To read about Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 1

Topics we covered in the previous post included

The concept of Hardware Maintenance

The Strategy related to Hardware Maintenance

The Facts about Hardware Maintenance

The beliefs about Hardware Maintenance

Here are a few other components related to storage hardware maintenance services as it fits into a concept of Storage Economics.

There was an interesting post by David Merrill at HDS regarding how a customer in the APAC market has been able to leverage Independent Service Providers for various different assets that they own and how they decide what stays with the manufacturer and what is being maintained by Independent Service Providers.

The Plan for Hardware Maintenance

Hardware Support: Support on storage assets could be available through Independent Service Providers (ISP’s), which could help reduce CapEx, OpEx and improve ROA by levering the existing technology on the floor for a longer time span.

Remote Support and Diagnostics: Independent Service Providers can enable storage frames for remote call home features, remote support and perform diagnostics for troubleshooting.
Code Upgrades (firmware) and Engineering: This support is typically only available through the manufacturer. But here is a fact; at the end of a 3 year life cycle of the equipment (when you start paying for off warranty support) how many times have you seen code upgrades being offered to customers, since vendors are more focused on technology that is current today).

Global technical Support: Global 24 x 7 technical support is often provided by Independent Service Providers as a part of service offerings.

Onsite Certified & Trained engineers: Independent Service Providers typically hire the same engineers that have been working for the vendor and redeploy them onsite for services

Spares: Spare parts are standard offering through Independent Service Providers to have them shipped at the site within the 4-hour SLA or possibly store it as onsite spares.

SLA: Normally Independent Service Providers SLA’s are matched to vendor specifications.  Also a custom tailored support plan can be created for the test and development systems – non critical systems, which might not need the utmost priority.

Software Support: In most cases Software support can be continued with the vendor, which enables you to receive software updates for your host environment or any other layered software. If your storage platform is more than 5 years old, may be you can investigate into dropping the software support.

The Pricing for Hardware Maintenance

So typically off-warranty hardware maintenance services may be available to you at 50% to 70% discount of vendors list price since these organizations do not have a sustaining engineering cost.

This will help increase the life of the asset you already own on the floor, which is fully functional and operational.

This will further help you reduce your CAPEX (by not purchasing new assets), reduce your OPEX (by reducing your maintenance cost) and improve your ROA (an asset you have already paid for).

This savings will need a 12-month cycle to fully qualify since hardware maintenance services are charged on a monthly basis.

With 50% to 70% savings per device (Storage Frame), if you have an environment with 1PB storage, your organization could see a savings of millions of dollars over 3 years and a 5PB environment might see a double-digit million dollar savings over 3 years.

Is this something that sounds interesting and can help you overall preserve your CapEx and reduce your OpEx?

Your Alternatives for Hardware Maintenance

Are people within your organization ready and open for this concept?

Do your homework in selecting the right service provider.

It is okay to consider giving the Independent Service Providers a partial environment that might consists of Test and Development Systems, to get a better feel for their services and response times.

Compare service offerings from multiple independent service providers.

Ask the right questions and see how long transition plans would take for a cut over.

Ask questions related to outages in these environments and the Independent Service Providers experience around it.

It is completely okay to drill the Independent Service Providers technical folks with tons of questions related to your environment.

Here are some additional things to ask the Independent Service Provider:

Ask about recertification cost

Ask about reconfiguration cost

Ask for any hidden cost

Ask about spares that are used

Ask about spares procurement process

Ask about spares testing process

Ask to see their operations (visit the ISP)

Ask about support plan

Ask to access the online service calls portal

Ask about online web portal for advisories and errors

Ask about response times

Look into escalation plans

Look into call flow processes

Ask about gaps in service compared to the vendor

Ask for a dedicated trained engineer (based on the amount of business)

Ask about training for engineers

Ask for a dedicated account manager

Ask for a dedicated technical contact

Ask for sales contact for your account

Ask for escalation contacts

Ask for project plan related to the transition from vendor to ISP

Investigate how big the Independent Service Provider is

Check references, ask reference customers about outages, parts replacement process, about hardware – software issues and call ownership issues

Compare SLA’s

Check the viability of the support solution (tools, processes, escalation, risks, etc)

Do not make decision on pricing only

Determine contingency plans.

