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Fastfacts: New Trends Driving Storage Consolidation

The document discusses the growing amounts of data that companies must store and manage. It notes that data storage is increasing exponentially and that companies often have multiple copies of data stored in different systems. This results in challenges around inefficient storage utilization and high costs. The document recommends that companies address these challenges through storage consolidation and virtualization.

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Dan Wenzel
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31 views

Fastfacts: New Trends Driving Storage Consolidation

The document discusses the growing amounts of data that companies must store and manage. It notes that data storage is increasing exponentially and that companies often have multiple copies of data stored in different systems. This results in challenges around inefficient storage utilization and high costs. The document recommends that companies address these challenges through storage consolidation and virtualization.

Uploaded by

Dan Wenzel
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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FastFacts

The amount of data that companies have to deal with is growing exponentially. Applications and files, business intelligence, and data warehousing generate massive amounts of information. According to industry experts, enterprises keep anywhere from five to 12 copies of this data in their storage systems: Daily and incremental backups, business analysis copies, testing copies, replication copies, off-site archives, and so on, all consume terabytes of expensive capacity in data centers and secondary storage facilities. In fact, research firm IDC expects worldwide shipments of terabyte storage capacity to grow more than 50% annually through 2010. Companies are facing several challenges as a result of this explosion: As business units launch new applications, they request dedicated storage capacity. The result is underutilized storage resources in some sectors and overtaxed arrays in others. Storage systems are deployed as needed, which raises management complexity issues when IT departments are dealing with multiple vendors and multiple sites. New technologies, such as storage area networks, are not well understood as yet and can also increase complexity for administrators. High-speed disk arrays are expensive, and as data loads grow, business management is pushing for IT departments to control costs by matching data to appropriate storage devices based on its relative value to the company. IT managers are meeting these challenges with storage consolidation and virtualization.
IDC, June 2006

New Trends Driving Storage Consolidation

Consolidation will play a significant role in driving server and storage sales. The storage consolidation market is expected to grow to 17.3 percent in 2009 (up from 13.9 percent in 2004).

Reap the Benefits A centrally managed, consolidated storage system enables companies to: rein in costs transition to and manage cutting-edge systems use best practices increase scalability improve resource utilization and high availability implement tiered architectures Consolidation is the Key The best way for IT departments to rein in storage chaos is by consolidating storage resources into a SAN, or storage area network. The advantage of a SAN over traditional, network-attached storage (NAS) devices is that a SAN creates a high-speed network of servers, switches that route storage traffic, and disk storage subsystems. With SANs, the storage resources are available to multiple hosts simultaneously, making a flexible and scalable pool of capacity that can be accessed by many servers. With a SAN in place, companies can begin addressing resource utilization by ensuring that existing storage is being employed properly, and they can create tiers of storage devices to better match data value to archival costs. Overstock.com purchased two networked storage systems and built a SAN to handle explosive growth in customer data, while also moving to a database clustering technology to provide fault tolerance and increase scalability. (CIO Insight, May 2005) Childrens Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota created a tiered storage architecture to maximize availability and scalability. The new system provides easy access to archived data and can support 30-40% annual growth. (EMC 2006) Kimberly-Clark Corp. turned to high-speed SANs to create a highly available disaster recovery plan. The quick replications and policy-driven, disk-to-disk copying capabilities lead to a 50% reduction in requirements for tape media and hardware and an enhanced recovery time of just 4 hours. (EMC 2006)

Fast Market Facts


Its clear that storage shipments and worldwide revenues are outpacing market standard growth rates. In December 2006, Storage Magazine reported the results of a survey showing that nearly 60% of respondents spent their storage budgets on SAN arrays in 2006, and the majority66% of respondentsbought systems with 1TB to 50TBs of capacity. Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues in the first quarter of 2006 grew 10.3 percent from one year ago to $4.2 billion, according to IDCs Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 627 petabytes, growing 51.5 percent.
IDC, June 2006

The worldwide market for storage-management software licenses totaled $5.6 billion in 2004 and is growing at a compound annual rate of more than 10 percent.
Gartner Dataquest, June 2006

CDW provides Trend Advisories, Case Studies, and White Papers about network infrastructure solutions and their impact on business. Contact your account manager today.

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