smart storage : in the age of the cloud

7/28/2019 Smart Storage : In The Age Of The Cloud

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WHITE PAPER

SMART STORAGE

INTHEAGEOFTHECLOUD

Robin Bloor, Ph D



Contents

......................................................Introduction and Executive Summary 2

.........................................................The Ever Expanding Data Resource 3

.................................................................What Does This Mean For Data Storage?! 3

...................................................................................................Storage Cost Trends! 4

.................................................................................................Cloud Storage Trends! 4

...............................................................................Storage TCO And Cloud Storage! 5

............................................................................The Storage Challenges 7

.....................................................................Supporting Application Service Levels! 7

...............................................................................................Supporting Data Flows! 7

..............................................................................Supporting Application Recovery! 8

........................................................................................Supporting User Capability! 8

................................................................Practical Constraints On Storage Options! 9

................................................Tactics Than Can Be Used To Meet The Challenge! 10

...............................................................................................................In Summary! 11

.................................IBM: Smarter Storage With An Accent On Agility 12

........................................................................................Best Practices Innovation! 12

.............................................................................................Reducing Labor Costs ! 12

......................................................................................................Self Optimization ! 14

......................................................................................Easy Tier and Right Tiering !

14 ...............................................................................Other Optimization Capabilities ! 14

..............................................................................................................The Benefits! 15

..................................................................................Real-Time Data Compression ! 15

..................................................................................................Data Deduplication ! 16

...........................................................................................................Cloud Storage! 17

......................................................................Towards Flexible Cloud Infrastructure ! 17

.........................................................................................................Cloud Strategy ! 18

.......................................................................................................Overall Summary! 18

SMARTSTORAGE INTHEAGEOFTHECLOUD

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Introduction and Executive Summary

In this paper we review IBM’s Smarter Storage portfolio of data storage and managementproducts in the light of the challenges that most data centers face in managing the corporatedata resource. Our conclusions are summarized by the following bullet points:

• The exponential growth in data volumes has been fairly constant for many years,varying very little from an average of about 55% per annum - it more than doublesevery two years. Currently, Big Data is an aspect of this, especially for somecompanies whose data growth far exceeds the average.

• The decline in the cost of storage hardware has also been fairly constant at about 35%per annum, which for most businesses does not compensate for data growth. This isparticularly so when you take into account that many storage costs; labor and otherdata center costs, such as power and cooling, are not declining at this rate. Labor costsin particular are increasing.

• As a consequence storage costs, already likely to be at 40% or more of data center

costs, are rising as a percentage of the IT budget.• This presents a difficult challenge for IT. The question is simply this: “How can we

bring storage costs under control, while continuing to support or improve existingservice levels and be prepared for whatever new requirement may suddenly emerge?”

• IBM has branded its solution to this problem with the words Smarter Storage. It has,correctly in our view, concluded that data storage can only be effectively broughtunder control by automation at every level. In its storage management portfolio, itnow offers innovative new hardware options, software based automation of datamigration, and compression and unified data storage administration capabilities thatreduce the labor involved in managing the whole data storage resource.

• As well as examining trends in data growth and storage technology, in this paper wediscuss all the tactics that are available to IT departments to reduce storage TCOincluding: new technology adoption, tuning hierarchical storage, data consolidation, back-up and data migration options, data deduplication, data compression, cloudstorage and cloud migration. IBM embraces and enables all of these tactics within itsportfolio of Smarter Storage products.

• In summary IBM provides customers with the opportunity to:

-Simplify the management of the whole storage resource.

-Exploit and enhance existing storage technology.

-Considerably reduce storage TCO.

-Move the data center towards a cloud style of storage management.

• In our view IBM does not just provide a portfolio of cutting edge storage technology, itenables customers to inject flexibility into inflexible storage infrastructure andmodernize their whole data storage strategy. Companies who are grappling with themany problems of data growth and storage management would be wise to considerwhat IBM’s Smarter Storage can achieve.


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The Ever Expanding Data Resource

The Bloor Group’s annual review of the IT industry, The Janus Papers for 2012, we identifiedthree major IT trends. None of them could have caused much of a surprise. They were: Thegrowth of cloud computing, the growth of mobile computing and the growth of BI

technology. We also identified the growth in the deployment of virtual machines, classifying itas a phenomenon that walked hand-in-hand with cloud computing. All of these areestablished trends that have been on the march for over five years and currently show nosigns of losing momentum.

They are also easy to rationalize. Computer hardware, including networking technologies,has continued to increase in power and decline in price at every level for years, and with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, it is clear that this has driven all of these trends. For providers likeAmazon and RackSpace, cloud computing is driven by economies of scale and thedeployment of commodity hardware walking hand-in-hand with virtualization technology.For the corporation, both private cloud computing and public cloud computing are driven byconvenience and value for money.

The second trend, mobile computing, may be consumer led, but it has opened up manyopportunities in corporate computing to enhance business processes, both in quality andspeed of service. It is driven by a deluge of cheap and increasingly powerful mobile devices.

The motivation for investing in BI is clearly business led and for good reason. According to a2012 study entitled The New Intelligent Enterprise , a joint MIT Sloan Management Reviewand IBM Institute of Business Value analytics research partnership, analytically sophisticatedcompanies are 2.2 times more likely to outperform industry peers and 260% more likely to betop performers. Their revenue growth is 1.6 times greater than the norm and their stock priceappreciation is 2.5 times higher stock prices appreciation. This trend is financially led.

