Is your organization ready to Consolidate SAN and NAS Storage?
Posted by
Lee Johns on Fri, Jun 15, 2012 @ 12:37 PM
The question I get asked more than any other with regard to storage is “How can I manage my storage more efficiently?”
Most of the customers I am speaking to already have shared storage of some kind (Although not all do) and they have found that the storage they purchased 3 years ago is now no longer meeting the needs of their organization. I have been in the industry for over 20 years and this is in stark contrast to 10 years ago when SAN and NAS storage systems had much longer usage cycles.
What is causing this? Unpredictability! It seems to be true that no matter how you plan there is always going to be some unforeseen event that changes your storage needs outside of your original planning envelope. It might be the rapid growth of server virtualization, your companies burgeoning use of video, a new regulation that means you have to keep data for longer or a new product or service your company is offering, but there is always something.
Shared storage’s initial promise was that you could create a single pool of storage that is more efficient to manage than having distributed disks in many servers. Customers still want that (and it is achievable), but unfortunately too many businesses get saddled with silos of storage technology (SAN and NAS storage)that are inefficient and costly to manage. In large part this is driven by organizational culture. If you have siloed IT teams it should be no surprise if you end up with a siloed IT infrastructure.
So how can you start your journey to a consolidated unified storage system to run mixed workloads? First take a look inside your own organization and determine if you are culturally ready for it. If you aren’t, set about fixing that. If you are, you can call your friendly neighborhood Starboard man.