So where do you find these alternatives?

Well, your initial search can begin on the web. Following that, you should further inquire into the company and try to dig into their area of expertise. Ask them about their competition and inquire with the competition on support plans.

If you have a Storage partner, go to them and ask them to find an Independent Service Provider for your organization.

If you have Global Outsourcing partners, inquire with them, to see if they have any strategic partners they recommend.

Honestly, working with so many different customers over the world, I have seen Independent Service Providers do good, they help the customer reduce CapEx and OpEx, extend the life of the equipment and most importantly run the entire operations without any disruptions, but that said, I have seen many Independent Service Providers fail miserably to deliver on promised services.

Do the research and jump on this if it is a viable option for your organization.

Its all about Storage Economics!!!!

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 2
Read more posts categorized as Storage

For example purposes, lets assume we are only talking about one single Storage device (frame) in the environment. Also for this blog post, lets assume the manufacturer (OEM) of the Storage frame is the vendor.

The concept of Hardware Maintenance

You purchased a storage asset 3 years ago. Spend a million dollars in acquisition cost on that storage device, also paid for software licenses, implementation cost, migration cost and training cost.  You are almost at a 2 million dollar mark to implement this Enterprise Class Storage, which includes your Tier1 and / or Tier 2 data.

How is this Storage frame doing today?

It’s working great, applications associated with it are robust, Thank God over the past 3 years we haven’t seen any outages in this environment.

Oh…………by the way, the vendor just visited today and is proposing we do a tech refresh in this environment.

The Strategy related to Hardware Maintenance

So the first question, are you ready for this tech refresh?

Is your business ready for this tech refresh?

Is your team ready and trained for this new technology?

Do you need external resources for this tech refresh?

Are there budgets and proposed growth in the business to pay for this tech refresh?

Do we really need a tech refresh?

Are your applications ready for this tech refresh?

Would your host environments be ready for this tech refresh?

What is that you are trying to gain by this tech refresh – Processing Power, Speed, Savings, Green Data Center, Power, Electricity, management cost, etc?

Are your users complaining about your application performance?

Is the number of users growing on these apps?

So how many Nah’s and Yah’s do we have on the questions above?

The Facts about Hardware Maintenance

The vendor is proposing a substantial savings and helping us reduce the TCO on these assets over the next three years.

Cost of hardware maintenance from the vendor for year 4, year 5 and year 6 (on the existing storage asset) is almost equivalent to the cost of purchasing new assets

We are being offered the best deal, free training, the vendor reduced the hardware acquisition cost by 20% and they have another 5% discount for the quarter closing tomorrow.

The beliefs about Hardware Maintenance

Hardware Support: No one other than the vendor can provide hardware support on the Storage assets because it is just too complex to manage.

Remote Support and Diagnostics: No one other than the vendor can provide remote support and diagnostics.

Code Upgrades (Firmware) and Engineering Support: No one other than the vendor can provide Code upgrades and Engineering Support.

Global Technical Support: No one other than the vendor has a 24 x 7 global technical support.

Onsite Certified & Trained Engineers: Only the vendor has trained and certified onsite engineers.

Spares: 24 x 7, 4 hour response spare parts logistics, only the vendor has it.

SLA: Only the vendor can provide a mission critical or a premium SLA that would include either 24 x 7 x 2 support or 24 x 7 x 4 support.

Software Support: No one other than the vendor can provide Software support

So, how do you get around these industry notions?

Please stay tuned for the next blog post on Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 2 tomorrow.

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Economics – Hardware Maintenance – Part 1
Read more posts categorized as All, Storage

A lot of new storage technologies are up and coming that have either Storage Virtualization or Thin Provisioning built as its core value. Those technologies can help run your storage in a much efficient manner, but what are your options related to your existing infrastructure that may consist of EMC Symmetrix DMX & above, EMC Clariion CX & above, NetApp FAS series, NetApp G Series, NetApp V Series, HDS USP, HDS USPV, HDS AMS, IBM DS Series, HP Eva’s, LSI’s, SUN branded LSI’s, etc. I am not suggesting if you are running Storage Virtualization or Thin Provisioning you are running at 90 or 100 percent efficiency, there are still places where these technologies start building inefficiencies as your storage environment starts to mature.

