. It was easy, but it wasnt costeffective or efficient. Today, thanks to scale-out virtualization, making a change to one application can impact the other 20 applications that reside on the same server if youre not careful. As you plan your storage consolidation project, you need to ensure it includes nondisruptive scale. That means creating

a consolidated storage environment that can grow with your business without requiring that applications be taken offline to add capacity and avoiding rip-and-replace or forklift upgrades that cost time, money and productivity. The Pillar Axiom 600 is a modular storage platform that can help you consolidate your storage resources and provide non-disruptive scale. It includes three intelligent hardware assemblies with their own Pillarspecific nomenclature:

Pillar Axiom Slammers (storage controllers) Pillar Axiom Bricks (drive enclosures Pillar Axiom Pilot (management platform) The Pillar Axiom Slammer storage controllers are completely redundant with dual active/active control units, fans, power and mirrored cache. The Pillar Axiom Brick storage enclosure can include a range of drive type serial ATA (SATA), Fibre Channel (FC) and solid-state drives (SSD) to meet the budget and performance demands of your business. The Pillar Axiom 600s RAID controllers are not in the storage processor; rather, they are moved to the Pillar Axiom Brick to help eliminate performance bottlenecks. Each Pillar Axiom Brick actually contains two redundant RAID controllers. This makes

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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

it easy to scale the Pillar Axiom 600 system because as you expand capacity by adding more storage enclosures, the additional RAID controllers you need will automatically be added. One Pillar Axiom 600 system can support as many as four Pillar Axiom Slammers, which makes it easy to add storage processing power without purchasing another storage system. In the past, trying to scale your storage to keep up with business demands meant some combination of adding capacity, introducing additional management points, paying for extra software licenses or dealing with downtime, as you rip and replace an old system that no longer meets demand. The Pillar Axiom 600 allows legacy and modern technologies to coexist in the same storage platform. It also allows you to easily and nondisruptively move application data off of older media to new media and allows you to remove the old media without disrupting applications. Well be further discussing the architecture of the Pillar Axiom 600 as we address more questions about storage consolidation. Heres what you need to know about non-disruptive scale:

Rip-and-replace upgrades to storage infrastructure are costly in terms of time, budget and application downtime The Pillar Axiom 600 has the ability to scale both capacity and performance in a non-disruptive manner

A business that keeps sensitive information about its employees in a PeopleSoft application needs to consider its storage security requirements when it embarks on a storage consolidation project. The same goes for a retailer that keeps customer credit card data in its database. A business that cannot allow data from different applications to co-mingle on the same server has compliance concerns it must address in its plans for consolidated storage. With the old direct-attached storage model, it was easy to keep data apart when regulations required, but once again it led to inefficiency and overprovisioning. The Pillar Axiom 600 lets you create multiple virtual storage systems within the same storage pool. Any combination of Pillar Axiom Bricks (storage enclosures) can be grouped into individual storage domains. These

3. Will Your Storage Consolidation Project Meet Compliance and Security Requirements?
Even the least tech-savvy among your customers understands the dangers of a data breach thanks to the attention surrounding a number of high-profile breaches in recent years. Customer data needs to be kept secure, regardless of the industry where your company does business. In an increasing number of industries, government and industry regulations add another layer of complexity to your storage environment.

One Pillar Axiom 600 system can support as many as four Pillar Axiom Slammers, which makes it easy to add storage processing power without purchasing another storage system.
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Your business requirements and your priorities will keep changing and your consolidated storage environment needs to change with them