BI has been empowered by the increase in computer power, enabling on the one hand theassembly of very large multi-terabyte to petabyte collections of data and on the other handanalytical technology that can process such data volumes or process more traditional datavolumes much faster - often significantly improving the speed and the results of BI activity.

Such opportunities do not arrive without some associated difficulties. The assembling of largedata files and databases pose problems in the area of back-up and recovery, as doesvirtualization. No matter what tactics are adopted for back-up and recovery there is noavoiding the fact that back-ups double the amount of data held and that recovery, when largeamounts of data are involved, can be slower than desired.

What Does This Mean For Data Storage?

Corporate data volumes grow at a rate of about 55% per year and have been doing so formany years. Glance through old IDC and Gartner reports in this area and it becomes clearthat the growth rate has been fairly consistent for decades. In recessionary years, the growthrate dips down a little, only to climb above the average in better economic times.

Ultimately the value of data to the business determines what data will be captured andstored, and this is constrained by the cost involved in storing, managing and backing upadditional data. However, the volume of data stored is rarely determined by directly decidingwhat data must be stored. Usually existing business applications have a fairly predictable


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growth rate, and this is likely to be well below the general average growth rate of about 55%.It is accommodated and allowed for as a matter of course. But beyond that, new compellingapplications are added: Big Data applications, BI applications, mobile applications, cloudapplications and so on. These usually account for most of the data growth.

Storage Cost TrendsIn terms of the price of storage hardware, hardware costs have been dropping fairlypredictably, while data volumes have been growing. Sadly, costs have not been dropping asswiftly as data volumes have been rising. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) which are the primarycomponent of local disk store, Network Attached Store (NAS) and Storage Area Networks(SANs) have, in recent years, been declining in cost at a rate of about 35% (measured in $ pergigabyte). Historically, HDD cost declines have at times been as high as 50% but they havenever balanced out the rate of data growth.

Solid State Disks (SSDs) have proved to be a boon to storage technology in respect of thespeed of speed of access. For reading data they perform roughly five to eight times faster than

HDD, although they offer less advantage for writes. However the cost of SSDs is roughly 20times greater than HDD and thus, while they are very useful for latency issues, they do nothelp to address the costs associated with increasing data volumes. The cost of SSDs is fallingat roughly 50% per annum which, again, is less than the growth in data volumes. If currenttrends persist the cost of SSD v HDD (50% decline v 35% decline) will not result in equal costsfor both at least another 15 years.

A parallel to this can be seen in the use of tape systems for back-up, archiving and long termdata storage. Predictions of the demise of tape storage have been common for over 10 years, but the tape storage market has not declined significantly. Some current predictions suggestthat it may now decline gracefully, at about -2% CAGR, while others suggest it may evengrow. There is no consensus, but tape still dominates the competing back-up and archiveoptions of compression to disk, purpose-built back-up appliances (PBBA) and cloud storage.Tape hardware currently costs about 30% of the equivalent cost of HDD for back-ups, but itdeclines in price slowly at about 5% per annum. This is not a simple comparison, of course, because tape media is inexpensive for archiving and HDD is not a viable archive medium.

Cloud Storage Trends

In respect of the cloud we need to consider both the public cloud and the private cloud. Datastorage in the public cloud is popular and its popularity is growing. Amazon, by far thedominant cloud storage provider for the enterprise with its Amazon S3 service, grew itsstorage service by 192% in 2011, on top of triple digit growth in previous years. Nevertheless,

the cost per Gbyte of Amazon S3 storage is falling relatively slowly, at a rate of just under 20%per annum. Cloud storage services vary and so do prices. Some provide a limited amount of free capacity, some offer data encryption and some offer real-time file synchronization formultiple devices.

There are obvious uses for public cloud data storage, where the economics are favorable, fordata archiving and for back-up and recovery of applications already running in the cloud.However there are practical limitations.


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Many applications cannot simply migrate to the public cloud because of applicationdependencies and service level imperatives. In the main, the public cloud providescommodity hardware and commodity level services. Suitable candidates for the public cloudare silo systems with few dependencies and undemanding service levels, which can bemoved as a unit to the public cloud.

The private cloud is far more flexible for several reasons, most of which stem from the factthat the data center has complete control of the environment; the network, the hardwaredeployed, the operating systems, the virtualization technology and the system managementand monitoring software. The advantages of the private cloud, for both for storagemanagement and application management are:

• Users can be provided with universal connectivity, from anywhere and potentially any

device, to any application in the private cloud without any loss of control overperformance.

• Businesses can be more agile and better able to respond to frequently changingrequirements.

• New applications and services can be implemented swiftly to deliver value as soon as

possible.

• Costs can be reduced and closely managed, both in respect of capital and operating

expenses.

The last of these advantages, cost management and reduction, is worth further comment.

Storage TCO And Cloud Storage

Hardware acquisition cost is only a small portion of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of storage. The other costs include: software purchase and maintenance, hardware maintenance,labor for storage management, including back-up and disaster recovery, power consumptionand cooling, data center floor space, cost of outages, data security and more.

