GROWING PAINS IN MID-MARKET STORAGE

Transcription

1 GROWING PAINS IN MID-MARKET STORAGE Weathering the Data Tsunami How Organizations are Tackling the Management, Cost and Complexity of Data Storage

2 White paper for Exablox By Tim Clark August 2013 Page#2

3 MID-MARKET HIT HARD BY DATA TSUNAMI Organizations of all sizes face a deluge of digital data, causing huge headaches for IT departments that must manage, store and protect the ever-growing data volume, particularly in mid-sized organizations. This data tsunami is not coming from traditional sources such as transactional or structured data stored in databases. Instead, over 90% is unstructured data from texting, digital phone calls, security videos, machine-generated data, social media and digital media. 1 Although some unstructured data 2 are not saved, much finds their way into data stores. The rapid growth and management of unstructured data were cited by the largest percentage of respondents as their primary storage challenge, Enterprise Strategy Group found in a in December 2012 survey of 400-plus IT professionals. In mid-market organizations ( employees), IT departments were even more likely than enterprises (1,000-plus employees) to call out the rapid growth and management of unstructured data, data protection, and running out of physical space as their top storage challenges, ESG found. 3 Other research highlights similar issues. For large and mid-size enterprises, the top storage-related pain points cited in a 2012 survey by TheInfoPro/451 Group were managing storage growth (46%), managing costs (26%) and managing complexity (12%). 4 In the United States, market researcher IDC reports digital data is growing more than 25% a year, doubling every three years..5 Other analysts predict even faster growth. The storage challenges at Balboa Park Online Collective (BPOC) typify other mid-sized organizations fast-growing unstructured data had created management headaches. The BPOC provides IT services for more than 30 cultural and nonprofit organizations in San Diego, many clustered in Balboa Park or nearby. BPOC had roughly 500 terabytes of data, including 10TB of file storage for its 500 users, 80TB for back-ups and 400TB of digitized museum content in a digital asset management (DAM) system repository 1 IDCPredictions2012:Competingfor2020, byfrankgens,idc,december2011, OthertypesofunstructureddataincludePDFfiles, messages,wordprocessingdocuments,spreadsheets, 2 OthertypesofunstructureddataincludePDFfiles, messages,wordprocessingdocuments,spreadsheets, webpagesanddigitalphotos,graphics,videoandmusic. 3 KeyChallengesinDataStorage, EnterpriseStrategyGroupresearchbrief,December global.com/researchnbriefs/researchnbriefnkeynchallengesninndatanstorage/ 4 Citedin ScalingstorageforhighNgrowthenvironments, DellsalesPowerPoint, %2Fi.dell.com%2Fsites%2Fdoccontent%2FsharedNcontent%2FdataN sheets%2fen%2fdocuments%2fconsolidation_solution_customer.pptx&ei=3wlouz2mgskdjakx6ygaaw&usg=a FQjCNGc4I5rr3v0UF5_KJBGR16NeBwrsA&sig2=3n7nWF9CQZagLDxOcYDQqg 5 TheDigitalUniversein2020 IDCCountryreportontheU.S.,byGantzandReinsel,February2013.Sponsoredby EMC. Page#3

