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Application-aware storage can help in a recession says Thesaurus
Date: Friday 6 February 2009
Author: PHILIP ALSOP
 Many organisations continue to buy and run storage devices with performance and capacity features well beyond their control and requirements. Application-aware storage can save companies added expense during the economic downturn, says IT expert, Thesaurus.
Mike Vinten, CEO, Thesaurus, says "The excess storage performance and capacity is due, in the main, to not keeping pace with rapidly changing server and virtualisation technologies. As a result, larger amounts of disparate storage are seen as a solution to the problem of ensuring network storage capacity is always available no matter what the real data storage requirement is and this comes at a huge monetary and risk management cost."
It is incredibly expensive, often ineffective and high risk to own a storage solution that exceeds a company's requirements or uses a specific storage platform to handle different application data. By contrast, a utility storage platform that is application-aware is now an option for many organisations to help reduce needless financial expenditure and solve security, reliability and capacity worries.
Application-aware storage combines NAS and SAN technology on one platform and is now more of a financially viable option for small businesses. Data is identified and stored by the application-aware disk in a mission-critical order. For example, data that comes from a company's daily sales application or stock system is stored on the outside of the disk edge for rapid access. Consolidating and tiering storage in this way increases disk utilisation in some cases by up to 80-90 per cent. Automated mission-critical storage also reduces administration time by up to 50 per cent whilst maintaining Quality of Service (QoS).
Rather than hosting these platforms internally, companies should look to host their storage in a shared environment to keep costs down. Coupled with new virtualisation capabilities, it gathers disparate storage and presents them in a single and simplified management view. It reduces hardware, resource and power consumption costs whilst providing a dedicated, secure location maintained by experts to store and back up sensitive data.
"This is ideally suited for small to medium size enterprises that lack the space or funds to host storage solutions in-house. Using a shared environment also means companies will only pay for exactly what they use, for example per gig, per month, instead of paying over the odds for masses of storage that will never be fully utilised," continues Vinten.
In short, application-aware storage and virtualisation technologies in a shared environment mean companies can reduce costs, improve efficiency and overall performance in these times when every drop needs to be squeezed out of each IT investment.
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