‘Put storage on a diet’

In the current world financial crisis, businesses are beleaguered to lessen their expenditure without sacrificing quality. In this sense, information technology (IT) organizations must meet demanding user expectations and superior levels of performance, while IT budgets stay essentially flat. This is why businesses need to realign their IT strategy to find a balance between maximizing storage utilization, containing costs and maintaining service level.

As the amount of data IT organizations manage at their data centers continues to grow at an exponential rate, most IT organizations respond by acquiring more storage appliances and disk drives.

According to a recent study, 51 percent of organizations expect to spend more on storage in 2009 even though more than 90 percent have lower budgets and fewer people than in 2008. Purchasing of storage devices, however, is not an advisable solution because of its cost of maintenance.

For IT organizations that must seek alternatives to do more with less, the focus will be on getting a “Return on Yesterday” or getting more return out of their existing systems and extending their usual life.

Symantec, a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management, has identified four key strategies so businesses can stop buying storage and start optimizing their existing storage assets. These are data deduplication, storage resource management, thin provisioning and archiving.

In data deduplication, duplicated data is reduced. Storage resource management identifies and reclaims unused storage capacities. Thin provisioning provides storage capacity only when needed, and archiving moves older data to a lower-cost storage.

If an organization is storing the same file multiple times, the deduplication software removes the extra copies and makes the single remaining version available to users. The deduplication software also strips out data that appears in multiple files, and then re-insists it when a user opens the file. By using deduplication, there is 40 to 80 percent storage reduction.

Focusing more on deduplication, Richard Velasco, manager of systems engineering, Symantec Philippines, said, “Deduplication is a primary focus for Symantec, and we will continue to deliver innovative technology that helps organizations achieve significant storage and cost savings, while providing advanced recovery capabilities and centralized management to meet our customers’ demanding business requirements.”

Symantec’s Enterprise Vault moves messages, files and SharePoint content directly out of applications like Exchange, SharePoint and Windows file shares to a deduplicated archive — moving deduplication to the information source. Using NetBackup or Backup Exec 2010, organizations will be able to deduplicate backups immediately, at the client, and centrally manage deduplication in the data center and globally across remote offices. As a result, organizations can reduce backup storage by as much as 95 percent, while still providing rapid recovery of applications in the event of a disaster.

“Symantec recommends organizations put storage on a diet by deploying deduplication technology to curb data bloat and save costs,” said Edler Panlilio, enterprise sales manager, Symantec Philippines. “Protecting more than 50 percent of the world’s data, Symantec is well positioned to deliver deduplication everywhere because our solutions are deployed everywhere the information exists.”

Also, Symantec has a unique approach to reducing backup deduplication complexity by providing a single interface to manage backups using any combination of integrated deduplication software and third-party deduplicated storage through its OpenStorage API. Organizations can deduplicate everywhere while centralizing management to reduce time and cost of operations.

Employing these strategies will guarantee organizations spend less on storage and only have to purchase new capacity when they have fully optimized the capacity they already have. With Symantec’s complete storage management solutions, organizations can measure, monitor and optimize their existing storage assets to significantly extend their useful life and reduce the growth rate of stored data. Through the use of such storage software technologies, hardware purchase can be delayed while also bringing significant productivity and cost savings to the data center. –Jan Milo R. Severo, Contributor, Daily Tribune