4 called the Balboa Park Commons content. Storage was growing 2TB/month, resulting in siloed storage systems and growing infrastructure costs. 6 Tight on space, museums digitize Adequate, secure storage of objects in their collections has long been difficult for museums, so some have begun digitizing their collections, opening them to anyone with Internet access. Europeana, Europe's digital library and museum, collects and provides access to digitized material from more than 2,200 collaborating institutions in 34 nations. Since its launch in November 2008, Europeana has grown to more than 26 million documents. Within companies, collaborative file data from programs such as Microsoft Sharepoint and online file-sharing contribute to the data deluge. Between 2009 and 2012, Aberdeen Group found that Sharepoint deployments jumped from that 44% of respondents to 65%. 7 Because collaboration can involve different functions and a range of file types from spreadsheets to CAD files, it is a significant contributor to the data tsunami. In some mid-sized companies, regulatory compliance drives data growth, particularly in healthcare and financial services. California s Bay Federal Credit Union, with seven branches and 180 employees, was stretching its storage system to meet the needs of more than 65,000 members. Customer churn and the requirement to retain financial records of prior customers had pushed Bay Federal s storage environment (about 100 terabytes) near its limit. If we maintain a base of 65,000 members over the course of a couple years, it doesn t mean they are the same specific members over that period, explains Paul Morris, chief information officer at Bay Federal. We are always in the midst of fostering new memberships while simultaneously realizing minor attrition. 8 WHERE STORAGE PAIN PINCHES MID-SIZED COMPANIES Mid-sized firms face similar storage challenges to enterprises, yet must solve the problems with smaller IT staffs, tighter budgets and no storage specialists. In the midmarket, storage pains often arise in the back-up process as issues of reliability, cost and labor. In a February 2011 Information Week survey, 60% of mid-sized and larger firms said they back up servers at least weekly, a rate that the researcher calls largely ahead of the curve. 9 6 BalboaParkOnlineCollectiveDeploystheExabloxOneBloxSolution:AchievesCostandManagementSavings, buyercasestudybylauraduboisandashishnadkarni,idc,june SharePointCollaboration:SecureandMobile, AnalystInsight,June2013,AberdeenGroup, 8 BayFederalsupportsgrowthontheCentralCoastwithHPStorageWorks, casestudy,hewlettpackard,august ENW&doctype=success%20story&lc=en&searchquery=&jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_cN001_title_r BackupSurvey:NewPossibilitiesforDataProtection, InformationWeekAnalytics,February Page#4

5 Storage management is complex and requires expensive storage specialists SAN experts, network specialists, technicians, administrators and DBAs to keep storage systems running. For mid-sized organizations, an already-burdened IT staff must provide these skills for day-to-day management tasks that include replacing hardware, managing backups, optimizing infrastructure, monitoring health and cleansing data. How much time does it take manage storage? One measure of labor time is a ratio called Terabytes per Full-Time-Equivalent or TB/FTE, a metric that some storage professionals disparage. 10 In 2011, Gartner estimated it takes 16.5 hours per year (just over two days) to manage 1TB of stored data. 11 Also painful for mid-market firms is the cost of growing capacity and performance to match the growth of unstructured data. More than 35% of organizations report dissatisfaction with costs to scale performance or capacity of their solutions after their initial purchase, making it crucial to establish scaling costs with your vendor, writes InfoTech. 12 In selecting new storage systems, performance and cost are key drivers. Digital media boost storage needs Business use of video is spreading beyond the traditional industries of marketing, advertising and entertainment. Motorola has created training videos for users of its many handsets. UNICEF utilizes video to tell complex stories and engage audiences, hoping for viral distribution on social media. * It s getting easier for employees to capture multimedia objects (such as still images and videos) for work purposes, and because the channels for employing them are multiplying, Gartner noted in a 2011 report. ** Professional producers of video, animation and graphics consume enormous amounts of storage for multiple versions of their work. * Your business strategy and the DAM revolution, white paper, 2012, Widen Enterprises. "Every time we needed more storage, we had to add another drive letter to the server, which introduced more management, and with participating organizations needing an additional 2TB each month, this approach did not scale," said Jason Quinn, IT director for the ** Digital Asset Management Witnesses a Resurgence to Address Rich Media in Organizations, white paper by Whit Andrews, May 31, TBNFTERatiosExplained,or,whystoragemanagementisn tlikestarbucks(part1), blogpostthepractical Polymath(unofficialEMCblog)byPeterKratz,March18, it/tbnftenratiosnexplainednornwhynstoragenmanagementnisntnlikenstarbucksnpartn1. 11 Thefigure1.65hoursisbasedonGartner sestimateof126terabytes/fte.see HowdoesyourHow does your company compare to recently released Gartner stats? By Kristian LeCapitaine, CIO Network on LinkedIn, March 2, Forrester estimates TB/FTE of 150 and higher. See DefiningAndMeasuringITEfficiency:MaximizingReturnOnStorage Investments, ForresterConsultingforNetApp,March2011, andnmeasuringnitnefficiency.pdf. 12 VendorLandscape:SmalltoMidNrangeStorageArrays, Nov.15,2012,InfoNTechResearchGroup,Inc. storyboardnsmallntonmidnrangenstoragenarrays. Page#5