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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

storage domains can have assigned LUNs and file systems that are isolated from the other storage domains in the system. Having these domains reside on a single physical Pillar Axiom 600 storage system will help you meet many of the goals of your storage consolidation project, such as reducing CapEx, power, cooling and management expenses (OpEx). It also helps improve your security and compliance measures by isolating data to different media and different host I/O ports if desired. The Pillar Axiom 600 also has software solutions available to help with your business security and compliance needs. Pillar Axiom Data Protection Manager provides application-consistent snapshots for business-critical applications like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. It provides consistency groups for recovering data spread across multiple LUNs and creating application snapshots using its CloneLUN feature. Pillar Axiom SecureWORMfs delivers cost-effective, scalable, non-erasable, non-rewritable storage for compliant archives and the unalterable fixed-content environments that some regulations require. Its industry-accepted write once, read many (WORM) technology enables archiving solutions with auditing features to comply with corporate governance requirements, government and industry regulations and compliance initiatives.
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You need to take security and compliance into consideration when you create a consolidated storage environment. Here are some facts to keep in mind: It was easy to isolate data for security and compliance reasons when data centers relied on direct-attached storage for their applications The need to isolate storage resources was a common cause of over-provisioning and low utilization rates in many data centers The Pillar Axiom 600 allows users to create multiple virtual storage systems within the same storage pool The storage domains in the Pillar Axiom 600 are isolated from each other in the same systems, allowing business to maintain isolation for compliance purposes and still take advantage of the benefits of storage consolidation

4. Are you getting efficiency and performance by consolidating storage?

You downloaded this paper because youre interested in consolidating the storage environment at your business. And the reason youre likely intrigued by storage consolidation is because it stands to increase your data centers efficiency in a number of ways. Having fewer storage resources helps you save on CapEx. Fewer resources to manage, power and cool helps you save on OpEx. Getting better utilization rates for your storage infrastructure means you dont have to invest in new storage resources as the amount of data you need to store continues to increase. While the advantages of consolidating your storage are very attractive, many storage administrators experience a serious disadvantage as well:

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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

performance degradation. After storage administrators left the directattached storage model behind, they turned to FC SAN or IP-based NAS storage architectures. SANs and NAS seem to grow endlessly because of the sheer amount of electronic data businesses store and applications create. With multiple applications feeding into these consolidated storage pools, bottlenecks were inevitable and performance suffered. The Pillar Axiom 600 storage system guarantees that youll increase your efficiency by promising 80 percent utilization rates. Gartner reports that industry-average utilization rates are in the 30 to 40 percent range. But the Pillar Axiom 600 goes a step further than efficiency, delivering efficiency with performance. The performance gains begin with the Pillar Axiom 600s innovative architecture, which places RAID controllers within storage enclosures (Pillar Axiom Bricks). Moving the RAID

infrastructure into the Brick reduces the overhead of RAID calculations and improves drive rebuild times. This helps performance scale linearly with increasing capacity. This distributed RAID architecture performs much better than legacy approaches to storage consolidation. Those legacy approaches might have as many as 1,000 drives assigned to as few as two RAID controllers. In the Pillar Axiom, up to 128 individual RAID controllers can all operate in parallel. The second aspect of the Pillar Axiom 600 that helps maintain performance while increasing efficiency is the aforementioned Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities. By allowing storage administrators to define the level of service that an application requires, QoS ensures that business-critical applications are given priority when it comes to storage resources even when the applications are using the same storage pool. Previous methods of storage consolidation required

adding capacity or ripping out an old system and replacing it with a new one when performance was suffering. The Pillar Axiom QoS manager is a powerful system with fine-grain control over multiple aspects of the system to ensure applications can perform to the level of their business requirements. It maximizes the use of I/O priority, the CPU, cache and capacity. It can also automatically configure spindle striping levels, mirroring, priority queues, network bandwidth and caching algorithms. As you explore your options for storage consolidation, make sure youre not sacrificing performance when you gain efficiency. Here are a few points you need to remember: Youre consolidating your storage infrastructure to increase efficiency, but methods of consolidation like FC SANs and NAS will eventually suffer from performance degradation as they grow The Pillar Axiom 600 storage system guarantees an 80 percent utilization

