Implementing Storage Virtualization: Elements of a Successful Project

According to a recent InformationWeek survey, 82% of organizations are either using or assessing storage virtualization. Among companies using storage virtualization, 59% listed cost savings as the key benefit they ve achieved. One way to drive ongoing savings with storage virtualization is to implement a virtualized tiered storage architecture.

1 Implementing Storage Virtualization: Elements of a Successful Project Continental Resources.

2 THE IMPRESSIVE TRACK RECORD OF STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION If you re interested in implementing storage virtualization at your company, you re on the right track and you re not alone. According to a recent InformationWeek survey, 82% of organizations are either using or assessing storage virtualization. 1 These organizations are launching their projects with the hope of saving money. Some 65% of survey participants are measuring their storage virtualization success in terms of cost savings, versus just 31% that are using time savings as their yardstick. When it comes to tracking the source of their cost savings, 60% of respondents will measure them in terms of better utilization of storage resources, 50% will measure in terms of better operational efficiency, and 47% will measure their cost savings related to deduplication. 2 In other words, implementing storage virtualization seems to be all about the money. But are companies getting the bottom-line results they expected? Two surveys certainly make it seem so. PROMISE Technology s 2010 Storage Virtualization Survey determined that among companies using storage virtualization, 59% listed cost savings as the key benefit they ve achieved. 3 Only 18% listed improvements in storage utilization as their top benefit achieved. Meanwhile, a Computer Economics study found that 88% of companies that have adopted storage virtualization have achieved a positive or break-even return on their initial investment. 4 Sounds appealing, doesn t it? It s enough to make you want to go live with storage virtualization as soon as possible. But beware: as with any technology project, you ll need to plan carefully and implement strategically. This e-book will guide you through the best practices you ll need to keep in mind along the way. 1. McTigue, Jake. Flex Time: Storage & File Virtualization Add Resilience. InformationWeek. Analytics Report. March McTigue. 3. PROMISE Technology. PROMISE U.S.-Based Survey Says Storage Virtualization Imperatives Focus on Cost Savings, Consolidation and Disaster Recovery. Press release. December 13, Computer Economics. Storage Virtualization Yields Positive ROI. Press release. December

3 HOW TO BEGIN PLANNING YOUR IMPLEMENTATION Has there ever been a successful IT project that didn t begin with a thorough plan? Probably not. Storage virtualization projects are no exception. Before you begin, you and your team will need to plot out which storage volumes you want to virtualize, how you want to virtualize them, what hardware or software you ll need to purchase along the way, how much third-party consulting help you ll need, and what total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) you d like to achieve by the end of the project. Whatever you do, don t plan in a vacuum. Instead, consider your organization s overall needs and goals carefully: Establishing your objectives and priorities up front is important, because the success of storage virtualization is largely driven by an organization s understanding of its needs. You need to establish how critical an application is to the business, as well as its availability and performance. Once the objectives and priorities are understood, the storage architecture, along with storage management standards, policies, and operational procedures, can be devised to meet them. If the primary objective of the IT organization is to improve the storage utilization and save on the CAPEX and OPEX by deferring the storage purchases and decreasing the administration burden, you need to understand the real scenario in the infrastructure. What is the current utilization level and how much improvement does it need? Where are the storage devices and how are they connected to the servers, applications, and so on. If the objective is to reduce the risk and downtime, and improve the service levels, then you need to do overall performance analysis of the infrastructure and set the baseline for monitoring the difference De Luca, Adrian and Bhide, Mandar. Storage Virtualization for Dummies: Hitachi Data Systems Edition. Wiley Publishing, Inc

4 SHOPPING FOR SERVER VIRTUALIZATION SOLUTIONS A key part of the planning phase is to select the products you ll use. Although most IT professionals think of server virtualization as an approach that will enable them to do less buying, the fact remains that if you really want your project to deliver long-term cost savings, you ll probably need to implement virtualization software as well as new storage hardware that provides better performance for a lower cost of ownership. Here are some high-level concerns to keep in mind as you re shopping for server virtualization solutions: Budget Has your CFO given you a firm limit on this project? Can you make a business case for more money, or will you be held to a hard budget? Will your budgetary limitations require you to work in phases, or can you think big picture from day one? Staff Do you have the in-house talent to implement storage virtualization technology? If so, will your staff have bandwidth available during the proposed timeframe of your project? And will they have the ongoing resources to maintain your storage virtualization technology for years to come? If you come up short on in-house skills or bandwidth, will you have budget to work with a third-party partner? Current Technology One of the best ways to make your storage virtualization project cost-effective is to incorporate as much of your existing technology as possible. How much of your current storage hardware will you be able to continue using as you pool its resources into virtual storage volumes? And how well will your proposed storage virtualization software and new storage hardware work with your current hardware? 4

5 CHOOSING THE RIGHT STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION PRODUCTS Choosing storage virtualization products for a small or midsized business? One expert recommends focusing your decision on the following considerations: Connectivity Number of Drives Drive Type Looking Beyond Space Hypervisor Compatibility Balance the speed of fiber channel against the relatively low cost of iscsi and NFS. More drives in an array means better throughput. Do you want the ample space of SATA or the performance of SAS? Just because you bought hardware that offers enough space to house your data doesn t mean it will perform adequately & scale well. Check to see which devices your product will support to run virtual machines Vanover, Rick. Storage Virtualization for the SMB. Datamation.com. April 21,