The point I am trying to make is, what have you done last to optimize your Storage Environment. Over the past year, I have met a lot of customers including IT IT Planning folks, CIO organizations, IT Directors, Storage Managers, Storage Engineers where all these folks work so hard to maintain and manage IT Assets on the floor including Storage environments. A Storage Engineer is always busy trying to keep up with new projects, migrations, consolidations, etc. In the race of life to get promotion at work, make managers happy, keeping up with new technology & projects, we all forget about things we decided to do yesterday or rather the day you joined the organization.

When was the last time you thought about reducing your organizations OpEx and CapEx. When was the last time, you took your organization through a Storage Optimization exercise. Have you setup a Storage Economics practice within your Storage environments that would help you reclaim stranded storage, help you re-tier your storage based on business needs, help you increase utilization and reduce inefficiencies within your Storage Environments.

Responses we get talking to various Storage folks, we try to do the best we can to keep up with the day to day storage needs, and we went through an exercise to optimize our environment about 12 months ago.

Wait a minute, 12 months ago? Each wasted month is a savings lost.

In my previous blog posts, I have addressed some very fundamental issues related to Storage Environments that can help you achieve the necessary goals you might have for your organization.

Please see related blog post below that shows how inefficiencies get built, how your storage should be optimized and the overall savings you would realize as an organization:

• Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 1
  
• The IT – Storage World of 2009
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 2
  
• The IT – Storage Budgets of 2009
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 3
  
• Some Fundamental Questions
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 4
  
• Facts about your Data
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 5
  
• Inconsistencies in Storage Environments
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 6
  
• The Technical Case
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 7:
  
• The Business Case
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 8:
  
• The End Result
• Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 9:
  

Case Study: A customer has a semi-large storage environment, running between 20% and 30% utilization with 1 single tier (all apps, users use Tier 1 storage – 15K Enterprise drives). They were looking to invest more into a specific storage platform, when the management decided to establish a Storage economics practice.

The customer had external consultants come in and review their entire storage estate, results were astonishing. Total savings of 10 Million US dollars over 3 years with establishing a Storage Economics practice for their 1 PB Storage Environment.

The above savings were minuscule, if there is a customer with a larger environment, the savings would increase substantially.
This savings can possibly help you acquire new technology or can be given back to the organization making you a hero, may be take you much closer to your dreams.

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Optimization
Read more posts categorized as All, Featured, Server Virtualization, Storage

What is the cloud? What will become of it? I spent May 17 and 18 in Prague at the Sys-Con Cloud Computing Conference and Expo exploring these questions with some of the smartest cloud-focused folks in Europe. The consensus: The IT world is changing and remote managed services are a big part of it. Another discovery: There are many, many terrible cloud puns in all languages.

The highlight of the show was Monday’s keynote by Roman Stanek of Good Data. His company’s eponymous analytics product lives entirely in the cloud, scaling as needed to meet customer demand. He led us through the thought process that led to this architecture, demonstrating why it’s simply the only sensible choice for applications like his. Nearly all of Good Data’s service expense is operational rather than capital in nature: Leveraging the OPEX advantage of infrastructure as a service allowed them to take in less money, giving less control to venture capitalists. The geographically-dispersed workforce uses laptop computers and the internet with no computer room or servers. Cloud computing is true SOA for the first time. As Roman told me, he couldn’t preach the virtues of the cloud without adopting it internally!

My discussions with the Expo attendees focused on where exactly this momentum will take us. Expo emcee, Jeremy Geelan, summed it up: Cloud computing will eventually be called nothing. It’s just computing. When it has no name, we will know that it has become a success. Many of my discussions came to this point, that the cloud computing movement is already underway, already taking hold both in consumer and corporate spheres, and will quietly take its place alongside more conventional in-house paradigms.