6 Balboa Park Online Collaborative, which had used VMware, Dell, and HP servers for storage Compounding the mid-market s storage issues, some storage vendors enter the midmarket with crippled solutions that often cannot be upgraded to enterprise-class systems, analyst firm Storage Switzerland notes. 13 They fear cannibalizing their large enterprise business with full-featured mid-range products. Mid-sized firms with small IT staffs and budgets also encounter pain in managing storage, particularly in implementing advanced features such as data duplication, continuous data protection (CDP), and clustering across multiple storage systems that must be managed as stovepipes. Balboa Park Online Collective, for example, wanted to standardize on a common solution after using a range of solutions from Symantec Backup Exec software to Drobo iscsi storage to a Backblaze Storage Pod. In addition to expanding physical capacity, storage architecture becomes an important element in scaling storage, Scaling a storage system means handling more metadata, the critical information about where data is logically stored, writes Storage Switzerland. Metadata grows along with the data itself and processing it can become one of the limiting factors to system scalability. 14 Some of the pain in mid-market storage may be salved by more dollars in the storage budget. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reported that 59% of North American companies increased their storage budgets in 2013, slightly lagging Western Europe at 63%. 15 How Exablox combats storage pains for mid-sized firms When Balboa Park Online Collective ran the Exablox OneBlox in a proof of concept (POC), BPOC found Exablox more cost-effective than deploying a shared storage solution from NetApp or Dell. It also estimated that Exablox would save 8 10 hours per week in management time. Organizations are looking to a new generation of solutions to help scale their storage architectures while driving down the cost and complexity of storing unstructured data. Exablox has emerged as a key player in this space, developing OneBlox solution the industry s first scale-out object-based appliance. 13 SolvingtheMidNRangeStorageChallenge, bygeorgecrump,storageswitzerlandresearchbrief,2011, Range%20Storage%20ChallengeNHandoutN2.pdf 14 HowtoScaleObjectStorage, byericslack,ofstorageswitzerland, switzerland.com/articles/entries/2013/3/25_how_to_scale_object_storage.html. 15 AnalystreportcomparesdatastoragetrendsinWesternEuropeandNorthAmerica, ESGpressrelease,April4, Page#6

7 Here s how Exablox is relieving storage pain: Simple installation: Start with exactly the capacity you need and then simply add drives and capacity at any time to the same global namespace. Easy growth: Bring your own drives to mix-and-match SATA, SAS, SSD drives to grow capacity without changing configuration settings or disrupting applications or users. Additionally add more nodes to cluster on the fly. Effortless upgrades: OneBlox adds capacity as your business data protection requirements grow without costly downtime, reconfiguration, or forklift upgrades. Secure data storage: Always-on continuous data protection (CDP) and encryption fully protect all information stored against data loss. Pay-as-you-grow: Zero configuration means less than five minutes to start, then match expanding needs from unstructured data. End users can recover their own data. Painless scaling: Without interrupting applications or users, add and automatically configure new OneBlox nodes to deliver non-disruptive scalability Advanced features: OneBlox s inline deduplication minimizes storage waste and maximizes primary storage utilization. Real-time replication transparently redistributes the data across multiple drives and nodes to protect against drive or node failures, even over wide-area distances. With snapshots every time information is written to OneBlox, easily recover every file in the event of data corruption, deletion, or other errors. End users can recover their own data. Simple management: With cloud-based OneSystem management software, storage administrators can manage one or more OneBlox appliances from anywhere through a web browser. OneSystem proactively monitors and manages OneBlox, eliminates dedicated servers to manage storage, avoids patching to keep the management software up to date, and. Managed service providers (MSPs), VARs and system integrators can manage multiple organizations remotely. Trouble-free back-up and recovery: Exablox s always-on continuous data protection (CDP) capability enables fine-grained data recovery. Its real-time replication enables disaster recovery, and its inline encryption prevents data theft from any removed disk drive. About Exablox Exablox is the company reimagining storage. Exablox solves businesses runaway storage costs and information management nightmares by providing a cloud-managed scale-out object-based solution that is affordable and easy to use. OneBlox is an inclusive storage offering that combines an elegant hardware architecture and Page#7

8 integrated, enterprise-grade software, including inline deduplication, continuous data protection, and disaster recovery. Founded in 2010, Exablox is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. and backed by leading Silicon Valley venture firms. Visit Exablox online at and join the conversation at About The FactPoint Group The FactPoint Group ( is a boutique market research, consulting and content company based in Silicon Valley. Since 2001 it has worked with technology providers, particularly in enterprise software, and enterprises to help bring products to market that address users needs. Page#8