Chris Poelker’s Blog

In part 1, I discussed how to leverage Virtual Tape to green the datacenter and the environment. In this part, I will focus on how storage virtualization can help reduce power consumption and datacenter floor space requirements.

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One of the hottest topics in IT these days is “Green”.  When the term green is used in reference to IT, it usually means more than just being environmentally friendly. For Information Technology, green also means needing less money to pay the bills for power, cooling, datacenter floor space, and the gas needed to ship tapes back and forth between the datacenter and offsite storage or DR location. 

So how is virtualization an enabling technology to “go green?”  In this series, I will discuss a few of the ways virtualization can save money and do something nice for the planet at the same time.

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A colleauge of mine brought this little gem to my attention, and in the interest of sharing, I thought ya’ll would also find it interesting.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/01/02/it_trends_2009_fforecast/

Quick Excerpt:

“Just about every major company funds a junkyard of application systems and technologies attached to them. Few have had the incentive to fix this, much to the consternation of corporate IT departments. Remember the IT cost justification for that ERP system - all those systems that it would replace, but somehow never did. And recognize the fact that this residue of junkyard legacy counts for a big part of the IT budget, and generates lots of operational inefficiency.

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In order to achieve greater efficiencies for IT investments, most IT models leverage the Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) standards model when implementing solutions within the organization. Although standardization may provide some substantial operational benefits, the reliance on traditional methodologies for critical data services are not meeting the more stringent financial and budgetary objectives we are trying to achieve in a down market. The optimized data services model is a shift away from traditional approaches, embraces recent advancements in server and storage virtualization, including data de-duplication, continuous data protection, WAN optimization, and thin provisioning to enable a paradigm shift in the datacenter to a more cost effective and optimized approach to IT.  

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Our CTO Wai Lam, (who is one of the brightest guys I have ever met) was recently featured in an executive viewpoint in Virtual Strategy magazine, and I thought his views were quite interesting, and could provide some insight to the readers of this blog.  

http://www.virtual-strategy.com/December-2008-Executive-Viewpoint/Executive-Viewpoint-Wai-Lam-FalconStor.html

Please review it and let me know your thoughts.

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With the economy being what it is, and all the consolidation going on in very large US business, the ability to provide complete data mobility is becoming a very interesting topic for many a CIO these days. I ran across an interesting article on searchstorage.com as an example of how virtualization can actually make data migrations as easy as “flipping a switch”!

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 Lots of folks have recently been asking me about how the cost benefits of introducing the ODS model in their datacenters. I guess the current economic climate is finally pushing the CIO’s to take an even closer look at what they are doing to reduce costs to help the business.

It boggles my mind how much money companies are throwing at their technology vendors to help them solve some simple business problems. Backup and Data Replication for DR are the two big ones. Innovation in the datacenter is at a standstill in many cases simply because the incumbent technology “partners” the company has chosen has only a few ways of doing things. The “traditional” companies have been repackaging the same old methodologies and forcing it down the throat of their customers, and taking advantage of the fact that the technical decision makers in these companies are simply too busy fighting fires to do the proper research to find out what else is available in the market. Sure the old approaches work and feel comfortable, since it is what everyone is “used to” doing. But times are changing, and those companies who make the effort to review the new innovations in the technology market today may be pleasantly surprised to find out they can most likely reduce their current IT expenditures by 50% or more.

In the next few blogs, I am going to dive a little deeper, and give specific examples of how companies can leverage the ODS model to dramatically reduce costs. As an example, what if I can show you how to get all the benefits of data deduplication without actually dedulicating your data? How about saving 80% on your WAN to consolidate data protection for remote offices, without having to buy all those VERY EXPENSIVE network tuning appliances. How about increasing operational efficiency by 70% or more? You need to take your current vendors to task, and I will be more than happy to show you how. 

Finally, imagine if the ODS utility model could be implemented while leveraging the same server and storage infrastructure currently in place! That would make rolling out the solution a bit more cost effective and easier to deploy than a complete rip and replace scenario. There would be no need to purchase proprietary disks or servers, the accumulated knowledge of the existing environment would not be wasted, and the existing service contracts could stay in place, which could reduce costs further while also lowering the learning curve. In order to accommodate such a scenario, the ODS solution would have to provide intelligence in an abstraction layer which integrated with and virtualized the existing storage infrastructure.

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Last time I suggested a new model for data management, the Optimized Data Services model – an integrated suite of capabilities that would operate in a virtual environment, intelligently managing data use, protection and archiving, which in essence creates a services oriented utility model for critical data services. Today I’d like to continue on this topic, covering the need for integrated risk management, deduplication, and general interoperability.

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This is going to be a three part series, due to it’s length. I will try and post one part each week for the next three weeks.  This topic covers a new paradigm in storage virtualization, which I am calling the ODS model.  The ODS (Optimized Data Services) model is a holistic way to do exactly what it says, leverage innovation in technology to reduce IT costs and optimize data services.

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