Strengthening the Strategic Role of Storage in the Application Economy

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER JANUARY 2015 Strengthening the Strategic Role of Storage in the Application Economy Stefan Kochishan Sr Director, Mainframe Marketing CA Technologies

2 2 WHITE PAPER: STRENGTHENING THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF STORAGE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY Table of Contents Executive Summary 3 Section 1: Introduction 3 Section 2: Storage Challenges in the Data Center 4 Section 3: Disruption in the Data Center 5 Section 4: Potential Benefits of Cloud Storage 5 Section 5: Potential Benefits of CA Cloud Storage for System z 7 Section 6: Conclusions 8

3 3 WHITE PAPER: STRENGTHENING THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF STORAGE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY Executive Summary Given the relentless growth of data and the increased cost and complexity of contemporary storage technology, IT is increasingly drawn to the possibility of leveraging outsourced storage services, so-called cloud storage, to host enterprise data. In the new application economy, the key to deriving real value from cloud storage services is having appropriate balance of tools and technology innovations to deploy capacity on demand and to facilitate the movement of data to the cloud to realize operational and cost efficiencies. Examples of the new application economy are everywhere, and they are fundamentally changing the world of business across all industries banking, finance, retail, transportation, hospitality and more. Connectedness is the critical measure of participation in the application economy. People to applications, applications to data it is the core design principle for IT in the application economy. CA Technologies has taken a leadership position in providing the tools and technology required to facilitate the introduction of mainframe storage cloud services into today s application economy. This paper helps to provide a realistic foundation for considerations for leveraging storage clouds in a manner appropriate to the requirements of the mainframe applications that support critical business processes. Section 1: Introduction When storage infrastructures are close to exhausting capacity, the customer s response is usually very tactical: purchase more expensive hardware. With no end in sight for shipments of new storage, the expense for new hardware extends beyond the initial purchase and can be debilitating for an enterprise. Nearly every organization also struggles with floor space restrictions and increasing operational costs, not to mention the challenge of managing disparate storage hardware. Enterprises desire a way to rapidly deploy new, efficient storage solutions without having to make significant investments in physical hardware. These enterprises need trusted vendors and partners that can deliver innovative, reliable storage capabilities they can depend on now and into the future. With organizations digital information growing from gigabytes to petabytes seemingly overnight, storage management infrastructures are forever caught in catch up mode. When they get close to exhausting capacity, enterprises scramble to quickly stand up hardware via the path of least resistance. Over the last two years: 1 The amount of data at enterprises has grown 45% The average enterprise storage footprint has grown from 2.2 PB to 3.2 PB

4 4 WHITE PAPER: STRENGTHENING THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF STORAGE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY However, exacerbating the issue: tactical measures that create long-term issues around cost, flexibility and complexity. Adequate storage solutions must extend beyond reasonable provisioning costs to include affordable installation, management and support: Cost. 38% of enterprises reported that their storage spend will rise 2, with the average enterprise storage budget being $2.5 million USD 2 Flexibility. A lack of time and resources prevents proactive planning for floor space and placement, calculating power availability and running cables. This can result in the need to quickly deploy new, non-intrusive storage solutions. Complexity. Adding storage hardware on an ongoing just-in-time basis creates a highly disparate environment which can lead to integration difficulties and maintenance challenges Globally, System z shops run the majority of business-critical applications. In fact, in 2014 IBM reported that System z shops ran 90 percent of the world s critical applications and processed 65 percent of the world s information. So, IT desires help to find a more efficient way to: Store, access, retrieve and recover z/os data more quickly and easily Reduce the costs of acquiring and managing necessary storage space Decrease unwieldy data center footprints and power consumption Section 2: Storage Challenges in the Data Center IT teams face daily challenges to create a constant stream of storage capacity to support business growth objectives. They work long hours making storage space available, planning and maneuvering to constantly provision new storage resources. New projects and customer business services can suffer delays due to long wait times to wade through the storage acquisition process. Headaches and frustration are common, especially when time is short and there is the tedious task of planning for floor space and placement, calculating power availability, and running cables. Planning is not the only challenge, of course. It would be safe to say that most businesses are very budget-minded and focused on controlling costs. Adding more storage hardware on-the-fly is a learned, expensive response, rooted in years of taking a reactive approach to storage problems. And it is here that businesses can spend precious budget dollars acquiring traditional storage (disk and tape) resources. So, IT constantly scrambles to achieve a delicate balance of having sufficient storage available and not deplete their dwindling budget. This is important, since they often have to ensure availability during daylight hours so that their batch window processes flawlessly overnight, and finished well before people begin showing up for work in the morning. The accelerating cost of disk based storage is beginning to make it resemble a nail in search of a cost-containment hammer. Despite the fact that the discrete components of disk array products are increasingly commoditized with three vendors producing nearly all disk drives, a handful of others producing virtually all array enclosures, and an increasing number of enterprise array controllers taking the form of simple PC motherboards running general purpose operating systems array vendors are able to increase the price of their kits by blending them with proprietary value-add software features.

