ENTERPRISE

Enterprise Storage Options: Local, Shared, Cloud-Based & Beyond (Part 1)

6/11/2013 11:13:40 AM

Storage is one of the cornerstones to the infrastructure foundation companies work so hard to build. But enterprises storage options now stretch far beyond traditionally used hard drives and tape drives and extend to virtualized environments on shared storage and cloud services where data is hosted entirely off-site. With so many choices, it can be difficult to narrow down which types of solutions it certain use cases.

Mark Peters, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (www.esg-global.com), says it all starts with cost because “if all storage was the same price, you’d put it all on main memory or solid state and be done with it.” But that’s not how the business world works, and companies have to be concerned with their budgets and bottom lines.

Enterprises storage options now stretch far beyond traditionally used hard drives and tape drives

Enterprises storage options now stretch far beyond traditionally used hard drives and tape drives

For that reason, Peters suggests companies choose storage solutions based on their industry and the types of applications they use. “One man’s tier-1 application is another man’s tier-3 application,” he says. Where instant messaging and email may be mission-critical for one company, it might be of relatively little importance to another. That’s why it’s worthwhile to look at all available options and compare them on a case by case basis to determine whether or not they fit your company’s specific needs.

Local storage

Local storage is the most common, traditional form of enterprise storage. It consists of direct-attached spinning disks or other media that are only connected to one server or one piece of infrastructure. According to Peters, many people use local storage “just be-cause it’s there” and because it “often looks cheaper because it came with the server.” But he warns that a series of direct-attached solutions can “end up in islands,” sometimes unable to communicate efficiently or at all. Still, there are proper uses for local storage, especially if your “application or server just needs the simplest storage,” says Peters.

Gene Ruth, research director with Gartner (www.gartner.com), says he “typically discourages folks from using direct-attached storage,” but concurs with Peters that some use cases do make sense. “One might want to have an exchange email environment and one could set up a direct-attached disk with dedicated servers to support exchange,” says Ruth. “One could also set up what amounts to direct-attached storage for a high transaction rate data-base and they might set up a Siloed set of physical hardware to support that very specialized application.”

Shared storage & virtualization

According to Ruth, shared storage is “where probably 95% of workloads will fit.” In fact, he says that shared storage is good for file shares, data-base support, server virtualization, and many other uses. Plus, there are many benefits to moving away from DAS (direct-attached storage) to a shared or NAS (network-attached storage) model for performance and consolidation.

Shared storage is “where probably 95% of workloads will fit”

Shared storage is “where probably 95% of workloads will fit”

“If you’ve got DAS attached to each of your servers, it’s kind of captive to that server,” says Terri McClure, senior analyst with ESG. “If you have 50% extra capacity on server A and you’re at 90% on server B, you can’t tap server A’s capacity. It’s just sitting there useless to server B, and you’ll have to go buy [more capacity]. One way is to use network storage for better utilization and greater efficiency.  So, if you have a number of servers share a storage array and you have 50% overhead, any of the servers can get to that.”

Shared storage solutions and virtualization are very popular in the IT industry and their growth is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. In fact, according to Chris O’Connor, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com), the efficiency and performance of virtualized environments have changed the way companies compare and evaluate storage options. And businesses are virtualizing more data and applications than ever before. “As consolidation and virtualization efforts have matured, we’ve seen both increases to the density of virtual machines supported on physical hardware, as well as the virtualization of more mission-critical workloads.”

Public cloud storage

Some companies use the cloud for temporary additional capacity

Some companies use the cloud for temporary additional capacity

Cloud storage is beneficial to companies for many reasons, but to tie it back to local and shared storage, it can be used to back up of on-premises data storage devices to great effect, according to Mike Matchett, senior analyst and consultant at the Taneja Group (www.tanejagroup.com).  In addition to backing up your on-premises storage, he adds that it can also be used “directly as primary storage” for collaboration purposes, like file-sharing.

McClure agrees that backup is a perfect use for cloud storage, but that due to latency issues, it might not be the best it for more intense uses such as hosting applications that require fast response times. She sees the cloud as a great solution for disaster recovery “because it’s much less expensive to stand up a copy of your data in a cloud in case something happens than it is to set up a remote data center somewhere.” McClure points out that some companies use the cloud for temporary additional capacity, which is typically seen “in retail around the holiday season.”

O’Connor says that although he agrees that the three biggest benefits of cloud storage are “anywhere access, agility, and capital savings, many have found that the long-term total cost of storing data or hosting applications persistently in the cloud is greater than keeping it in-house.” For that reason, he says, some companies are trying to move their solutions back on-premises, whether that’s through the NAS or other types of cloud environments.

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