Automated Storage Provisioning demo

Demonstrating return on investment with storage has not always been an easy proposition. With many customers now also required to demonstrate 'in year' ROI for any investments, storage or otherwise, this task seems to have become that much more difficult! Equally, we know statistically that, when calculating the total cost of ownership for storage, only 30% is comprised of storage acquisition leaving the remaining 70% comprised of operating expenses [IDC].

However, reducing OPEX as well as increasing storage efficiencies whilst achieving in year ROI needn't be as difficult as it may appear at first glance. There are certainly storage technologies which can provide demonstrative 'in year' return on investment and, critically, valuable and compelling cost benefit post implementation.

Three such technologies are data deduplication, thin provisioning, and storage virtualisation. Whilst specific implementations of such technologies can be complicated, what we must bear in mind is that the three aforementioned technologies are all block level technologies; put simply, data is comprised of zeroes and ones and what these technologies are looking for is the uniqueness of the data as well a pooling allocation. How? In the event that the storage system sees and identical pattern of zeroes and ones [i.e. duplicate data] the data can be dropped and not stored, leaving a marker in place which allow future users to access the single unique version of the data which has been saved previously... and accessed seamlessly.

Thin provisioning and storage virtualisation carry this concept further by allowing customers to only allocate the data blocks which are actually being used, in the case of thin provisioning, or pooling dissimilar vendor storage arrays into a contiguous universal storage pool in the case of storage virtualisation.

We can then couple these storage technologies with Computacenter's Automated Storage Provisioning solution which gives business users a web based front end to request the storage they require whilst automating the provisioning, irrespective of storage vendor, on the backend. These technologies, when coupled together or, in some cases used alone, can provide demonstrative and real in year ROI as well as multi year cost benefit and operating expenditure reduction.