Among the many ideas worth considering:

• We may eventually see time-variable pricing, with rates going up at periods of peak demand and down at other times. This will lead to spot pricing and futures contracts.
• One follow-on idea was the possibility of deep discounts for those who can tolerate “best effort” services. Would you pay 10% extra for a non-guaranteed extra copy “most of the time”?
• Service providers will compete not just on price, but scalability, efficiency, and SLAs.
• Private clouds may not be clouds at all, since they don’t offer the same CAPEX/OPEX tradeoff and flexibility advantages. But private clouds could lead to a peer-to-peer public cloud, something that is already happening with DR systems today!
• How many public clouds will there be and who will run these? Will it be the usual suspects like Amazon and Google? The telephone companies? The software providers? Or corporate peers, as mentioned above?
• Flexibility to relocate applications in the cloud is an excellent idea, and one that will spur adoption, but “ye canna change the laws of physics” when it comes to bandwidth. This means that it’s a lot harder to migrate cloud storage to a new provider than cloud application instances!
• With each country adopting different laws, it becomes incredibly important to consider which legal system governs your cloud computing system. This has important implications for privacy and accountability, but many fail to think about it.

Although I missed out on the fellowship of the EMC World Bloggers’ Lounge, I think I learned much more from the cloud community in Prague!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. |
Lessons From the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo Prague 2009


This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Lessons From the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo Prague 2009
Read more posts categorized as Cloud Computing, Server Virtualization, Storage

Continuing the blog posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA), this will be the final post. This post focuses on the end result of running an analysis in our Storage environment.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT – Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT – Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

In this blog post we will try to wrap up some important things we discussed in the previous blog posts.

Here is how Storage Analysis of your Infrastructure help you

1. Reduce CAPEX
2. Reduce OPEX
3. Reduce Total Cost of Ownership
4. Not spend CAPEX for implementation
5. OPEX savings should pay for analysis by achieving efficiency and higher utilization
6. Immediate ROI
7. Make sure your numbers are not some arbitrary numbers; they have to be real dollars, not a 5 year plan to consolidate your assets, remember the word Immediate ROI.
8. Understand how much you will be paying at a front end of the deal, understand how much you will be paying as an ongoing cost, understand how much upgrades will cost, understand how many resources you will need to deploy (hardware, software, licenses, training, manpower), understand how reporting works, etc
9. Gain operational efficiency
10. Process should be agent less
11. Should work Cross platform (EMC, HDS, NetApp, 3Par, IBM, HP)
12. Data should be collected during business hours, it should be light weight, more or less not require change controls.
13. Data should be collected possibly from the least numbers of places (host) but get a full representation of the host environment as well as storage environment.
14. Don’t try to analyze your environment based on what someone else is using, rather see what best fits your environment based on your business processes, rules and needs. Do not just evaluate an OEM operational tool; idea is to look beyond it.
15. PB’s of storage should be analyzed within hours, not months.
16. Minimum Training
17. Maximum Drill Down for Reports
18. Reports for various folks within an organization like Storage Operators, Storage Admins, Host Admins, Storage Managers, Infrastructure Managers, CIO’s Office.
19. Check how your Configurations are setup in your environment
20. Check how your tiering is setup in your environment
21. Check for inconsistencies
22. Check for reclamation

So the above might help you get much closer to your possible goals of 2009, “DO MORE WITH LESS”.

Storage Analysis is not something you should run once, but as an organization establish a team of engineers who are responsible around increasing efficiency and utilization of your storage environment. Don’t forget your storage is between 30 to 35% of your IT budgets. Better efficiency will help you save millions on the front end (CapEx) and millions on backend (OpEx).

The “PRACTICE OF STORAGE ECONOMICS”, which seems to be a big thing every OEM is jumping on to these days, should be followed within your organization.

It has to be made a Practice, not just a onetime reclamation exercise. Best example, we live in our house and how often do we clean it, repairs, ongoing work to make it better every time. Storage is the same way, it needs work.

Experience

We have been talking to a large manufacturer here in the US. They have in excess of 10 PB of Storage. During our initial meeting with them about Storage, they mentioned how they have been able to successfully implement a plan in their organization for Storage Reclamation which has helped them reduce millions of dollars in Storage purchases. Also on the other hand, due to the Storage economics practice, they have managed to increase their operational efficiency in storage and thereby reduce their OpEx, again savings which would account for millions.

Really happy talking to these customers, that they are not driven by an OEM to just purchase new storage, but rather their internal practices help them achieve what they target for.

What are your experiences with Storage and have you implemented a Storage Economics practice within your organization?

