When it comes to data centre technologies, storage has finally started to take centre stage says Andy Hardy, international sales director at Compellent

Despite the fact that data growth continues unabated at most UK firms, many data centres are already struggling to expand beyond their current physical or energy footprint.  With space, cooling and power at such a premium the need to do more with less has become a harsh reality.
 
With the industry finally waking up to the fact that the old way of doing storage simply doesn’t work anymore, we should expect to see a major change in the data centre when it comes to future storage investment buying decisions. 

Storage virtualisation, thin provisioning and automated tiered storage are three hot storage tickets that fit the moment perfectly, while solid state disk (SSD) in the data centre is fast catching up.

Take the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) as an example.  RHS's existing direct-attached storage infrastructure could not support its massive library of 200,000 images, each 80MB in size, so they replaced it with a Compellent SAN featuring tiered storage across a mix of Fibre Channel and SATA drives.  

Phillip Gladwin is the IT operations manager at RHS.  He says: “The SAN features Data Progression which automatically migrates active and inactive data to the most appropriate storage tier.  By automating the tiered storage process we can take full advantage of SATA drives, which require less power than Fibre Channel drives.  This has enabled us to drive down short-term drive acquisition costs as well as make environmentally-friendly savings over the longer-term because of reduced energy consumption."

Gladwin confirms that tiered storage also helps RHS with performance.  He says: “Now, if an infrequently accessed image becomes more popular, it is moved back up to the faster drives so it can be accessed and downloaded more quickly.”
Another example is the London Borough of Hillingdon.  Hillingdon reduced its server hardware infrastructure by 97% after deploying storage and server virtualisation technology from Compellent and VMware.  By running 94 virtual servers on just three physical machines, the London Borough of Hillingdon was able to make annual energy savings of £20,000. 

Hillingdon also uses Compellent’s thin provisioning software which eliminates the allocated but unused capacity found in traditional storage arrays. This means Hillingdon was able to purchase less storage hardware up-front and defer storage upgrades, while saving on the floor space and electricity costs associated with keeping unused disks spinning.

While saving space and energy is a major driver, performance remains a prerequisite for many businesses, hence the growing interest in SSD.  Although SSDs still seem prohibitively expensive, they are already a viable option for some users.  As the cost of SSD drops we should expect to see more widespread use of SSD in the enterprise.  One of the smartest ways to really reduce the cost barrier without sacrificing the performance benefits of SSD is, again, through automated tiered storage. 

When planning the launch of Compellent’s SSD solution, we looked at how users could maximize efficiency, and ultimately we determined the drive approach would be most adoptable and scalable. Only the most frequently accessed blocks of data, rather than complete LUNs or volumes, earn “tier 0” storage.  This approach is perfect for applications that can really take advantage of the performance boost from SSD technology. 

Chris Evans of Brookend Limited, an independent storage consultant says: “If Compellent's technology works as described, then LUNs will be analysed at the block level and the active blocks will remain on the fastest storage with the least active moved to lower tiers of disk, or to other parts of the disk, within the same array.  This should offer a more granular approach to using SSDs for active data. In addition, if data can dynamically move up/down the stack of storage tiers, then as data profiles change over time, no application re-mapping or layout should be necessary. Hopefully this means that SSDs are used as efficiently as possible, justifying their inflated cost.  This is a step in the right direction for making storage usage as efficient as possible. 

The era of ultra-efficient storage is coming, and not a moment too soon.