The expanding data universe in India is accompanied by a paradigm shift toward clustered storage architectures, believes Santhosh D’Souza
Big data, cloud, social and mobility are the disruptive forces that are currently driving the Indian IT infrastructure market – forecasts are currently in the vicinity of $2.1 billion in 2013, growing 9.7 percent compared to 2012. We’re seeing rapid data center implementations to meet the ever expanding server consolidation and virtualization needs, combined with growing data sets and adoption of multimedia applications and mobility.
Amidst the explosion, the data storage industry in India is witnessing a paradigm shift toward clustered storage architectures. In the past, the primary driver behind the adoption of a clustered storage infrastructure was the ability to improve operating performance. As it became increasingly necessary for mission-critical data to remain up and accessible at all times, customers have realized that clustered storage is the panacea to enable non-disruptive operation (NDO) and is therefore more important than ever before.
As IT-as-a-service became a central business driver, organizations realized that they contend with providing consistent and constant service to clients and customers while operating on shared infrastructure. This has become an increasingly difficult challenge with the consolidation of services on fewer and fewer IT components. The result is an exponential increase in the difficulty of scheduling downtime to upgrade or maintain those components.
For some customers, scheduling downtime is not just difficult, it is nearly impossible. They are often forced to postpone service upgrades until maintenance becomes absolutely critical. It often requires far more effort and resources to coordinate the downtime than to execute the actual event. In the interim, they are stuck operating with reduced capacity and/or hampered performance levels.
Many of these customers didn’t realize NDO is even possible. Until they are shown how clustered storage infrastructure will allow them to move and redistribute data without limiting access, many assume that downtime is just an unpleasant and unavoidable business reality.
Besides, organizations previously viewed unplanned downtime as their biggest concern; today’s business technology leaders increasingly realize that planned downtime — for upgrades, routine maintenance, or to scale — is not only more common but also far more disruptive.
Clustered storage has the potential of changing the rules of how data is stored, managed and accessed. Trends driving the movement to clustered storage are modular scalability in the multiple dimensions of capacity, performance, manageability, non-disruptive operations that eliminate planned downtime requirements, and the complete agnosticism of clustered storage infrastructure to access protocols, as it supports all popular SAN and NAS protocols.
The manifold benefits that clustered storage offers has made businesses realize that with its adoption, they can reduce storage costs, increase workflow productivity, increase the IT operating leverage and unlock new revenues.
Clustered storage has driven increasing adoption among organizations to scale their data infrastructures out (horizontally) as opposed to exclusively scaling them up (vertically). Clustered storage was traditionally assumed to be primarily, or even only, appropriate for enterprise-level businesses. The ever-intensifying explosion of data and the changing role of IT operations, however, are motivating more midsize and even small businesses to investigate the advantages of clustering.
The cost equation
Some organizations assume that the cost of clustered storage outweighs the benefits it offers. When we do the math with them though, we often find that clustered storage offers significant savings. For example, rather than deploying a single high-end controller to operate on a workload, it can sometimes be far more efficient to add multiple clustered nodes that are less costly. With this approach, we have seen savings of as much as 60 percent on capital expenses while also improving performance and enabling NDO.
That said, although a clustered environment is often compelling, sometimes it is not the most appropriate data storage solution for an organization. We always advise businesses to assess their actual application and workload needs to see if clustering is right for them.
Here are a couple of — highly simplified – thumb rules for IT managers weighing the adoption of clustered storage. First, for organizations that employ workloads generating a high ratio of CPU computations relative to the amount of data, scaling out with a clustered storage environment is often more efficient and more cost effective, because it drives down the cost of the CPU resources. If an organization has the inverse ratio — a large amount of data, but few CPU requirements — it could be more likely that scaling up will work better.
Second, for organizations that have highly shared infrastructure where availability is critical, the NDO features of clustered storage can be particularly advantageous. Communicating pain points and business needs to a trusted solution provider partne, will allow their engineering teams to design a system based on which workloads function better on a horizontally scalable solution as opposed to a vertical one.
As explosive growth of data now impacts more organizations across more business segments than ever before, the benefits of clustered storage have both dramatically increased and become increasingly affordable. It’s not always the most appropriate platform for all businesses — no technology ever is. But, as more companies learn about clustering, and how it could work for them, we have seen that many are pleasantly surprised to discover that it is an affordable and extremely powerful solution to their data management challenges.
Santhosh D’Souza is Director of Systems Engineering at NetApp India.