As a rough rule of thumb, the total cost of acquisition (TCA) of storage technology will likely be around 20% of the TCO - and in recent years the TCA as a percentage of TCO has beenfalling. The costs that have clearly been rising as a proportion of TCO are: data center floorspace costs, power consumption and cooling costs, and labor costs.

Labor costs for the various activities involved in managing storage are normally higher thanthe storage TCA, and labor costs, even adjusted for inflation, have risen over the past tenyears. They now make up about 25% of the storage TCO, but can be higher. Data center floorspace together with power consumption and cooling are likely to be 10% or more of thestorage TCO. Other costs include related hardware costs (networking costs and server costs

that can be attributed to stronger management), disaster recovery costs and serviceinterruption costs.

The private cloud is an attractive option for storage because it can reduce operating costsacross the board, particularly labor costs if sensible technology choices are made. This is acomplex area of IT costs to analyze, since many related factors can be involved. These includethe strategic aspect of planning for data growth. It is possible, for example, to reduce shortterm costs with specific technology choices, which will inevitably generate future costs.


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The private cloud is particularly appealing because it allows both data and applicationswhich run in the private cloud to make more efficient use of resources. While, for service leveland other practical reasons, the public cloud is constrained in its usage, those organizationsthat can exploit and manage the private cloud effectively will probably be able to migrate tothe public cloud smoothly when it is able to support the software and data management

capabilities that can currently be achieved within the private cloud.


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The Storage Challenges

The prime responsibility of an IT Department is to enable and support the enterprise inrunning business applications and providing users with access to IT services and to data. ITprovides a whole variety of services and its effectiveness can and should be measured in

terms its ability to deliver those services efficiently and economically.Dealing with data storage effectively is a major part of this responsibility, but it cannot beconsidered entirely in isolation from other IT activities. This becomes clear if we just considerthe various application service levels an IT Department may be required to support.

Supporting Application Service Levels

There are many dimensions to service levels that can impact data storage:

• As data volume grows application performance usually deteriorates. So if the amountof data doubles, response times are likely to more than double. This is because mostapplications were never built to scale linearly. A hardware upgrade to resolve this

performance issue can be complex and may be expensive.• When data volumes double, back-up files are likely to double in size, but also back-

ups will take longer. Consequently, the “back-up” window may not be long enough. If so, the approach to back-up may need to change - for example by moving to replicateddatabases or data mirroring. This may mean moving from tape back-up to disk.

• Application upgrades usually increase data volumes. It is not guaranteed, but it islikely. Database growth can be surprisingly high with relatively small changes - and itdiffers from one database product to another. Just adding an index to a large table cancause a leap in the storage required. The decision to store database data in Unicodeformat has been known to increase database size by 10 percent or more.

• Requests for increases in service levels may mandate changes to how backup isperformed, particularly if the request involves running an application 24/7.Regulatory changes can increase the time that archive data needs to be held. Requeststo retain data for longer prior to archive can increase data volumes considerably.

• Server virtualization usually increases the amount of data storage required, mainly because of back-up and recovery issues.

• The data storage requirements of new applications are not easily predictable,especially in-house applications. It is often difficult to provision the appropriateamount of storage from the start and plan adequately for its growth

Supporting Data Flows

Data flow support is distinct from application support. With BI applications, there is normallya flow of data from operational systems through ETL software and data cleansing software todata warehouses, from which data marts are extracted, which may in turn feed desktopanalytics applications running on desktop databases. And these are probably not the onlyapplication dependencies that involve data flows.

• Data flows have dependencies which can be difficult to satisfy from a service levelperspective since any link in the chain may break and need to be recovered. Whendata flows move more swiftly they may increase the disk capacity needed to support


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them, since data can pile up in one place or another. Such data pile-ups also happen if a link in the data flow chain breaks as it inevitably will some day.

• The storage capacity required for BI applications that support user self service can bedifficult to predict unless storage limits are agreed and kept. User requests for greaterdata capacity are often met even when they go beyond what was agreed.

• Data flows span environments and involve communications resources as well asstorage resources. Cloud-based applications (i.e. SaaS) limit the versatility of dataflows as the cloud provider naturally imposes their own rules of how and when datatransfers can occur.

• The private cloud poses less of a problem in this respect, although data flows with theprivate cloud can be difficult to manage effectively unless good technology choices aremade. Adding new data flows usually increases the interdependency of applications,increases data storage requirements (for data staging) and increases the risk of servicelevel violation. The current trend to Big Data is particularly likely to provoke new dataflows since analytical data marts drawn from the “big database” tend to proliferate.

Supporting Application Recovery

With legacy silo applications there are few storage challenges in the area of back-up andrecovery, even where data growth is high. Application silos are inherently inefficient in theiruse of resources - i.e. they over-provisioned. With high data growth that inefficiency willcontinue to persist. This why there is so much enthusiasm for the private cloud. In the privatecloud resources are shared far more effectively. However there are some challenges to this.

• Running applications in several virtual machines on the same server means that thefailure of the server - and it will happen one day - will result in the need to restoremultiple application simultaneously. Each application that failed will need to go

through its recovery process and if all these applications are restarted on a “new”server then they will all be actively recovering at the same time. Since applicationrecovery is often an intensive workload this may increase recovery time, and hencelead to longer outages. This recovery challenge includes the application databases andtheir log files (assuming the chosen tactic for recovery involves log files rather thanmirroring or some other form of replication).