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 9
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Storage

Continuing the blog posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA), this post focuses on the business challenges on why analysis of our storage platforms is important and how it might help us discover inconsistencies in storage environments eventually saving millions in CapEx and OpEx.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT – Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT – Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

It is important from a Business Standpoint that each aspect of this Storage Analysis project yield us the necessary results to help us make savvy business decisions related to our Storage Estate. While we do so, we still want to verify the analysis does not cost us our valuable CapEx dollars, which are more or less not available in 2009.

Some of the important business requirements, decisions & outcomes related to storage analysis are highlighted below:

1. Initial purchase and setup fees (CapEx dollars) for analysis software; if possible let’s keep this zero for storage analysis.
2. Ongoing cost (OpEx dollars) for analysis software; this constitutes your training, upgrades, engineering expense, etc. Let’s keep this zero as well for storage analysis.
3. With the given above scenario’s how does the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) look like now?
4. Let’s add a twist to this, let’s make this Storage-Analysis-On-Demand. You only pay for what you analyze.
5. No ongoing cost on a monthly basis, no setup fees, no upgrades, no CapEx dollars. Too good to be true, let’s find the solution now, how we can achieve this.
6. May be SaaS is the way to go (Software as a Service), no firewall issues, no security, no licenses, no upgrades, no deployment.
7. From an ROI (Return on Investment) standpoint, you should be able to reclaim your Storage right now, not 6 or 12 months later when the financial situation changes.
8. If you have multi site datacenters with single digit or double digit PB of Storage, you know how painful it is to deploy an enterprise wide Operational Tool (Time, effort, people, testing, training, meetings, outages, VMware, supported/unsupported, service packs, etc, etc).
9. Lets add another twist to this, no licensing cost for deployment, no charges per port, no charges per report, no charges per array, no charges per TB of raw data for licensing, no upgrades, no windows licensing, no VMware licensing, no infrastructure software licensing, rather a flat fee per TB to analyze a multi PB environment.
10. Minimum cost to deploy, may be all the storage & host related data can be collected for our environment from a single server

Do we have a Storage Economics Practice setup within our Storage environment to consistently increase our utilization, efficiency, reclamation and lower our outages & cost?

The above are some of the key points you should consider before you make a judgment to deploy any Storage Analysis software in your environment.

Experience

This is a fact…..

A MNC (Multi National Company – two digit PB storage), by successfully implementing a Storage Reclamation, Efficiency & Utilization project have managed to reduce their CapEx by 80% in the first year. They are planning to reduce their CapEx by 50% year after year.

Another MNC, by automating certain storage process for (storage) report creation reduced 20 man days to 2 hours a month for management reports.

How much CapEx and OpEx savings does that equate to?

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 8
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Continuing the blog posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA), this post focuses on the technical case on why analysis of your storage platforms is important and how it might help you discover inconsistencies in storage environments.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT – Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT – Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

From a technology standpoint, it’s very important to understand what Storage Analysis will do and how it might overall bring more value, efficiencies and utilization in your environments. To talk about a few technical issues it might help you understand are..

1. How much headroom (total possible growth) we have in our storage environment (drilldown array, lun)
2. How much reclaimable storage do we have in our environment (drilldown array, lun)
3. How much immediate deployable storage do we have in our storage environment (drilldown where)
4. Can we predict capacity planning and future growth
5. The information obtained above should be as of today, not something you started working about 3 months ago.
6. In large volatile storage environments, things are changing every second, it hard to keep a track of your storage configurations, relationships, headroom, capacity, reclamation.
7. Are you maintaining spreadsheets or access databases to keep a track of your applications, application owners, wwn, servers, zones, etc. You need to consider something soon.
8. Do you enforce Tiering in our environment, how much data do we have based on each tier.
9. Do we follow ILM approach, how much data needs to be migrated over to different tiers based on business needs and rules (we should see FAST later this year that should automate the process on V-Max)
10. Do we have any configuration issues in our environments that have caused major storage outages (single path host, multipath host with only one path active, LUN masking issues, zoning issues, BCV issues, other configuration issues)
11. How many times in the past 6 months have we had a major application outage and what caused it (how much penalties did we pay for those – OPEX dollars).
12. If we follow any compliance (SEC, Sarbanes Oxley, HIPPA, etc), is our data complaint in terms of replication, policies, etc
13. Do we have any manual processes for charge backs and bill backs, if so, what can we do to automate it.
14. Do we know how the LUN’s in our environment are setup and the relationships it has with LUN’s on other arrays in terms of replication, BCV, Snaps, Clones, SRDF, etc.
15. Do we know how the storage is growing in our environment: Trend Analysis
16. What sorts of report are available to you for the analysis you are performing.
17. Be careful to not just obtain a nice topology diagram of what is connected where, but being able to drill down real time to obtain LUN level details is important.
18. With any storage analysis product, how much work is involved, How much training, How much training related cost, ease of use, number of users, detailed drill down, how easy would it be to analyze your environment, etc needs to be understood before the project starts.
19. Do we have a Storage Economics Practice setup within our Storage environment to consistently increase our utilization, efficiency, reclamation and lower our outages & cost.

