Chris Poelker’s Blog

Thin provisioning may actually get you 30% or more better utilizaiton from your storage, but what else can you do to have an even greater impact?

 Simply take a look at what your database administrators are doing! Have you reviewed existing processes for testing and development? Are the costs and complexity high?

Most DBA’s want control. Even though you may be backing up a particular database every night, your DBA’s may also be using disk space for their own dumps! Database dump space in some companies may exceed 100% of the total storage space allocated for the databases themselves. How about test/dev? In some SAP shops, you may find up to 9 copies of certain database instances for testing and development. That’s FULL COPIES.

Another area that quickly eats up tier1 disk resources is disaster recovery. If you are using array based replication, you need another like array at the DR side. You will also need all the capacity based internal firmware licenses for the replication solution, and multiple GOLD copies and BCV images to assure protection from rolling disasters and multiple recovery points.

Add it all up: Thin provisioning saves 30%

• DB dump space adds 100%
• DR space adds 300%
• Test/Dev copies adds 900%

Thin provisioning savings are pretty much eliminated. Whats a better way?

1. Provide the DBA’s with a share to dump to that also Dedupes the data at 10:1 (IE: that 1TB database dump is now only 100GB)
2. Use OFF FRAME snapshot copies for test/dev (Using lower cost SATA disk for an R1 copy on another frame reduces storage capex by 50%, while providing up to 255 copies with minimal storage space, with no impact to production for copy on write snaps)
3. Use fabric based continuous replication to lower cost storage for DR, and take snaps at the other side (get rid of all the array licenses and use modular storage for DR by moving to fabric based CDP technology)

  Results?

An overall savings on storage and operations of 12X over current expenditures.

Add that to your new server virtualization initiative, and collect a nice bonus check for saving the company tons of money!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Storage Utility, storage virtualization, Green, Data Deduplication, Optimized Data Services, VMware, ROI, SOA, Storage, Virtualization, FalconStor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.