• Where there are distinct application dependencies and critical data flows exist between applications, the problem is further compounded. It then becomes a matter of ensuring the recovery of multiple related applications in a coherent way which alsoensures that application down time is minimized.

Supporting User Capability

By user capability, we mean user services as well as user devices: desktops and mobiledevices. This generates other challenges:

• It would be ideal for every user to be able to connect with every application and everydata service with the ability, where appropriate to view data and to run applicationson their user device, or in a client/server manner between their device and a datacenter server. Such a capability requires a back-up and recovery capability whichextends to the device. Security is particularly an issue with mobile computing as


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mobile devices are frequently lost or stolen, so data may need to be encrypted andmust be backed-up.

• Mobile computing, like desktop computing before it, has spawned many newapplications. It has also added new dimensions to many applications. It hasspecifically added location information to some applications and it also supports andencourages the use of image, audio and video data. This means data growth and itmay well mean better connectivity since the data involved is likely to be dispersed between different data stores and applications.

• While desktop computing is fairly mature in terms of disk storage and data recovery,there is a trend to virtual desktops which alters the storage requirements. In particularvirtual desktops usually move storage capacity from the desktop into the data center(or possibly into the cloud).

Practical Constraints On Storage Options

When an IT Department reviews its data storage strategy it has no choice but to start from

exactly where it finds itself. There may be many ways in which it can cut costs, improveservice and cater for planned new systems. However, some of the possibilities will excludethemselves simply because of obvious practical constraints. These may include:

• Data Center Space: When an organization exceeds the capacity of an existing datacenter, the capital expenditure involved in acquiring more data center space may beprohibitive. This will be the case if building or renting a whole new data center becomes necessary. Data center space is expensive so it is a priority not to exceed thecapacity of what currently exists - indeed not to even come close to doing so. In suchsituations, the private cloud is likely to be a positive boon. Because of its efficiency it islikely to consume far less data center space and consume less power. Datacompression, which can significantly reduce the amount of physical disk space needed

can play a part in this.• Budget: In commercial companies the IT budget is likely, in total, to make up about

15% of business costs. Naturally this varies from company to company. Howevergiven that storage is often a large slice of that, getting more budget for investment inmore effective storage technology may not be easy to achieve even if a strong case can be made for the investment.

• Project Capacity: The operational area of IT can only run so many infrastructureimprovement projects at any time. There is a limit on the number of staff available tocarry out such projects. There may be many projects that could improve the economicsof the data center, including: server virtualization projects, private cloud projects,

platform migration projects, data and/or application migration projects, desktopvirtualization projects and many more. Such projects often impact each other, but anyone of these projects could deliver a desirable return on investment if carried out well.

• Existing Technology: There are a variety of ways in which storage costs can bereduced or kept low, but for simple technical reasons, some of options might not bepractical because of the technology already deployed. Constraints might be technical, based on almost any existing infrastructure hardware or software. They might befinancial as many technology purchases are amortized over a specific period and thetechnology cannot be retired until a particular time.


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• Service Levels: Some storage options, although attractive for, say, cost reasons, mightnot be able to satisfy the back-up and recovery or disaster recovery service levels thatare currently agreed.

• Wiggle Room and Unpredictable Requirements: IT Departments usually over-provision all hardware to some degree knowing that new, unpredictable yetunavoidable needs for additional capacity may suddenly develop. The need, forexample, to provide for and organize PC security was a shock for IT. Then email usagesuddenly exploded, the Internet emerged, then mobile devices and then Big Data.

Tactics Than Can Be Used To Meet The Challenge

There is a limited range of tactics available to address the perpetual challenge of optimizingdata storage. They include:

• New Technology Adoption: Whether in the form of new hardware or softwarestorage options, or significant upgrades to familiar technology, opportunities toimprove the characteristics of the storage layer regularly occur. The main issue here is

what to choose and when to choose it, as the approach to storage needs to be well balanced so that data storage is optimized as a whole - for the long term, if possible.

• Tuning Hierarchical Storage: Data storage management will, to some degree, involvetuning the hierarchy of data storage until the day that all data has migrated to thecloud - if such a day ever arrives. This can involve regularly deleting data completelyfrom archives as well as deciding not to archive some data. Aside from that it involvesmoving “cold” data to slower less expensive storage devices or into archive, while“warm” data moves in the opposite direction - in short, optimizing the movement of data through hierarchical store. IBM refers to this as “right tiering.” Naturally thisneeds to be done without violating service levels.

• Data Consolidation: This usually means consolidating data to NAS devices or SANsto make more effective use of disk space. Usually standalone HDD is far lessefficiently used than either NAS (usually used for files) and SANs (usually used fordata blocks and database storage). Often as little as 25% of the capacity of HDD isactually used, although this depends on context. Most organizations have pursuedthis tactic to some degree already but there will likely be room for improvement.Where the technology supports it, thin provisioning (virtual provisioning) can beemployed. This reduces physical storage allocation to include only data written todisk rather than reserving large amounts of resource space ahead the need for it.

