Need More Storage? Reclaim It!!

Its predicted that storage capacity doubles once in every two years

. How is this additional storage being actually utilized? By overcompensating. A typical organization includes storage assets that are provisioned to peak capacity while creating a significant amount of unutilized storage that results in a poor return on the storage assets. Reclaiming stranded storage capacity is essential to improving ROA (Return on Assets). In the current economic climate, storage budgets are nearly flat or even nonexistent. Yet, the amount of storage that needs to be managed continues to grow exponentially.

Unfortunately, business organizations gravitate towards what can be seen as an accidental architecture, where a short term fix is seen as adequate for a problem that actually requires long term strategy of storage. This results in a multitude of problems starting from decrease in productivity, conflicting management interfaces, unused assets and asset proliferation.

Though the consolidation of storage has considerably improved the storage utilization rate, the average storage utilization across industries remains low, estimated to be around 30 to 40 percent. The rest of it simply remains unallocated or unused due to a multitude of reasons.

Poor storage utilization is a result of many factors at multiple levels. Following are some reasons that lead to low storage utilization:

Ownership in Silos - Ideally, IT organizations are the custodians of storage infrastructure. Most often however, storage ownership rests with many stakeholders such as business owners, application owners and so on. This results in mushrooming storage stacks emerging across the organization.

Excessive Buying - To keep up with the ever expanding data storage needs of the business, IT departments tend to take the easy way out - Buy more.

Legacy - Inheritance of storage infrastructure due to consolidations, mergers and acquisitions also contribute to the storage mayhem.

Optimized Storage The Challenges Involved

While clearly there are multiple administrative layers in the storage realm, what is lacking is a clear view of the storage landscape at any layer across the organization. Considering that, the starting point is to have a sound understanding of storage patterns by answering some basic yet fundamental questions

Current Utilization: What is the current storage allocation and utilization at the storage level, host file-system level, and application level?

Mapping: Is there any visibility into the mapping of storage from the application to the disk, to understand the real usage of the storage capacity? How much storage capacity is over allocated across the organization at the storage level, host level, and application level?

Forecasting: Which are the applications, file-systems/LUNs, storage devices that are at risk of filling up completely? Are these risks real? What is the time frame for 100 percent storage utilization?

Determining answers for the above questions requires a crystal clear view of storage patterns across application, file and disk. This is facilitated through the usage of tools, processes, methodologies and more importantly the right expertise.

To learn more on the storage optimization approach read our white paper on Storage Capacity Audit and Reclamation Service - Click Here

About Microland:

Microland is a pure play provider of IT Infrastructure Management Services and its Infrastructure Management Services encompass all services that relate to monitoring, managing and enhancing the performance of a clients IT Infrastructure. These include Server Management, Messaging (e-Mail) Management, Data Center Management, Network Management, IT Security Services, Device Management, Application Management and Process and Technology Consulting among others. Microlands Operation Management Centers are ISO 20000-1 & 27001 certified. Amongst the recent awards won by Microland are - Top 10 Best Performing Infrastructure Providers by Global Services Media in 2009 for the 3rd consecutive year; Top 100 Outsourcing service providers globally by The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) in 2009; The Best Infrastructure Services Partner (India) for the fourth time in a row by Microsoft since 2005; Ranked 8 and 2 among The Top 20 Remote Infrastructure Management vendors and for Data Centre Management capabilities respectively by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Microland provides a proven and reliable alternative to global customers in managing their enterprise IT infrastructure. Microland is headquartered in Bangalore and employs over 2,300 professionals worldwide. For more information, visit www.microland.com

by: Lucy

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