Big Data Age: How to save storage costs

Today's technology is developing rapidly. Especially storage, the performance is extremely prominent. From the technology, the user and the application aspect, its development speed surpasses other it domain. At the same time brings about the corresponding problem. Data center and enterprise managers are faced with the dilemma of how to choose a storage array. The usual solution has long been hyped up, such as flash storage or such hyped technologies as WAN optimizations seem to have become ingrained in people's minds.

The recommendations of the following seven storage solutions are not based on the "new things" of any technology, but are more practical and valuable to the cost of the enterprise. These seven recommendations should allow managers to consider a new development of their storage budget for 2012. It is a good time to re-examine the key storage points on the market based on the characteristics of existing storage infrastructures, resources, data, and required access. The key to storage is to reduce or at least maintain operating costs and capital expenditures while increasing storage performance.

1. Streamlined configuration

Before the 3Par was bought by HP. The automatic streamlining of configuration technology plays an extremely important role in configuring storage capacity. In the early days of the SAN, companies actually spent more effort to ensure the expected growth in data. Thin provisioning helps organizations to be able to deliver what they need while ensuring increased capacity without creating new LUNs (logical unit numbers).

2. Object-oriented storage and rest (representational state transmits)

Initially, the technology seemed to have a greater impact on cloud computing. Now more and more companies think that data is more suitable for storing in the public cloud. At the same time HTTP will likely become a means of transmission, using the rest method to move and store data, and provide rich metadata and related data description. Don't be surprised when you see this cross-Wan case taking root in the data center.

3. WAN Optimization

Enterprises can improve the efficiency of the network through WAN optimization products, such as wide-area data service provider riverbed. This can effectively reduce the amount of traffic that is sent, deleted, and compressed data across the WAN. and can significantly save storage space, reduce latency, reduce enterprise WAN bandwidth related costs and other benefits. The optimization enterprise across the WAN can view and create data around the world, just as it is inside the LAN.

4. Tiered Storage

With the cost balance and performance requirements of enterprise requirements, it is necessary to put the data that needs to be stored on the best media to match the value and performance of the data. Data that does not require frequent access is not necessarily stored on SSD or higher-performance disk drives. Today's vendors provide storage products with the ability to automatically lay out data based on access mode. Organizations should understand the way data is stored on media and the growth of data models to better understand the cost of expanding capacity and performance before making a purchase decision.

5. Outward-extending NAS

The traditional size of the NAS model in small and medium-sized enterprises accounted for less and less market share. It is being replaced by a way of extending outward. and begin to incrementally add the ability of an enterprise to increase capacity and performance in a clustered manner. Build a global namespace and work in it. This can effectively simplify storage configuration and significantly reduce total costs.

6. Performance Layer Equipment

Devices are less concerned with the ability to manage capacity based on NAS. Devices are more concerned with how stored data moves data with maximum efficiency. NAS optimization is to enable IOPS to return to the NAS, the device can not bear all the heavy calculation, these tasks are all owned by the NAS. The result is improved performance and reduced capital and operating expenses.

7.FCoE

FCoE (Ethernet Fibre Channel) helps businesses extend Fibre Channel in an Ethernet infrastructure. This can effectively save on infrastructure costs. Includes cabling and power management. Nowadays most people don't know much about FCoE. There is also no information on iSCSI and FCoE competition. But that does not mean that FCoE will not be an important technology in the future. The growth rate of file-based storage has exceeded the storage of blocks of data. So Fibre Channel and FCoE will survive.

Making new choices doesn't pose a risk to your current infrastructure or data center. On the contrary, some of the above suggestions can indeed help companies get very real financial returns.