because business data and the way that it is used is playing a growing role in determining business success. For instance, companies such as Amazon and Rakuten are using their business data to gain strategic advantage over their competitors. The use of customer profiling and identifying what a customer may wish to purchase, based on their purchase history, provides a serious competitive advantage. In addition, understanding each customer’s purchase habits (such as typically making all orders within the same few days each month, after payday) enables these businesses to target specific products at specific customers at a precise time, via a customized email based on the individual’s purchase history and purchasing profile.
Another key consideration is how the value of the data changes over time. For instance, if a customer stops making purchases or closes their account, legislation might require that data to be deleted after a set period. Therefore, information that is stored may have a different value to the business, depending on its age. Understanding how an organization uses its data, and the value of its information throughout its life cycle, can be at the heart of storage design for many businesses (see Figure 1.9).
Figure 1.9 Information Lifecycle Management key challenges
It is also important to recognize that ILM is a strategy adopted by a business or organization, and not a product or service. This strategy must be proactive and dynamic, in order to help plan for storage system growth, and also must reflect the value of the information to the business.
Implementing an ILM strategy throughout a large organization can take a significant period of time, but can deliver key benefits that directly address business challenges and information management and utilization. The key design considerations that relate ILM strategy to the architecture of a storage platform include the following:
• Improving utilization by employing tiered storage platforms, and providing increased visibility into all enterprise information, alongside archiving capabilities
• Providing simplified storage management tools and increasing the use of automation for daily storage operational processes
• Implementing a wide range of backup, data protection, and recovery options to balance the need for business continuity with the cost of losing data
• Simplifying compliance and regulatory requirements by providing control over data placement, and knowing what data needs to be secured and for how long
• Lowering the total cost of ownership while continuing to meet the required service levels demanded by the business, and aligning the storage management costs with the value of the data, so that storage resources are not wasted, and unnecessarily complex environments are not introduced
Providing a tiered storage solution that ensures that low-value data is not stored at the same cost per gigabyte as high-value data
Implementing a Software-Defined Storage Strategy
As a consequence of the ever-increasing cost of enterprise business storage, as outlined previously, more IT industry attention than ever before is focused on new storage architectures and technologies designed to drive down the total cost of ownership associated with storage. This approach aims to reduce both CapEx and OpEx costs by reducing hardware to its bare commodity components, and removing secret source software from the controllers, in favor of placing it onto a common storage software layer provided by either the hypervisor or a software-defined storage model.
In the past, several attempts have been made to develop a common management system that can transcend storage hardware and software vendors. For example, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) developed the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), and the World Wide Web Consortium has Representational State Transfer (REST). However, these have seen only limited adoption by the storage industry. To achieve even limited interoperability and provide a sense of single point of management and support, the only real option for large enterprise IT organizations and cloud service providers has been to deploy homogeneous storage islands from a single hardware vendor in an attempt to manage operational overhead and therefore reduce OpEx costs.
The theory behind the software-defined storage model is to facilitate management across a common plane, by breaking down the barriers to interoperability that exist with proprietary vendor storage hardware. For most IT organizations, storage from different vendors, or even different models of storage array hardware from the same vendor, create isolated storage islands. It can be difficult to interoperate, share resources, or even manage across these islands from a single pane of glass.
The software-defined storage model aims to provide OpEx cost savings by driving efficient capacity utilization and platform management in a more agile way, typically by providing automation and a common management interface for all of the storage infrastructure. Therefore, the challenge for enterprise IT organizations and cloud service providers is to find the right software-defined storage solution, one that can apply the right centralized software services to the entire infrastructure by using simple, unified operational procedures within a common user interface.
The software-defined storage model also aims to reduce CapEx costs by moving away from proprietary storage hardware, and toward technology that facilitates unified management across all components of the storage infrastructure. When considering hardware solutions to deliver a software-defined storage-based environment, IT executives may be focused on reducing the total cost of ownership of storage resources. The following list provides a buyer’s guide that IT organizations can use when working with their respective storage vendors to establish core storage requirements:
• Which storage solutions can work with the applications, hypervisors, and data that we currently have and are predicting to have going forward?
• Which storage solutions can enhance application performance?
• Which storage solutions best provide the required data availability?
• Which storage solutions can be deployed, configured, and managed quickly and effectively using currently available skills?
• Which storage solutions can provide greater, and if possible, optimal, storage capacity?
• Which storage solutions can best facilitate flexibility (provide the ability to add capacity or performance in the future without impacting the applications)?
• Which storage solutions provide automation and centralized management capabilities?
• Which storage technology will meet the preceding requirements within the available budget?
The approach often taken by IT organizations is to follow the lead of a trusted storage vendor. However, a key challenge for IT decision makers is to see beyond current trends in the industry and to arrive at a strategy that will provide a solution meeting not only today’s storage requirements at an acceptable level of cost, but also next year’s requirements for the various lines of business, and even the next decade’s. This requires a subjective and clear-headed evaluation of the options, their costs, and the alternative approaches that could deliver the required storage functionality that optimizes both CapEx and OpEx budgets.
An additional challenge, which you also shouldn’t overlook, is the complication associated with educating decision makers about the intricacies of storage technologies, in order to obtain budgetary approval. Enterprise IT executives rarely question the requirement to store and retain their ever-growing volume of business data. However, explaining the differences between various storage products, and their advantages and drawbacks, often requires a transfer of technical knowledge