The Pillar Axiom QoS manager is a powerful system with fine-grain control over multiple aspects of the system to ensure applications can perform to the level of their business requirements.
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rate compared to an industry average of 30 to 40 percent The distributed RAID architecture of the Pillar Axiom 600 helps the system maintain performance, while it increases efficiency The QoS management in the Pillar Axiom 600 ensures that businesscritical application can perform up to their requirements even when they share the same storage pool as other applications 6

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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

Avoid forklift upgrades

which means they are able to use the capacity they paid for instead of over-provisioning and paying for extra capacity. The Pillar Axiom 600 system is one of the most flexible SAN storage systems available, allowing you to consolidate multiple applications onto a common storage pool that can use solid-state drives and/or Fibre Channel or SATA drives.

5. Will your storage consolidation project help you reduce costs?

Consolidating your storage infrastructure is a good idea on many levels, but just because youre undertaking such a project doesnt mean youll automatically reduce your costs. Your storage consolidation project needs to do a number of things to ensure your business is reducing costs. It needs to: Simplify the management of your storage resources Deliver high utilization rates Grow without adding additional license fees Scale up and scale out as your storage needs evolve Scale without needing to rip and replace the entire system

The technology in the Pillar Axiom 600 storage system is designed to deliver overall cost control, while allowing users to consolidate their storage environment and deliver the performance required by businesscritical applications. Thanks to the Pillar Axiom Pilot policy controller the intuitive management user interface of the Pillar Axiom 600 administrators can easily deploy, provision, manage and maintain the system without special training. It enables policy-based provisioning and dynamic performance prioritization, fault management, capacity planning and guided maintenance. Users of the Pillar Axiom 600 storage system are guaranteed 80 percent utilization rates (as much as 50 percent higher than the industry average),

Theres no end in sight for the problem of data growth, and when you combine that with the ever-changing business requirement that todays businesses face, its clear you need a storage system that can scale with your business to help keep costs in check. The Pillar Axiom 600s modular architecture provides the flexibility to add capacity or change application priorities without disrupting applications or undertaking difficult migrations. Because one Pillar Axiom 600 can support as many as four Pillar Axiom Slammer controllers, users can add storage processing power without purchasing another entire system. The system grows with your business, and the modular infrastructure means growth does not mean adding management points, extra software licenses or the costly downtime that comes with ripping and replacing existing systems. There are a number of ways that your storage consolidation project can actually end up costing you money instead of reducing costs. Keep in mind the following:

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5 Must-Ask Questions for SAN Storage Consolidation Success

Storage consolidation projects that result in systems that are complicated to manage or add management points as they scale can increase costs If your storage consolidation project doesnt lead to high utilization rates, then youre not getting your moneys worth from your storage investment The Pillar Axiom 600 is a single storage system that guarantees 80 percent utilization rates and provides for different types of data on different drives The Pillar Axiom 600 has a modular architecture that allows it to scale up and scale out without ripping and replacing, without causing application downtime and without adding software licensing fees

Conclusion
A successful storage consolidation project can cut costs for your business over the long term, but only if its implemented in a way that gives your organization the flexibility it needs to deal with changing business conditions. This flexibility should include: The ability to not only provide storage for a number of applications, but to prioritize those applications so business-critical applications have the resources they need The ability to scale in a nondisruptive manner so your storage infrastructure can grow with your business without costly downtime or forklift upgrades The ability to provide the security and compliance your business

needs while still consolidating storage on a single system The ability to increase efficiency without sacrificing performance The ability to help save costs by using intuitive management interfaces, few management points and increasing storage utilization rates Oracles Pillar Axiom 600 provides application-aware unified storage with storage domains that can isolate data, a modular infrastructure that scales with your business and industryleading performance and utilization rates. If youre exploring storage consolidation for your business, you can learn more about the Pillar Axiom 600 storage system at: http:// www.oracle.com/us/products/ servers-storage/storage/san/pillaraxiom-600-488677.html

2011, QuinStreet, Inc.