 Experience

We had a conference call with a potential customer late last week about our storage offerings. This is a large insurance company that has acquired quite a few different companies over the past 5 years and are growing and currently going through data center consolidation projects.

During the call, we asked what they were doing for reclamation and other storage economics. To my surprise, they answered, we had purchased an OEM based Operational Software about 5 years ago and we didn’t like it, there are different people within the organization that still use it, but it’s not giving us the required results we want, more or less its used for alerts.

Now we have just purchased and going through an implementation of another OEM’s Operational Software for data reclamation, analysis and monitoring. The customer goes ahead and says, we have been trying to implement this software within our environment for the past 4 months now.

The point I am trying to make is, whatever these deployments are, they have to be easy enough, cost effective, not time and resource consuming, not consume your CAPEX dollars and not spend you OPEX dollars (training, implementation, outages).

It has to be light weight, easily deployable, should yield results in a short duration of time (hours or days rather than months), but still should be able to analyze your environment at a very detailed level.

What are you using today to manage your several hundred TB or an enormously large double digit PB storage estate?

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 7
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Continuing the blog posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA), this post focuses on some facts about what causes and what are inconsistencies in storage environments.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT – Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT – Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

To talk about a few inconsistencies that exist in the volatile storage environments, here is a subset of them, later in the post we will talk about what causes these inconsistencies.

• Host masking to non existing LUNs
• Host masking to invalid LUNs
• Multipathing inconsistency with Hostmodes
• Split BCV’s with no increments
• BCV is smaller than Source devices
• Source is smaller than BCV devices
• Administratively fractured Clone copy, data integrity issues
• Unallocated BCV to LUN
• Host masked to LUN and LUN non mapped to path
• LUN mapped to path and not masked to host
• Single path host
• Replication split
• Replication failover
• Replication Sync
• R1 and R2 LUN to with improper host attachments
• BCV never established
• BCV Split
• BCV Sync
• BCV Mirroring
• Empty disk drive slots
• Disk drives installed but not used or configured
• Physical Disk space (unused disk drive space)
• LUN unallocated
• Ungrouped disk

The above storage inconsistencies are pretty common with large environments and with multisite replication enabled. Also without a proper storage management tool, these errors are very likely to exist in any storage environment.

What causes these above set of issues; let’s talk about a few primary related reasons

• Human error
• Incorrect planning and implementation
• Lack of Storage Strategy
• Lack of Reclamation Strategy
• Lack of Training
• Storage Consolidation projects
• Host migration projects
• Host retirement or scrapped projects
• Lack of Storage management
• Operational Oversight
• Undocumented planning and procedures

Experience

Just spoke to a potential customer last week. During a conference call we asked them, what are some of the major issues they are seeing in their storage environment? They have two Storage tools they use for operational and management purposes to handle a large double digit PB storage environment.

The answer from one of the architects was, we know of a lot of issues in our environment, but we have priorities around other things happening in the environment and cannot focus on these operational day to day non trivial issues.

With a large environment like the above to manage, a storage reclamation exercise can help a customer reclaim storage in terms of PB’s and could convert into immediate ROI, ROA and reduction in CapEx / OpEx that would help the organization save millions of dollars in new storage acquisitions. The question remains, are those our priorities today?

Do you have any of the above issues in your storage environment, or are you aware of them yet?