5 5 WHITE PAPER: STRENGTHENING THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF STORAGE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY Section 3: Disruption in the Data Center Just coping with the growth of storage capacity demand is a full time job in many organizations. Beyond the practical problems of bringing infrastructure and data itself under some sort of coherent management, IT planners also confront the immediate challenge of meeting the fast changing demands of business. But there is disruption in today s data centers. Business needs are changing the relationship between consumers and corporate IT. In the past IT and business teams managed in separate silos of responsibility. Today, IT and Business teams must improve collaboration and understanding to drive business growth. Business groups are increasingly acquiring and managing their own technology assets. And so these trends can create risk, increase costs and impede IT innovation. IT must be viewed as the new innovators. IT staff must move from just maintaining technology, to delivering business innovation that will help their company be successful. They must research, evaluate and acquire reliable, easy-to-implement storage solutions that actually improve their velocity to provide business services. IT s value to the business then can translate to: Transforming and delivering Real Savings to the business to free up resources and improve efficiency Taking a customer centric approach to drive a fantastic end-to-end experience that proves Real Value Accelerating the pace at which IT delivers Real Innovation Businesses today are operating at a velocity that can result in incredible and sometimes unexpected storage demands on the dynamic data center. Ways need to be found to blending the capabilities of System z and the still evolving potential of architectures such as cloud storage to deliver greater flexibility and responsiveness to changing business demands. Section 4: Potential Benefits of Cloud Storage The potential benefits of storage clouds, more properly framed as network-based storage outsourcing services, include the following. Improved storage capacity growth management. Improved, on demand, data access. Reduced year over year storage hardware (CAPEX) costs. Reduced risk in terms of operational uptime, return on investment, and early infrastructure obsolescence. These are possible outcomes of storage cloud adoption and are by no means assured simply as a function of contract or service level agreement with a vendor. To realize the potential benefits from storage clouds, you need to approach the use of services realistically, with full appreciation of the capabilities and limitations of such services and with full information about the data you are seeking to host in a storage cloud. Moreover, you need a plan of action, augmented by appropriate tools, for staging data to the cloud, for managing secure access to the data, and for allocating and de allocating storage resources as business needs dictate.

6 6 WHITE PAPER: STRENGTHENING THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF STORAGE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY The simplest way to conceive of cloud storage is as a storage resource where backup copies of critical data can be stored. Ideally, this backup storage resource is sufficiently distant from the data center to ensure that the backup data will not be exposed to the same disaster event that could damage or constrain access to original data. A key to success is having a WAN capable of moving changed data on a routine basis to and from the cloud service. Cloud storage services can also be used as locations for storing archival data. Archival data that is, data with a re-reference rate of nearly zero percent, but that must be retained nonetheless for business or regulatory reasons consumes about 40% of the expensive disk storage capacity fielded by most organizations. This capacity could be returned to productive use if the archival quality data and its maintenance could be outsourced to a qualified service provider. Security and accessibility when needed are paramount to the success of such a strategy. The above two uses of cloud storage are the low hanging fruit of the strategy, bending the cost curve of storage by reducing the need to add capacity every year to the existing physical infrastructure while at the same time de-cluttering on-site storage systems of duplicates, backups and archive quality data that slow search operations and impair efficient storage capacity provisioning. However, these applications only hint at the potential for cloud storage services that have helped them to capture the imagination of IT planners. Another, and to many, a more exciting use case for cloud storage envisions the use of easily provisioned cloud storage capacity to enable agile response to business needs. The business value case for such a provisioning model has the following arguments: Using a dependable cloud storage service accessed via a dependable gateway or on-ramp appliance and wide area network facility, organizations can simplify and streamline the deployment, allocation and provisioning of storage to applications supporting mission critical business processes. Using such a service helps eliminate expensive hardware purchases and mitigates the accompanying hardware vendor lock-in and costly warranty and maintenance renewal processes, thereby reducing overall Total Cost of Ownership for storage infrastructure. Over time, cloud storage services dramatically reduce energy consumption at the data center, and improve direct and indirect access to data both by the mainframe and server plant and by users having an increasingly diverse set of client devices. This use case for cloud storage services is much more technically challenging than are either cloud-centric backup or deep data archiving, mainly because of the interactive and ongoing nature of the relationship that must be established between the dynamic data center and remote cloud stores, not to mention the limitations of current shared WAN technology. Robust cloud storage hosting services have begun to appear that claim to provide reliable and highly available storage capabilities at affordable prices. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and other cloud storage providers are gaining mindshare in architectural discussions and field testing of next generation data centers, and some companies have begun vesting significant portions of their data assets with service providers. Another point worth mentioning is that significant improvements have been made in the on-ramp technologies used to connect data centers to cloud service providers so called cloud storage gateways