6 4 BEST PRACTICES FOR STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION IMPLEMENTATION As you research your storage virtualization project, you re going to hear a lot of technical talk about how you should implement your hardware and software. A skilled consultant can lead you through the exact steps you should follow. Here, we ll provide you with some best practices that will help you get the most out of your storage virtualization implementation. 1. Partition Your Storage Hardware Want to ensure that your newly virtualized storage resources will provide adequate levels of performance to all your business applications? Consider partitioning your storage hardware. Here s how it works: Virtual partitioning enables logical partitioning of the physical ports, cache memory, and disks on the virtualized storage platform. You can then improve security by restricting access so that the administrator of one partition won t be able to access or interfere with priorities or data in another partition. Virtual partitioning also allows you to optimize application performance within a partition. By dedicating a fixed amount of cache memory to a partition, you can guarantee that the application is getting the required resources and won t be affected by any other application, host, or user. 7 Depending on the size and scope of your organization s storage environment, your tasks here may involve configuring both internal and external storage platforms. An experienced third-party consulting firm can help you figure out the particulars. 7. De Luca and Bhide. 6

7 4 BEST PRACTICES FOR STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION IMPLEMENTATION 2. Implement Tiered Storage As we ve discussed, saving money is typically the top benefit companies seek to achieve in their storage virtualization projects. One way to drive ongoing savings with storage virtualization is to implement a virtualized tiered storage architecture. This type of configuration can allow your IT department to view all your storage capacity as a single pool, and to optimize the usage of this pool by using a simple, intuitive set of tools. So, how can tiered storage actually save you money? It allows your IT staff to store your organization s most mission-critical data such as product formulas and other trade secrets on your newest, fastest hardware that offers the highest levels of availability. IT can then migrate less-critical-but-still-important data to lower-cost (but lower-availability) hardware. The bottom line is that you ll get more usage out of all your hardware, and may be able to meet business users needs well into the future without purchasing more hardware. 7

8 4 BEST PRACTICES FOR STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION IMPLEMENTATION 3. Use Dynamic Provisioning Your storage virtualization project also presents you with an opportunity to begin allocating your storage resources in smarter ways. In the traditional approach to allocation, when you add a new terabyte of storage hardware to be used with a particular server, you ll need to allocate the entire volume to that server. With dynamic provisioning (also called thin provisioning), you can allocate that extra terabyte of storage space in smaller blocks as needed. For example, if your server will only need 400 GB in the immediate future, the other 600 GB will remain available for use by other servers when they exceed their existing storage volumes. It s not hard to imagine the benefits here: you ll make life easier on your IT staff, who won t have to manage storage one server at a time, but instead can allocate resources from a centralized pool. You ll also free up unused storage resources across your organization. This will enable your IT staff to delay or even eliminate some storage hardware purchases leaving more money left over for your most critical IT projects. 8

9 4 BEST PRACTICES FOR STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION IMPLEMENTATION 4. Migrate Data to Faster Appliances You re already undertaking a major project one that may require some downtime for your business users. Why not take this opportunity to also migrate your data to newer, faster, and more energy-efficient data storage hardware? The thought of migrating data may conjure up nightmarish images of previous projects gone awry. But with storage virtualization, you can move your data without interrupting the smooth operations of your business: After the existing storage is virtualized behind the controller, you can plan for migration of data from older storage to new fast-performing storage devices. Traditional methods of data migration are inherently disruptive because the process, involving multiple people in the IT organization (application, system, network, and storage administrators), can take a great deal of time and resources, and poses risks if something goes wrong. By implementing storage virtualization, heterogeneous migration of data between one vendor s storage to another s is possible. Defining groups of volumes according to how they relate to the application and applying policies by way of highly customizable storage tier definitions enables the movement of data without interrupting running applications De Luca and Bhide. 9

10 WORK WITH AN EXPERIENCED STRATEGIC PARTNER Curious about the kinds of savings you can expect to achieve with storage virtualization? Hitachi Data Systems offers a reliable methodology for calculating the financial impact of storage virtualization in your organization. With the Hitachi Storage Economics Model, you can follow three simple steps to analyze your savings in up to 33 different cost areas. How can you get started with the Hitachi Storage Economics Model and then begin putting the technologies in place that will actually deliver on your savings projections? Talk to ConRes. ConRes offers a full line of data storage solutions to address your data warehousing, data discovery, and data recovery needs. We offer high-availability data storage solutions focused on your specific needs, including storage virtualization, dynamic provisioning, tiered storage, and storage space partitioning. We also provide the strategic, personalized consulting services you ll need to guide your virtualization project to a successful and financially beneficial conclusion. Remember: according to one survey, 82% of businesses are either using or assessing storage virtualization technology. Don t put off your project any longer. Call ConRes to schedule your complimentary Storage Virtualization Consultation today