How to get the maximum return from your tiered storage

Centiq Blog

Nov 27

2009

How to get the maximum return from your tiered storage

Posted by: Alastair Williams in Infrastructure on Nov 27, 2009

One of the greatest challenges to realising the benefits of tiered storage is the ability of an organisation to classify data within the application bounderies to make tiering effective. What an organisation generally leans towards is tiered applications. E.g. all oracle on Tier 1, file services on Tier 3. This approach has a finite scope in terms of storage purchases as it is defined by the number of applications installed not by the varying value of the data within those applications.

Moving inactive data or "Data Tiering" requires IT to have a far greater insight to business process and the confidence to challenge the "we need to keep everything forever" syndrome (also known as "Compulsive Hoarding Disorder" ). The benefit of this question however is that sometimes data can be identified for complete removal, and storing less is the ultimate cost containment exercise. (Not to mention the benefits in business recovery planning that can be attained).

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written by Robin Webster, 05:24 December 05, 2009

What about the increasing number of dynamic tiered systems that are available do it for you based on usage patterns? What are the implications of these technologies, they seem to be the magic answer?

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written by Alastair Williams, 08:59 December 07, 2009

This technology is great if you accept as a business support function you have no idea, and don't want to know, about your organisations information assets. My view is that auto-tiering is a technical solution for IT departments for a non-technical problem. Running a storage information policy based on access frequency/QoS is just one of many criteria that should be considered.

If you are not using it should it even be there? Legal and commercial rules get ignored in this scenario.
If you are sizing for it how do you determine the level of access (spindles) you need (so that you don’t buy too much) and if this is known why not resolve it more intelligently and remove waste data completely from the system.
Whilst useable for Oracle, typically within an application it’s the handful of transactional tables that get hit driving processor demands as well as storage, as these class as active they are unlikely to get moved, splitting the DB may work however why go to this trouble and manage it when archiving gives better returns.
It fails to take into account the costs of using the wrong data to make decisions. The more businesses absolve themselves of the responsibility of working with their IT and keep jumping onto technical hopes the greater the problem becomes.

As with anything magic. It’s just a trick to hide the truth, despite appearances the assistant hasn’t disappeared, she is still in the box and still needs feeding and letting out once in a while. If you dont and get new assistant each time the trick is performed the magic doesn’t get better you just end up with a bigger box.

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written by Robin Webster, 20:15 December 07, 2009

So all we need to do is get the business talking to the IT departments to gain a shared understanding of the value of their data. Perhaps we should offer two options on quotes for these technologies - the hardware option and a crucial conversations course!