netapp_10_smart_stg.pdf

7/30/2019 NETAPP_10_SMART_STG.pdf

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Ten Smart Things to Know

About StorageTrends, Developments and Tips to Make Your Storage Environment More Ecient

Smart decsios arebuilt on

Brought to you by Sirius Computer Solutions, a NetApp STAR Partner


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Its the lieblood o your business. Dont let the

rising costs o storage and capacity problems

deplete your bank balance and take up valuable

man-hours.

Small and medium businesses are amous or

having user fles residing on individual computers.

As they get larger and/or more sophisticated, theymight add a fle server where everyone stores fles.

But ever-expanding data requirements are leading

more frms to consider vir tualized storage, which

has traditionally been the province o larger

enterprises. This approach oers a ar greater

amount o space than you can pack into a

fle server.

Cloud, consolidation and virtualization are the

buzzwords that are on everyones lips these

days when it comes to storage. But what dothey actually mean when it comes to your

business? And what are the other, not so

glamorous issues that you need to be aware

Storage Is More Than Just Servers

o when you look at your storage needs, both in

the present and in the uture?

Most storage innovations over the past year

have evolved to solve two main problems

bandwidth and securityand thats why its

important to know whats relevant to you in

the current world o rapidly evolving data andstorage needs. Read on to see our top smart

things to know about storage and how it could

aect your business.



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1. Storage Scaling

Server and desktop virtualization will increase the needor businesses to scale up storage systems non-disruptively as virtual machine demands increase. Themore you virtualize, the more load you put onto yourservers, and the more you need to utilize the storageyou already have.

While data growth continues to explode, your capacitywill be limited by your budget. In order to overcome thisdiculty, companies will be looking or ways to increasethe utilization o their storage assets in the coming year.

Youll nd that all-in-one storage oerings, which aregaining in popularity, contain most o the trends wellbe talking about. Theyre generally easy to use, harnessvirtualization technology and include some aspects onetworked storage.

Also, the good news is that theres a lot o unused andoverallocated capacity to be reclaimed, and utilizationo storage assets can be increased due to recent newtechnologies such as thin provisioning and deduplication.Read on to nd out more about those topics, too.

With NetApp, you can boost your storage utilization byover 200%.

2. Acquisition Costs are on the Rise

Storage represents a signicant and oten-growingportion o a businesses total IT budget. In ForrestersEnterprise and SMB Hardware Survey, North America andEurope, respondents reported that on average, 17% oIT budgets went to storage. This was up rom the 2007number o 10%, which indicates that storage represents

a growing portion o IT spending.

Decreasing technology liecycles could undermine yourinvestment in IT inrastructure. How can you ensure thatthe purchases you make today can easily and cost-eectively grow with your business into the uture?

Measure the resultsdont just buy the eature. Theresa great deal o attention on eciency-ocused tools, butreal improvement wont come just rom buying a tool.Whether its thin provisioning, deduplication, or any othertechnology, it takes a solid understanding o the way thetool works and how to use it to get the desired results.

The eectiveness o these tools varies widely as well, sodont assume that you will get the results youre lookingor just by buying the eature. Talk to vendors whounderstand what theyre selling to you and i its evenappropriate or your business.

Buying the right storage solution or your business meansyou could deer additional purchases o extra storage diskracks by two years i you talk to the right vendor.

3. Storage Complexity Is Decreasing

As enterprise-class storage lters down the ood chain,it tends to be adopted rst by tech-savvy rms that haveenough internal IT resources to understand and properlycongure systems. The midsize business market needsto have these technologies simplied to suit a new seto customers.

What we see now is a big reduction in the managementcomplexity that used to accompany networked storageand traditional storage processes. The right vendor canoer enterprise-class capabilities or the MSE market, withstorage that is simple to use and aordable to purchase.

The latest batch o products, or example, is ar easier tooperate than their relatives rom a couple o generationsback. That doesnt mean that the boss can use them,unless they have some level o basic computer knowledge.

Typically, an IT generalist, someone who perhaps looksater backup, networking, and troubleshooting on a part-time basis, should be able to operate modern small tomedium business storage tools. Ease o use and reliabilityare just as important as power and fexibility.

How much time is your IT person spending on storagemanagement? By implementing the right tools andsolutions, customers are able to administer their storagein just two to three hours per week and manage up to15 TB in less than one hour a week.



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4. Thin Provisioning Is Becoming

More Popular

Thin provisioning is the act o using virtualizationtechnology to give the appearance o more physicalresource than is actually available. I you always haveenough resources to simultaneously support all o thevirtualized resources, then you are not thin provisioned.

Thin provisioning can help businesses simpliy capacityplanning, accelerate application and new-service rollout,increase storage utilization, and reduce costs. This newmodel o storage provisioning can help eliminate someo the most common and taxing capacity utilization andmanagement challenges.

Look into thin provisioning to increase your storagesavings and even shrink your data center ootprint by98.5%.

