Storage islands leave data management plans adrift – StorageSoup blog by Randy Kerns

By , Monday, June 29th 2015

Categories: Analyst Blogs

Tags: Data Management Plans, Randy Kerns, Storage Islands, Storage Soup, TechTarget,

A major problem that IT professionals have dealt with over time is the creation of islands of storage. A common cause of islands is when organizations purchase and deploy new systems with their own storage for a specific purpose.

Storage islandsStorage islands create problems in these areas for administrators:

• Data protection. This requirement is usually assigned to a single group to insure its completion, manage recovery of information, and make sure business practices are followed. When storage spreads to islands, these tasks become more complex.
• Security. Islands of storage increase the effort required to address security for data-at-rest.
• Inflexible capacity. Islands prevent capacity from being applied to where there is immediate demand.
• Performance. Meeting changing performance demands to storage can be difficult and expensive. Individual islands of storage would have to be addressed as individual cases each time there is a performance challenge.
• Cost. The overall costs for managing storage islands can be significant and greater than expected when the islands were created.

The IT answer for islands of storage has been a consolidation to centralized storage, either through storage virtualization or large systems with advanced capabilities for performance, protection and security. Performance is addressed by the larger systems with the ability to manage quality of serviceand introduce solid-state storage. The economics for consolidation have been proven over time compared to isolated storage.

Read the full article at TechTarget

Forgot your password? Reset it here.