Shared Storage and next generation data centres, or how technology is changing your job

The challenges facing businesses today are manifold. We live in a technology driven world that is getting faster and faster. It can be argued the speed at which businesses can respond to change now equates to success. Company leaders are looking to the IT department to provide this business agility and help them stay ahead of the game.

We are currently going through an IT revolution driven by multiple technology innovations. According to a Gartner survey of CIOs, mobile (70%), big data/analytics (55%), social media (54%), and the cloud (51%) are set to be the most disruptive technologies over the next few years.1 Due to this, data creation has increased exponentially and demand by business to garner the value from this data has risen rapidly. Business leaders are looking to the IT department to find better ways to store, manage and utilise this data.

In the past the CIO and the IT department were expected to “keep the lights on” and the servers running, decreasing overall technology cost while maintaining the same level of service and productivity to the business. But now the game has changed, CIOs are now expected to move away from a singular concentration on the technology and look to picking and choosing the right combination of IT solutions that will drive competitive advantage for the business. Never before has the CIO had more influence in other areas of the business, and it is this, in combination with today’s technology advances that is changing the role of CIO and the wider IT department. A single on premise infrastructure is now history. Businesses are looking to a combination of services – not just on premise data centres – but also managed services such as cloud and outsourced IT. An IT job is no longer about maintaining the infrastructure, it is now about managing the huge array of IT services, picking and choosing those that will deliver the biggest ROI and drive the most benefit to the business.

Shared Storage and Next Generation Data Centres
Huge pressure is being placed on IT to take advantage of the latest technology advancements. Shared storage has been a popular method of providing an IT environment to businesses of all sizes due to its ability to streamline the cost, time, and physical infrastructure associated with its usage. However, as business demands increased so did the physical on-premise infrastructure requirements making costs soar, thereby negating the positive benefits of its implementation.

But now, shared storage has evolved, combining elements of on-premise, virtualised, public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure. By leveraging, managing and consolidating all these technology options into a single, linked, infrastructure solution, the CIO and IT department are able to balance cost, opportunity and risk, enabling the business to adapt to changing requirements and maintain competitive advantage.

The golden goose of shared storage looks to unify SAN, NAS and storage virtualisation into a single hybrid array in order to provide businesses with an easily scalable storage infrastructure. This needs to be flash enabled for consistent high performance, and have the ability to free data so it can be moved easily around the complete IT infrastructure landscape, thereby driving flexibility and ease of use.

Not only this but the deployment of shared storage should take into account current and future cloud adoption. Any implementation, if it is not already, should be cloud enabled.

In addition to these considerations there are a number of pitfalls that CIOs need to look out for when adopting a virtualised shared storage infrastructure:

· Vendor lock-in is a huge headache. Today no company wants to nail its flag to a single technology mast. By doing so costs can spiral and the eventual IT adoption may not be optimal for the business needs. Any deployment of shared storage needs to incorporate a virtualisation software that can manage multi-vendor 3rd party data storage platforms, preventing vendor lock-in, protecting existing investments and promoting ease of use.
· Easy data management and the easy transportation of data around the infrastructure is also essential. Clustered shared storage of data can drive non-disruptive operations through the creation of a data fabric that means data clusters can be shifted around to maximise uptime when planned maintenance is required. This can be done through the deployment of a storage OS that can provide a data platform.
· Cost efficiency is on every business leaders’ lips, but by adopting a shared storage infrastructure solution that prevents vendor lock-in and enables easier data management around that infrastructure, businesses can ensure all implementations are exactly tailored to their individual business needs, providing the greatest ROI.
· Multi-tenancy for control. Shared infrastructure implies the ability to host, manage and secure many workloads sharing the same storage infrastructure, all with different resource consumption and service requirements. This can be difficult to achieve, however Shared Multi-tenancy puts you in control and ensures equity between competing workloads.

All this isn’t for nothing
Many businesses are wary of the upfront investment required when adopting shared storage, but this cost needs to be compared to the wide range of benefits implementing a solution that takes advantage of all the new technologies can offer. By ensuring that the key issues of flexible data management and vendor lock-in are addressed, the benefits of implementation quickly outweighs the upfront investment.

By deploying shared storage businesses obtain an IT infrastructure that is more responsive to their organisation allowing them to make rapid and more informed decisions about their business. Enabling technologies, such as virtualisation and private/public clouds, offer improved levels of agility and efficiency that can deliver the full value of next generation data centres built on a shared virtual infrastructure. By deploying clustered shared storage, businesses will be provided with an optimal storage environment that increases agility, scale, efficiency, performance and up time.

1 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2304615