• Back-up And Data Migration Options: Storage space can be significantly reduced byusing a Change Data Capture (CDC) approach when backing up or transferring data

from one location to another. Since only changes to data are captured to back-up files(or to intermediate files in data flows) considerable disk space is saved. This is alsocontextual and will not necessarily work in every situation. Alternatively, a differentapproach to data back-up may be more economic. Data replication of databases or filescan, in some circumstances, save storage space, for example by using a replicated back-up of a database for query traffic. Such tactics can also be used in disasterrecovery procedures. Again this is contextual.

• Data Deduplication: This is also referred to as single-instance storage. The idea is thatonly one unique instance of a file or possibly a block of data is ever kept. At the other


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locations where the file or data block exists, a pointer is placed to point to the uniqueversion. This can be particularly effective in reducing the physical volume of archiveddata, especially where block deduplication is implemented.

• Data Compression: Both CDC and data deduplication are forms of data compression.There are other approaches to data compression which can be applied to data files ordatabases that write compressed data directly to disk. As some databases alreadymake active use of data compression, this tactic cannot be applied indiscriminately. Itis important to know that data compression must involve data decompression whenthe data is used, which will present a processing overhead. Data compression needs to be intelligently implemented.

• Cloud Storage: The private cloud approach to data storage can deliver significanteconomies of scale, particularly when used in conjunction with some of the tacticsalready discussed. Virtualization within the private cloud is inherently more resourceefficient at every level; CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth. Most importantlyit encapsulates what we believe to be the most promising storage technology direction

organizations have available to them; the virtualization of the data storage resourcewithin the data center. The cloud is not a panacea for all the storage challenges, but itis an important element in meeting many of them. Ultimately, private clouds providethe foundation for the possible migration of data and applications to the public cloud.

In Summary

We have provided here our view of the challenges that corporate IT departments face inmanaging the storage resource. We can summarize the situation as follows:

• Existing service levels, changes to service levels and service levels for newly deployedapplications all need to be fully supported as time marches on.

• The organization’s data flows, including any extensions or enhancements to themneed to be monitored and effectively managed.

• Improving and more diverse user services and user devices need to be supported.

• Disaster recovery, and normal backup and recovery, need to stay in step.

There is a variety of new and changing requirements which can be expected to grow withtime. The situation is made more onerous by a series of practical constraints. These include:data center space, budget constraints, capacity for change, the constraints of deployedtechnologies, service level limitations and the emergence of unpredicted requirements.

The tactics that can be employed to meet these challenges include: new technology adoption,the tuning of hierarchical store, alternative approaches to back-up, data deduplication, data

compression, private cloud and public cloud storage.The solution that organizations choose will inevitably apply these tactics, but for the bestoutcome, they need to be combined into a long term strategy for managing the data storageresource.


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IBM: Smarter Storage With An Accent On Agility

The corporate data resource will not be made more manageable without increasing theflexibility of the storage infrastructure and the approach to managing it. Organizations haveto deal with an exponentially increasing data volume that, on average, doubles every two

years. While that doubling may seem predictable to some degree, the source of the next waveof disruption is usually not. Will the next challenge come from real-time streaming? Or will it be Big Data from social media or Big Data from web site logs or even external sources?Whatever it is, what will be the impact on overall data volumes, back-up strategies, disasterrecovery and data archiving? There is unlikely to be any certainty in predicting futurerequirements or in trying to predict technology costs or future changes in capability.

In these circumstances, IBM, as a premier provider of storage technology, has focused onembedding intelligence, flexibility and agility in its storage technology to help ITorganizations meet the challenge of the next big thing, whatever it will be.

Best Practices Innovation

An important step in addressing data storage challenges is to consider storage best practices.IBM, in a continuous study of its multitude of customer engagements and its own internalstorage management activities, identified five storage best practice areas:

1. Establishing a storage process and governance model

2. Reclaiming and exploiting unused storage space

3. Virtualization and tiered storage systems

4. Modernizing and automating backup, restore, and disaster recovery

5. Automating archive, retention and compliance

Such activities are clearly key because of the economies in resource efficiency and laborefficiency that may be won. But if all such activities are conducted manually it will be difficultif not impossible to optimize them. It will be slow and labor intensive, even if done well. Forthis reason IBM chose to embody all of these best practices in the design of its storageproducts, so that they could be partially or completely automated. In essence this is what IBMmeans by “Smarter Storage.”

The inclusion of best practices in the design of storage technology is an innovation of itself, but IBM’s storage innovation is not limited to that. Table 1 on the following page lists theprimary IBM storage products. We discuss these below, along with technology features thatIBM has been integrating into its storage products that boost their efficiency significantly.

Reducing Labor CostsFor most data centers the escalating labor costs of managing storage are a primary concern.IBM‘s portfolio of storage products addresses this issue in multiple ways, as follows:

• The Advanced Administration Interface: This is feature of IBM Tivoli StorageProductivity Center (v5.1). It integrates the management interface across multiplestorage systems (IBM XIV, IBM SONAS, IBM System Storage DS8000, Storwize V7000Unified and SVC) and thus can embrace legacy storage devices. Because of the unifiedinterface administrators no longer need to master several disparate management


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interfaces. It reduces complexity, simplifying the storage management process. It is

expected that IBM will soon add this same interface to its IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.• Data Consolidation: Data consolidation can deliver the twin benefits of reducing data

center floor space and reducing the labor costs of managing storage. To this end IBM’sStorewize V7000 virtualized storage systems consolidate multiple heterogeneousSANs into a single virtual SAN improving storage utilization and simplifying SANmanagement. Similarly IBM’s SONAS consolidates NAS store into a singlenamespace.

