In most businesses, data grows rapidly, voraciously consuming storage as it does so and ratcheting up expenses. Sometimes it seems impossible to keep it under control.However, there is a difference between the Blob and storage that puts you in the driver’s seat. Data didn’t arrive on earth courtesy of a meteorite. We create it by ourselves every day. If we produced the problem, we should be able to defend against it and its associated costs. Here are some ways you can improve storage efficiency.1. Tier your data
Wouldn’t it be nice if business unit leaders would come to you and say, “I need a sub-millisecond response time on my reads and writes for this application,” plus inform you of all their other requirements? That would make it easy to determine the IT resources you should assign to an application. The truth, however, is that in many cases, business leaders don’t know what they need. They just want to make sure that the application does not slow down operations in their department.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From my experience, if you look at 200 or so companies, you’ll find approximately 10 with enterprise tool sets for infrastructure management, six with middle-of-the-road packages, and four with home-grown solutions. That’s 20 total, just 10 percent. To make matters worse, the enterprise tool sets tend to be difficult to install and use, so system admins fail to use them as much as they should.Based on my observations, most businesses do not have a good read on the health of their IT infrastructure. They need a cost-effective, practical solution to monitor their IT environment so they can manage it more efficiently.Preventing Murphy’s Law
IT infrastructure management tools can help to prevent slowdowns and downtime, thus help you to avoid the firefights that occur when Murphy’s Law strikes. That, of course, should be a priority. After all, when you have three people hunting down a problem for a week, each spending perhaps 10 hours on the problem, you waste 30 working hours.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s 2 a.m., and a hospital’s system has slowed to a crawl. Lives are at stake. For the harried system admins looking for the source of the slowdown, time is of the essence.The hospital’s system has servers attached through a SAN to storage devices. But where’s the weak link? The administrator cannot afford to waste time analyzing server performance when the problem may be in a storage device or the SAN. He needs information that enables him to conduct his root cause analysis as quickly as possible.Perhaps you don’t have to worry about whether someone will live or die when your IT infrastructure fails. However, when it’s slow or down, it fails to deliver a satisfying user experience. Also, it’s likely that your company’s operations falter, costs increase, and your bottom line suffers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s 2 a.m., and a hospital’s system has slowed to a crawl. Lives are at stake. For the harried system admins looking for the source of the slowdown, time is of the essence.The hospital’s system has servers attached through a SAN to storage devices. But where’s the weak link? The administrator cannot afford to waste time analyzing server performance when the problem may be in a storage device or the SAN. He needs information that enables him to conduct his root cause analysis as quickly as possible.Perhaps you don’t have to worry about whether someone will live or die when your IT infrastructure fails. However, when it’s slow or down, it fails to deliver a satisfying user experience. Also, it’s likely that your company’s operations falter, costs increase, and your bottom line suffers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2016, as multiple system outages led to long check-in lines, flight cancellations and passengers camping out in airports, several airlines’ reputations made unplanned descents. What could they have done differently to prevent these crises or to recover from them more rapidly?Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.Southwest Airlines' problem in July came down to a failed network router. Delta Air Lines' nationwide system outage in August was a result of a power surge that caused an automatic transfer switch to malfunction and take down 500 servers. Unfortunately, systems and equipment did not switch over automatically to back up power. The result of these mishaps? Each airline cancelled more than 2,000 flights and suffered negative media coverage, including a tweet storm from frustrated customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What are the leading causes of storage bottlenecks? They include mismanagement of virtual storage, applications with insufficient or the wrong type of storage, and poor storage design. Let’s explore these further.1. Mismanagement of virtual storageIf you’re not monitoring your IT infrastructure, carving up your storage array or subsystem between numerous virtual machines (VMs) can be challenging. That’s because you have no visibility to the flow of traffic. Allocating your VMs to a logical unit number (LUN) without data to guide you is like building a highway without doing a traffic study to assess traffic volume at different times of the day and week. How would you know how many lanes are required to accommodate the traffic?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tim Conley