The Value of Information
A recent trend in my customers is that they are currently working on business requirements to store information that is going to grow exponentially, if there businesses continue in there current operational manner. Finding the correct storage solution that can meet this demand while providing the correct level of performance in terms of IOPS and ensuring that utilisation in the Data Centre improves has resulted in a desire to evaluate the storage problem with a different approach.
The conversations and the problem solving exercise has been an interesting one. The designs have been creative and varied, however the end result has always been consistent and this is partly due to one crucial question not being asked at the start of the process.
What is the information being stored worth to my business?
The Global Economic situation and the data explosion has resulted in the cost of storing the information becoming of more interest in the final purchasing committee meeting. In the past the architecture decision of where the information being stored was made by the storage teams and recent trends have been to place it on Tier 1 storage.
The justification for Tier 1 Enterprise arrays has been valid for a number of years it provided the correct balance between Cost, Risk and Performance for an enterprise when information being stored was at manageable levels and when compute was actually expensive to purchase.
Many of my customers have explored and tried to implemented ILM models. However the varied types of data in an organisation and the need to implement different ILM policies and tools for those data types has resulted in a costly overhead which in the end does not justify the investment in man time. Instead the customers are seeking a new architecture where they select the storage based on requirements and validity for the business. This is resulting in some choices that meet Sun's Open Storage model.
An interesting use case that highlights the above is that of storage for compliance. Compliance information storage does not always generate revenue instead many businesses are implementing solutions as cost prevention, whilst they try to understand how to use the information for business purposes at a later date.
They are architecting solutions to store data in the realms of multiple terabytes providing the business the ability to store and retrieve the business information on demand whilst not impeding on the normal performance of the existing applications. Without this ability the business potentially may be fined or in fact forced to cease trading. However that is all the business benefit the information will create at this time until somebody is able to find other business use cases. When you asked the question “What is the information worth to the business” The response is “FINE Prevention!” and so the true value of the information is that of the potential fine value.
An interesting solution to the problem that I am seeing increasingly being used is that of a server. My customers have been completing internal benchmarks that have been very pleasing based around Sun's X4540 server. I call it a server because that is what it is a 2 Socket Quad Core AMD device. It just so happens that it is also tightly coupled to 6 disk controllers managing 8 disks per controller and so 48 spindles in total with upto 48TB capacity.
They are building there own database appliances and data archives around this device. The cost of management is the same as a server and the Data Center savings are huge, with all of this fitting into a 4 Rack Unit box.
When you look at what its replacing:
The solution is less complicated, more cost effective, and easier to manage. It also has the added benefit of not being on shared infrastructure an outage for the application is the only thing that is required for a change to be implemented. They are ensuring availability and a DR Solution via the use of Database replication rather than disk based replication as they want to ensure transaction integrity while removing the cost of Tier 1 based replication licences. They did of course have other options in Solaris and software based solutions but they wanted to keep it simple
The performance has been interesting as well, the IOPS have been the same as that of the existing implementation on an EMC array in a shared environment. Myself and the customer cannot wait to see what will happen when we introduce Write Intensive SSD's into the mix. I hope I can report on some real world results in a later blog.
The conversations and the problem solving exercise has been an interesting one. The designs have been creative and varied, however the end result has always been consistent and this is partly due to one crucial question not being asked at the start of the process.
What is the information being stored worth to my business?
The Global Economic situation and the data explosion has resulted in the cost of storing the information becoming of more interest in the final purchasing committee meeting. In the past the architecture decision of where the information being stored was made by the storage teams and recent trends have been to place it on Tier 1 storage.
The justification for Tier 1 Enterprise arrays has been valid for a number of years it provided the correct balance between Cost, Risk and Performance for an enterprise when information being stored was at manageable levels and when compute was actually expensive to purchase.
Many of my customers have explored and tried to implemented ILM models. However the varied types of data in an organisation and the need to implement different ILM policies and tools for those data types has resulted in a costly overhead which in the end does not justify the investment in man time. Instead the customers are seeking a new architecture where they select the storage based on requirements and validity for the business. This is resulting in some choices that meet Sun's Open Storage model.
An interesting use case that highlights the above is that of storage for compliance. Compliance information storage does not always generate revenue instead many businesses are implementing solutions as cost prevention, whilst they try to understand how to use the information for business purposes at a later date.
They are architecting solutions to store data in the realms of multiple terabytes providing the business the ability to store and retrieve the business information on demand whilst not impeding on the normal performance of the existing applications. Without this ability the business potentially may be fined or in fact forced to cease trading. However that is all the business benefit the information will create at this time until somebody is able to find other business use cases. When you asked the question “What is the information worth to the business” The response is “FINE Prevention!” and so the true value of the information is that of the potential fine value.
An interesting solution to the problem that I am seeing increasingly being used is that of a server. My customers have been completing internal benchmarks that have been very pleasing based around Sun's X4540 server. I call it a server because that is what it is a 2 Socket Quad Core AMD device. It just so happens that it is also tightly coupled to 6 disk controllers managing 8 disks per controller and so 48 spindles in total with upto 48TB capacity.
They are building there own database appliances and data archives around this device. The cost of management is the same as a server and the Data Center savings are huge, with all of this fitting into a 4 Rack Unit box.
When you look at what its replacing:
- EMC Symmetrix shared with other hosts and the costs of features such as Powerpath
- Veritas Volume Manager
- A Separate Enterprise Server
The solution is less complicated, more cost effective, and easier to manage. It also has the added benefit of not being on shared infrastructure an outage for the application is the only thing that is required for a change to be implemented. They are ensuring availability and a DR Solution via the use of Database replication rather than disk based replication as they want to ensure transaction integrity while removing the cost of Tier 1 based replication licences. They did of course have other options in Solaris and software based solutions but they wanted to keep it simple
The performance has been interesting as well, the IOPS have been the same as that of the existing implementation on an EMC array in a shared environment. Myself and the customer cannot wait to see what will happen when we introduce Write Intensive SSD's into the mix. I hope I can report on some real world results in a later blog.