5. Downtime Is Getting More Expensive

IT downtime is becoming even more expensive than everbeore. A lot o companies dont ully understand thecost o not preparing, so as a result they are not willingto spend the money to ensure disaster doesnt occuror to make sure that they can quickly recover. Smallercompanies are particularly vulnerable to downtimecatastrophes, but they dont have to be. Its becomingsimpler and less costly to saeguard against downtime.

Speak to us, and you could see a 50% decrease inbreak/x man-hours and eliminate up to $750K indowntime costs.

6. Data Migration Is Becoming

More Complex

Oten when organizations or individuals change computersystems or upgrade to new systems, they need to transerdata between storage types, ormats, or computersystems. Thats when data migration comes into play.

It takes a lot o eort to restore user access to migrateddata, and there is a perceived lack o solutions that canmigrate data across diering storage platorms. You needhelp to organize data intelligently and present it to userslogically.

NetApp Global Services has years o experience withdata migrations with businesses o all sizes. They cando the whole migration, help with the upront planningto ensure you make the right planning decisions, or justcomplement your in-house expertise.

With the right help, clients have been able to convert140 virtual machines to a new platorm in a single month.

7. You Need to Protect Your Data

Data protection is becoming even more essential to ITstrategy. It minimizes the risk o downtime and data lossas well as the risk o a compliance breach. Unortunately,most data protection implementations can be complexand costly and require a number o specialty products tobe bolted onto your environment.

Also, maintaining legacy tape solutions has provenineective at meeting decreasing backup windows,increasing service-level expectations and overall datagrowth, and minimizing the impact o viritualization. Thereis only so long you can continue to use an aging solutionbeore it breaks and puts your business at risk, not tomention growing costs and complexity. A new approachwith a truly integrated backup, storage and disasterrecovery solution that is ideal or physical and virtualenvironments is needed to help ensure your businessand data are secure and protected while saving timeand costs.

NetApp Integrated Data Protection delivers highavailability, backup, compliance and disaster recoveryservices directly rom the storage, enabling you to replacemultiple products with a single high-eciency platorm.

You could reduce sta time to support backup by 75%and see an 80% reduction in backup time.



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9. The Cloud

You cant talk about storage without mentioning thecloud. Cloud computing is a collection o computingresources (scattered across multiple locations) that canbe pooled together and managed as one unit. Userstypically purchase, via monthly subscription, the amounto disk, processor or memory they need, or else they

receive a specic service, such as online backup orarchiving o aging data.

Many SMBs use cloud services such as Google Docsand Amazon EC2, but even more sophisticated tools arecoming on the market that are appropriate or small tomedium businesses.

The cloud is really an extension o virtualizationtechnology. Instead o a single server being virtualized,however, the cloud represents the virtualization o a largegroup o computing resources or an entire data center.But virtualization is proving hugely popular with smallbusinesses, many o which have little or nothing to do

with the cloud.

Find out i the cloud is right or you by speaking to one oour resellers. See how it could help you save thousandsin new disk acquisition costs and leverage networkedstorage to grow cost-eectively.

8. Deduplication: Why Its a Good Idea

Storage-based data deduplication reduces the amount ostorage needed or a given set o les. It is most eectivein applications where many copies o very similar or evenidentical data are stored on a single disk, a surprisinglycommon scenario.

Data deduplication is an important new technology thatis quickly being embraced by MSEs as they struggle tocontrol data prolieration. It helps eliminate duplicatedata and reduce the capacity needed during backupsand other data copy activities. Unortunately, the manydierent deduplication approaches rom various vendorscan leave users bewildered.

As you consider this technology, make sure deduplicationts into your existing environment with minimal disruption;ultimately it should become be a transparent backgroundprocess. It should also have minimal impact on systemperormance. This is particularly true or more perormance-sensitive primary storage environments and workloads.

The smart usage o deduplication means you couldreduce your e-mail restores rom ve hours to 15 minutesand reclaim 70% disk space or Hyper-V guests.

The eld o storage is developing ast, but its easier than you think to take

advantage o the latest cost-saving trends and developments. Be smart with your

storage: speak to your local vendor about NetApp midsize businesses solutions.

2012 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions o this document may be reproduced without prior written consent o NetApp, Inc.Specications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, and Go urther, aster are trademarks or registered trademarkso NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Hyper-V is a trademark o Microsot Corporation. All other brands or products aretrademarks or registered trademarks o their respective holders and should be treated as such.www.netapp.com

10. Unifed Storage Is the Solution

The more storage technology evolves, the more evidentit becomes that a unied approach to data s torage isneeded. At the oundation, unied storage means that astorage system can support multiple storage accessprotocols simultaneously: NAS protocols or applictionsthat store and access storage in unstructured les and

SAN protocols or applications that store and accessblock-level data.

NetApp pioneered unied storage access capability backin 2002 and has shipped well over 150,000 unied storagesystems since then. Today, other storage vendors arejust beginning to oer the basic level o unied storagecapabilities that NetApp oered nine years ago.

Talk to us to get a unied storage solution that will growwith your business and use 50% less storage with NetAppcompared to a baseline o traditional storage.


netapp_10_smart_stg.pdf

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