Data reduction the answer to storage overload

Storage. For those organisations struggling to manage and protect the explosive growth in data, it is a huge issue. Indeed, many companies require 40% more storage each year. However, it is possible to reduce your storage footprint. Reducing your storage impact is a smart step forward in 2011 for any business, regardless of size.

Improving storage efficiency can enable businesses to add core capabilities, without adding complexity, allowing them to lower costs while getting more value out of their IT resources. That said, different businesses have different storage issues. Also, within a business there may be a number of different storage issues to be addressed.

As well as managing and protecting data, it is vital to mitigate risk and maintain rapidly growing information assets while ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Getting control of service levels and growth rates, while reducing business risk and optimising storage management costs, requires a sound information infrastructure.

IBM has identified the five essential storage wishes that will help customers address inefficiencies and optimise their storage environments and lead to a Happy Storage New Year:

Wish 1. Real-time data compression shrinks active data so that files and databases take up less space and can reduce storage requirements up to 80%. This technology compresses data before writing to the storage system, which helps reduce storage sprawl, and improve performance and efficiency for both the disks and the storage system.

Wish 2. Storage virtualisation improves flexibility and responsiveness by masking the physical characteristics of storage systems from applications. It also facilitates online data movement across different types of storage, which can resolve I/O (input/output) hotspots, provide load balancing and optimise storage costs and match business requirements. Storage virtualisation in most cases helps to increase disk utilisation up to 30% and administrative productivity up to two times.

Wish 3. Thin provisioning automatically allocates storage only as needed. By allocating and using physical disk capacity only when data is written, businesses can purchase less storage capacity and lower their operating costs. It also facilitates better planning for future growth.

Wish 4. Deduplication works by removing unnecessary redundancy in large volumes of data, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored. Deduplication technology uses powerful algorithms to filter out duplicate data to improve back-up and recovery performance and reliability, and greatly improve business agility.

Wish 5. Automated storage tiering is the process of automatically moving data to different classes of storage according to how often it is used and the speed at which it must be available. This helps ensure the busiest data will be allocated to the highest performing solid-state drives when needed. By dynamically monitoring and moving data to the appropriate drive tier automatically, more active data is moved to solid-state drives, which in turn enables use of fewer, more energy-efficient disk drives. Businesses can improve storage performance up to three times by moving only 2% of data to solid-state storage, with no administrator intervention required.

Selecting the best storage technologies for your business depends on the type of data you need to store and manage. Organisations face a raft of challenges in managing the increasing proliferation of data and reducing their storage footprints. Of the five essential storage wishes outlined above, inventive solutions to enable smart movement and management of information, and capacity growth without complexity are available. The innovations built into these offerings make it increasingly easier and more cost effective to store, safeguard, retrieve and share critical data, helping to lower capital and operating expenses, minimise storage infrastructure size and lead to a Happy Storage New Year in 2011, something we can all raise a glass to!

By Greg Kieser, Mid Market Storage Specialist, IBM Australia