• Automated Hierarchical Storage Management: IBM’s SAN Volume Controller, itsStorewize V7000 and its DS8000 include Easy Tier, which automatically manages themigration of highly active data from slower to faster responding storage devices, fromHDD to SDD. The dynamic movement of data is invisible to applications using it. It

saves the labor associated with managing hierarchical storage and improvesperformance.

The potential cost savings with this technology are significant. An April, 2012 cost studycarried out by Edison Group, comparing IBM’s Storewide V7000 to EMC VNX5500, estimatedthat IBM delivered administration time savings of 47%, which on a 48 drive 14.4 TB storagesystem translated to an advantage of ⅓ of a full time administrator. The cost savings in thatstudy do not fully take into account some of the advantages of the Advanced AdministrationInterface and they do not include the automated data migration delivered by Easy Tier.


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Table 1. IBM’s Primary Storage Products

IBM Storage Product Description

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Storage resource management software that provides acentral point of control for automating and managingheterogeneous storage infrastructure

IBM Storwize V7000 & Storwize V7000Unified

Virtualized storage systems (SANs) that consolidateworkloads into a single storage system. This includesIBM Easy Tier for automated tiering

IBM System Storage SAN VolumeController

Device with preinstalled software (currently V7) thatprovides a single point of control for heterogeneousstorage resources. This product also includes Easy Tier

IBM Scale Out Network Attach Storage(SONAS)

NAS that scales out to support the storing of billions ofactive files in a single name space

IBM Real-time Compression AppliancesSTN6500 and STN6800

Appliances that compresses data to NAS disk storage inreal-time without performance degradation

IBM XIV Storage System High-end high availability disk storage systemparticularly suited to cloud and virtualized environments

IBM System Storage DS8000 Series Self-optimized IBM disk system that spans bothdistributed server environments and the mainframe

IBM System Storage ProtecTIER 7620,7650G and 7680

Family of IBM real-time data deduplication appliancesthat compress data for back-up and archive



IBM’s Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, has attracted the approval of the IT analyst industry,with Gartner positioning as the leader in its Storage Resource Management and SANManagement Software Magic Quadrant.

Self Optimization

Self optimizing storage is one of the keys to reducing labor costs as a proportion of storagemanagement costs, but it delivers other advantages, including raw performance and agility.IBM’s Smarter Storage vision embraces the idea that storage should be self-optimizing andthis now runs like a thread through its storage portfolio. It embodies the idea of “righttiering” which means automatically delivering “fast enough” storage at the lowest possiblecost.

Easy Tier and Right Tiering

Designed for simplicity, IBM’s Easy Tier, was the industry’s first auto-tiering solution. Itdynamically migrates data between HDD and SSD. The benefit it delivers depends upon theworkload and the amount of SSD available. For example, with 10% of data placed on SSD, it

has been proven to boost storage performance by up to 300% in a transaction processingenvironment.

That level of improvement was demonstrated by IBM in tests that simulated a brokerageworkload. IBM has also published a SPC-1 benchmark with Easy Tier that achieved a 300%performance increase using less than 3% solid-state storage. The SPC-1 benchmark simulateshigh I/O throughput requirements, sensitive I/O response time constraints, and dynamicworkload behaviors.

In the relatively new workload of managing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Easy Tiereliminates common VDI performance issues: peak loads when many PCs start up at the sametime or run virus scans or install software updates. Easy Tier can usually reduce wait times

dramatically with just a small percentage of data held on SSD.Easy Tier focuses on the whole workload. While it will migrate data to faster storage to gainperformance, in the spirit of automated “right tiering” it will also relegate less urgent data tolowest cost storage. Thus it may be possible to fund HDD investment for critical applicationssimply by right tiering non-critical applications. Right tiering can save costs in manyorganizations because the over-provisioning of fast storage is common, often to the pointwhere almost all data is held on top tier storage.

IBM plans to enhance this capability further soon, by enabling Easy Tier to usurp traditionalstorage boundaries and support direct attached server storage. Through Application AssistedData Placement IBM will allow applications and middleware to interface directly with Easy

Tier to optimize storage at the application level.

Other Optimization Capabilities

IBM’s approach to storage technology is founded on data virtualization which removes thephysical link between applications and the data they use. The obvious and immediate benefitof this is that data can be physically relocated with neither applications nor their users beingdisturbed or even knowing that it is occurring. Data virtualization makes right-tieringpossible and it also assists other optimization features.


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One of these is thin provisioning. Thin provisioning is the provisioning of virtual disk volumes and drives without reserving the physical space, but dynamically providing it just intime, when it is needed. Hand in hand with thin provisioning goes thin mirroring, where aprimary data volume is fully provisioned - usually for the sake of better performance - but themirrored volume is thinly provisioned. Remote mirroring, which may play a part in back-up

and disaster recovery arrangements, can also involve thin mirroring. These capabilitiescomplement right tiering.