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 6
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Continuing the blog posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA), this post focuses on some facts about data that sits in Storage Environments.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT – Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT – Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

Going to a very basic question about a Storage Environment, What percent of your storage is allocated and what percent of it is actually being used?

The more utilization you gain, the further you can push your new storage acquisition timeframes increasing your ROI and reducing your CapEx. The better efficiency and optimization you gain in your storage environments, the further you can push to reduce your OpEx.

So based on some latest data we have gathered from various different customer environments, believe it or not, on an average, this is what we saw…..

Allocated Storage

• Average Customer Production data: Between 20 to 24%
• Average Copy / Replication data: 20% more than Production data: Between 24 to 28%
• Raid Overhead associated with production data: Between 15 to 19%
• Storage Allocated but no owners: Between 18 to 22%

Unallocated Storage

• Storage unallocated meant for future use: 13 to 17%

To shed some light on production and copy / replication data, there are a lot of data inconsistencies being reported in terms of broken links, replication failures, source and bcv lun size mismatches, etc.

The above scenarios with allocated / unallocated storage will reduce your ROI (Return on Investment) and ROA (Return on Asset), further causing budgeting issues in an organization.  

As you go to various different teams and ask them about the allocated / unallocated storage, you will hear different answers throughout the entire organization. From everyone’s view these numbers are debatable.  

Experience:

This time around, a personal experience.

In addition to my Technology Solutions responsibilities for our customers, I also have responsibilities around managing internal IT infrastructure that includes the apps, databases , storage and other IT assets. We have a lot of new projects happening every month, quarter, etc and have to allocate storage for those needs.

Projects that are hot today, might not be hot in the next 3 months, or may be in next 6 months. Projects get scrapped, host systems get scrapped, but storage still sits there, churning and spinning. Believe it or not, as the economic times change, lots of things are enforced and as the IT managers internally started looking at all the storage, we were able to reclaim quite a bit that was in real terms stranded storage, which is now all allocated to new ongoing projects or ready to be allocated at a short notice.

Do you know how much of your storage today is allocated, unallocated, stranded and importantly how much of it is Production data in your environment? 

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 5
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Continuing my posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA) and Storage Economics, this one focuses on the facts of IT Budgets of 2009.

Read the entire series of posts on Storage Resource Analysis (SRA):

Part 1: Storage Resource Analysis and Storage Economics

Part 2: The IT – Storage World of 2009

Part 3: The IT – Storage Budgets of 2009

Part 4: Some Fundamental Questions

Part 5: Facts about your Data

Part 6: Inconsistencies in Storage Environments

Part 7: The Technical Case

Part 8: The Business Case

Part 9: The End Result

Direct Impact Cost

• Reducing Total Cost of Ownership
• Reducing CapEx
• Reducing OpEx
• Storage Segment outsourcing
• Reduce Cost of After Warranty Support
• Reduction in Power Consumption
• Reduction in Storage Management
• Meeting SLA’s resulting in reduction in Penalties

Hidden Savings

• Storage Virtualization
• Increase Utilization & Efficiency
• Storage Reclamation & Optimization
• Redeploying unused storage
• Trend Analysis and Forecasting
• Unnecessary licensing cost for storage management software
• Reduction in Floor Space
• Centralized Storage
• Storage Consolidation
• Automation
• Investment into long lasting technology
• Planning resulting in future growth without heavy cost impact
• Tiering using ILM approach
• Green Data Center

 Should I mention, “DO MORE WITH LESS”, the beaten up concept of 2009.

And the important aspect is how do you manage to achieve all of the above while your databases are growing, your file systems are growing and you do not have a luxury to spend any additional dollars this year?

Experience

Recently I had a chance to talk to a CIO from a Fortune 1000 customer, and during the conversation with him, we asked him about what the primary objectives he has for his organization related to Storage.

Some of the things he mentioned were increasing efficiency and utilization within his storage environments, reducing his OpEx with automation and consolidation, reducing his CapEx with leveraging his IT assets on the floor for 3 additional years after warranty and try to centralize the entire storage throughout all business groups for better management and OpEx/CapEx reduction.

Well, let’s move on to the next topic…

What have you or the top management done in your organization to meet the IT – Storage budgets of 2009?

© Devang for Gestalt IT, 2009. | Storage Resource Analysis (SRA): Part 3
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