Efficiency vs. Optimization
“Storage Efficiency” has become a big topic over the past 12 months. There are a number of new technologies that have come out in the last few years that are helping to deal with storage growth. We all know that data is the root of the decisions that drive business today. The more data you have, hopefully, the better decisions you can make to drive your business to success. The question is, “what is the value (and hence the cost) of the infrastructure to create that success?” What we do know is that the ability to put more data in a highly efficient footprint can give your company a competitive edge. There are five technologies that can help an IT organization create an efficient storage infrastructure. These are:
1) Tiering
2) Virtualization
3) Thin Provisioning
4) Compression
5) Deduplication
It is also important to point out that there are some semantics when talking about storage efficiency, specifically between efficiency and optimization technologies. I think it is useful to attempt to define these as they lead us to picking the right solutions for what we are trying to accomplish. For the purpose of this post, efficiency will relate to making existing capacity more useful and optimization will mean making more capacity out of existing capacity.
Using these definitions, technologies such as Tiering, Virtualization and Thin Provisioning are efficiency technologies. These technologies help to utilize the existing capacity that you have.
Tiering is technology that is used on about 10% of your data or less. It is used to move data that requires higher performance to flash storage. Good tiering technology analyzes data access patterns and moves the most active data to the highest performing disk. It doesn’t really change the amount of physical capacity that is required; it just changes what type of capacity is required and allows IT to make sure data is operating as fast and efficiently as possible.