The Benefits

IBM’s Boulder, Colorado data center was, understandably, an early adopter of right tiering. Itimplemented it on an already efficient storage infrastructure. This data center currentlymanages about 100 petabytes of storage, counting production and back-up data. During theimplementation, data migration, which had originally been estimated as needing almost 6man weeks of effort was completed in only 6 man hours. Resource mapping, which couldhave taken several weeks using older tools was done automatically. The ultimate impact was

$13 million in infrastructure cost savings, with a 50% reduction in the unit cost of storage.One of IBM’s customers, a cloud application service provider that runs ERP applications forits customers achieved a key benefit with Easy Tier in the area of performance. With previousstorage systems application performance was variable, with access times drifting up to 25milliseconds at peak times. With Easy Tier, using flash optimization, the ERP database reliablydelivered access times in the narrow 1 and 2 milliseconds range at all times. The customerwas particularly impressed that the storage system required no manual tuning.

Contexts can vary, but as a general rule, automated ‘right tiering’ is likely to reduce the unitcost of storage by up to 50%, or with a little investment in SSD, it can cure performanceheadaches.Contexts can vary, but as a general rule, automated ‘right tiering’ is likely toreduce the unit cost of storage by up to 50%, or with a little investment in SSD, it can cureperformance headaches.

Real-Time Data Compression

IBM’s real-time data compression is a unique patented technology. IBM offers a range of Real-time Compression Appliances to work hand-in-hand with other storage technology and thecapability is also baked into its Storwize V7000 and V7000 Unified, and its System StorageSAN Volume Controller.

The technology compresses data as it is written to a storage device and decompresses it whenit is read without there being any need to change applications in any way. Critically, itimposes almost no overhead in performing the compression. Application performance is

either unaffected or improved and storage space will be significantly reduced.The actual level of compression varies with the type of data as illustrated in the adjacent tablewhich shows the results of tests IBM has performed. Note that the compression rate shownfor databases applies to databases that are not implementing internal compressiontechniques. As such, customers may need to reconfigure a database prior to implementingreal-time compression for that data.

At the moment IBM’s Real-time Compression and its Easy Tier capability are not supportedconcurrently on the same virtual disk volumes. However, compression does work in harmony


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with other IBM storage automation featuressuch as thin provisioning, data virtualizationand data migration. Like thin provisioning andthin mirroring, real-time data compression isvisible to the administrator and configurable

through the IBM storage administrationinterface.

Perhaps the most important aspect of IBM’sReal-time Compression is that it does notcompromise performance. As such, it should beusable in any processing context. Previousattempts by the IT industry to build this kind of capability failed to avoid a performance penaltyand thus have had a far more limited area of application.

In testing this for an OLTP workload thatsimulated 700 users interacting with a 1.2TBOracle database, using IBM Storwize V7000 with48 disks, IBM’s real-time compression achieved 997 transactions per minute. The performancewith uncompressed data was 996 transactions per minute. For a simulated email workloadrunning against a 1.6TB Exchange database on the same hardware, real-time compressiondelivered 1,871 reads per second and 1,055 write per second, while with uncompressed datathe results were 1,568 reads and 891 write per second. Performance was improved by about18% with data compressed by about 40%.

IBM customers are now confirming these benefits. For example, an IBM customer was able tocompress 3-D animation files by up to 70 percent while improving file access times. IBMestimates that its Real-time Compression can reduce the cost per TB up to 40%, whencompared to uncompressed storage.

Data Deduplication

Strategically IBM’s data deduplication capabilities can be viewed as complementary to itsdata compression technology. They both reduce data storage requirements but in differentways for different contexts. IBM provides coordinated data deduplication capabilities inseveral parts of its storage hardware and software portfolio, including in its SONAShardware, in Tivoli Storage Manager and via its ProtecTier® appliances which are highlyscalable and built for large data centers.

ProtecTier can be thought of as creating a Virtual Tape Library that is written to disk. Thelevel of data compression it achieves is very high, often reducing disk space requirement by afactor of 25 or more. It is particularly effective for back-up and recovery, where the amount of data duplication can be very high. It can also play a central role in disaster recovery strategies.Because it is an in-line appliance it removes any resource overhead (CPU and memoryworkloads) that might otherwise present a service level or resource issue for software baseddata reduplication.


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Table 2. Data Compression Rates

Data

Classification

Compression

Rate

Uncompressed database

(Oracle or DB2)

Up to 80%

VMware Virtual Servers

(Linux)

Up to 70%

VMware Virtual Servers

(Windows)

Up to 50%

Microsoft Office files (2003) Up to 75%

Microsoft Office files (2007

or later)

Up to 20%

CAD/CAM files Up to 70%



The data reduction methods used by Tivoli Storage Manager (also Tivoli Storage ManagerFastBack) employ a file and block level progressive incremental backup approach. Theoperational workload is reduced considerably compared to full back-up, leading to faster backup and recovery.

IBM also partners with network technology providers (for example, Juniper and Riverbed) todeliver data deduplication in WAN optimization appliances. Here data is deduplicated beforetransferring across the network, thus reducing network traffic. This can speed up disasterrecovery strategies that span a WAN.

Cloud Storage

As a multitude of surveys indicate, corporate IT is gradually adopting public cloudcomputing through SaaS and IaaS services. It is also clear that most large organizations aredoing this in a measured way, by configuring private clouds within their data centers andmigrating their applications and data to the private cloud before considering public cloudservices. In harmony with this trend, IBM has readied its technology for the cloud style of

computing. Currently it is focused on establishing private cloud capability, which it refers toas Cloud Agile storage.

