Tiered storage cuts costs, improves business alignment

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2004 by Chuck Hollis

Business managers want tools that automate, monitor, and audit the storage and migration of data among platforms. Using new, lower-cost storage technologies and better aligning service levels with the value of the data, a tiered approach can reduce total cost of storage by upwards of 45% while improving the strategic alignment of storage investment with business needs.

Why Tiered Storage?

One reason businesses need a tiered approach to storage is the sheer volume of information they must store.

Even through the economic downturn of the last few years, data storage requirements have continued to grow by 70-80% a year for many organizations. This has been driven by the increased use of information systems to increase the efficiency of logistics, supply chain and distribution systems, by the storage needs of e-commerce functions such as online sales, marketing and collaboration with business partners; and the needs of specific applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and e-mail. Regulations that require the long-term storage of critical data are also driving storage growth in vertical markets such as financial services and health care.

A second factor is the growth in unstructured data such as documents and images. Unlike information stored in the rows and columns of a traditional database, unstructured data may include anything from a mortgage application to a patient x-ray. It represents the fastest-growing type of data, increasing at rates between 120% and 200% a year, driven by the increasing use of work-flow applications in financial services, which relies heavily on documents, and health insurance, which relies heavily on images.

Unstructured data drives up the need for tiered storage because its value tends to fall more quickly over time than does the value of structured data. For example, an e-mail may be critical the first day it is sent, but after a week may never be opened or needed again. This means unstructured data can be archived sooner on slower, less expensive media than structured data, provided the organization has a tiered storage infrastructure which allows such migration.

Another driver is stagnant or even shrinking IT storage budgets, a situation that may not improve even as the economy improves. Having discovered they can "do more with less," management will in many cases be reluctant to increase spending for storage unless the IT staff can prove a compelling return on investment. Smaller IT staffs also mean companies have fewer skilled people to evaluate, choose, and integrate multiple technologies from multiple vendors, as well as fewer staff to perform ongoing storage management. Packaged solutions to address common pain points like e-mail and database archiving as part of a tiered storage architecture can help reduce complexity while delivering solid business benefits.

At the same time, business managers have become used to getting higher performance, reliability, and availability year over year even if they are paying the same or less for each megabyte of storage. Tiered storage can help IT organizations deliver such improvements while reducing the long-term total cost of ownership of storage.

In some industries, new regulations requiring the long-term retention, proof of integrity and timely recoverability of data are driving the need for tiered storage architectures. Among the well-known examples, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires auditors to keep records of financial audits for seven years, while HIPAA requires health care providers to keep patient records for two years after a patient's death, and to guarantee access to such records in case of disaster. By providing different storage service levels and recovery times for different types of data, tiered storage can help organizations meet such regulatory requirements without breaking the bank.

The final trend driving tiered storage is new technologies that enable a tiered-storage strategy, such as ATA-based disk arrays that offer disk-like performance for tape-like costs. New fixed-content storage platforms offer new cost-effective options for long-term data storage, while new storage management software provides new capabilities for managing and moving storage as needed across different storage devices.

What is Tiered Storage?

Tiered storage refers to different combinations of storage hardware and software designed to provide specific levels of performance and functions at various price levels.

It provides up-front savings because customers purchase only the storage capabilities they need for their parti-cular application requirements instead of overbuying to meet "worst case" or "peak demand" needs. It also provides ongoing cost savings because customers now have the tools and processes to more effectively manage the storage they have, and to ensure their current storage resources are aligned with business requirements before purchasing more.

Implementing a tiered-storage strategy also provides a better dialogue between IT and the business about the importance of various application information to the business, and about the price/performance tradeoffs available with various storage technologies.