7 7 WHITE PAPER: STRENGTHENING THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF STORAGE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY have come to market. For example, vendors like NetApp, with their SteelStore cloud storage appliance, EMC Data Domain and others, are designing mechanisms to simplify connection to a WAN facility and cloud service for data center processors and offer technology akin to channel extension to mask the impact of latency and jitter from workflow processes while optimizing link capacity and performance. Finally, innovative cloud storage services deliver a reliable and secure strategy for integrating System z with cloud storage services that doesn t require a leap of faith in the marketing claims of cloud evangelists. In the best of cases, cloud storage should be, quite simply, just another storage target rather than a complex interrelationship of hardware, networks, gateways, service workflows and management/monitoring capabilities. Section 5: Potential Benefits of CA Cloud Storage for System z CA Technologies can help companies address these challenges with a new innovative product designed to work with leading cloud innovation solutions. It provides powerful cloud storage capacity on-demand that can significantly reduce costs by decreasing the physical storage footprint and required data center space and power. CA Cloud Storage for System z simplifies the process to move mainframe data storage into the cloud. It is designed to help organizations reduce their dependency on expensive, proprietary hardware solutions and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for storing and managing their z/os data. When used with certain cloud storage providers and appliances*, CA Cloud Storage for System z is designed to help you store, access, retrieve and recover z/os data more quickly and easily to improve your delivery of business services. The combined technologies help you avoid investing in underutilized storage capacity for future growth by tapping into the cloud to provide fast and flexible access to endless capacity when you need it. Figure A. Public Cloud or On-Premise Data Virtualiza7on So8ware Mainframe Cloud API Storage Appliance Provider Cloud Storage Provider De- duplica7on, compression & encryp7on Encrypted In- Flight * CA Cloud Storage for System z currently works with cloud storage offerings from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and cloud storage appliances from Riverbed Technology, NetApp, and EMC Data Domain.

8 8 WHITE PAPER: STRENGTHENING THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF STORAGE IN THE APPLICATION ECONOMY CA Cloud Storage for System z is designed to help you: Access cloud storage capacity when you need it. Reduce your dependency on expensive, proprietary hardware solutions. Shrink your costs of acquiring and managing physical storage. Avoid investing in unutilized capacity. Reduce the time and effort required to manage and optimize your growing data storage environment. Enable greater productivity to more quickly deploy and manage new and efficient data storage solutions These capabilities, when fully realized will deliver a number of benefits including cost reduction, improved flexibility and efficiency in terms of IT support for business initiatives, and reduced complexity that translates into greater availability of data and the potential for easier and more automated data migration and lifecycle management. Section 6: Conclusions Relentless growth of data will continue. Cloud storage service providers will be able to better provide reliable and secure access to and recovery of z/os data quickly and easily to those who require it. CA Cloud Storage for System z moves cloud storage closer to realizing its potential to match the velocity requirements around data access that continue to accelerate in contemporary business. In short, with CA Cloud Storage for System z, firms can move closer to capacity-on-demand provisioning in storage, cut time, effort and expense out of the processes for putting data storage behind those applications that require it when they require it. For more information visit us online: /cloudstorage Connect with CA Technologies at CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at. 1 What The Evolution Of Cloud Storage Means For I&O, Henry Baltazar, James Staten with Christopher Voce, Michelle Mai, Forrester, February 14, shaping up to be a decent year for IT data storage spending, Rich Castagna, SearchStorage, May, Copyright 2015 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. CS _0115