The most cloud relevant aspect of IBM’s approach is its storage virtualization technology.

Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization means removing the dependency applications have for specificphysical disk resources. Once applications can interact with virtual files and volumes, thephysical resources that provide the underlying storage service can be changed at any time aslong as service levels are not violated. Virtual storage can be more reliable and yet allowsadministrators to migrate data, upgrade physical hardware or provision new resourceswithout service disruption.

IBM invented virtualized storage over three decades ago and has been an innovator in thistechnology area, bringing the first storage virtualization appliance, its SAN VolumeController (SVC), to market in 2003. This feature is now present in its XIV, Storwize V7000and V7000U, and in SONAS. With SVC and Storwize V7000 IBM combines both IBM andnon-IBM storage into a singe virtual storage pool. In practice this enables legacy storagesystems to acquire Smarter Storage capabilities such as thin provisioning, remote mirroring,automatic right-tiering and real-time compression.

Towards Flexible Cloud Infrastructure

IBM’s Cloud Agile storage provides the ability to migrate data and applications into a privatecloud, between private clouds and, to some degree, from private cloud to appropriate publiccloud resources. Complementing the IBM storage systems, the important softwarecomponents are:

• IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center: This provides consistent storage resourcemanagement and SAN management for private clouds and for the whole data center.

• IBM Active Cloud Engine: This is policy engine that allows the creation and executionof policies for files, so that data migration between storage tiers or between differentfacilities is transparent to users. Individual files or whole directories can be moved.


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• IBM Storage Service Catalog: This links user requirements to IT capabilities andstorage resources. Its goal is to satisfy service levels in the most economic way.

• Tivoli Storage Manager Suite for Unified Recovery: This caters to individual back-upand recovery requirements whilst also aligning them with disaster recovery needs. Itallows for data deduplication and incremental back-up.

With the inclusion of these components, IBM delivers optimized storage services for cloudapplications, most of which will be hosted on virtual servers, require virtualized storage andneed integrated backup services. It is worth noting here that the Tivoli Storage Manager Suiteembodies deduplication. In effect it provides a fast back-up and recovery capability whichcan ease or eliminate the service level challenges that can occur in private cloud deployments.The Active Cloud Engine embodies the ability to migrate data whenever needed and toautomatically provision new storage resource. This addresses some of the user servicechallenges while the IBM Storage Service Catalog meets the connectivity challenges posed bythe private cloud.

IBM’s Cloud Agile storage is optimized for rapid deployment of private clouds, and also

provides essential infrastructure for public cloud providers.

One of IBM’s customers, a fast growing cloud company that provides secure messaging andemail services to large and midsize organizations, deployed IBM technology to build anapplication and infrastructure capability. The company provides email and messagingservices at a pay-as-you-go cost that is below the internal costs of most organizations. It usesIBM’s Storwize V7000 along with its associated software components. According to thecompany president, “IBM offered a 60% cost savings over other storage systems for our cloudservice.”

Cloud Strategy

Our view is that a considered cloud strategy requires the step-by-step virtualization of thecorporate data resource, where appropriate in parallel with application virtualization. Theprimary challenge is to manage this process in a way that keeps costs low. This calls forautomation to reduce labor costs and keep other data center costs low. IBM providestechnology which is capable of this.

In doing so it elegantly addresses the challenges of backup and recovery (including disasterrecovery) that are posed by the adoption of the private cloud. For most sites the goal can andshould be for backup and recovery to be no more difficult that it was when the applicationsran in silo environments and to impose no increase in downtime. IBM achieves this through acombination of connectivity capability, data migration capability and data deduplication.

Overall SummaryUltimately the storage challenge can be expressed in the following way:

Data storage requirements are rising at an average rate of 55% per annum. Data storage

costs are falling at a far slower rate. Consequently data storage costs are increasing as a

percentage of the IT budget.

At best data storage costs fall at an average rate of about 35% in respect of hardware, but notat all in respect to many other costs, including labor, power and cooling. Storage hardware


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makes up roughly 20% of storage costs while the cost of labor is generally 25% and it is notfalling. The public cloud does not provide an easy way out of this conundrum. Figuressuggest that storage prices in the public cloud are falling at a rate of just 20% and there aremany applications that simply cannot be migrated to the public cloud.

IBM’s solution to this is Smarter Storage, which it delivers through a wide portfolio of storagesolutions both at the software and hardware level. IBM’s focus across its whole storageportfolio has been to build intelligence into all components in a way that:

• Simplifies the management of the storage resource

• Exploits and enhances existing storage technology

• Offers considerable opportunity to reduce costs

• Moves the data center towards a cloud style of storage management that is capable of handing the issues posed by backup and recovery in the private cloud.

• Enables cloud migration

It provides its customers with the opportunity to inject flexibility into inflexible storageinfrastructure and modernize their data storage strategy.


About The Bloor Group The Bloor Group is a consulting, research and technology analysis firm that focuses on openresearch and the use of modern media to gather knowledge and disseminate it to IT users.Visit both www.TheBloorGroup.com and www.InsideAnalysis.com for more information. TheBloor Group is the sole copyright holder of this publication.

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