We are all familiar with the buzz in the IT industry over the last number of years on server virtualization and how it helps organisations to save money by consolidating their server environment and having a small number of servers running at a higher level of processor utilisation,  rather than having a large number of servers running at 5-10% utilisation which are eating up datacentre space and creating a massive power and cooling bill every month.

Did you know its possible to achieve similar savings on your storage environments, even if you haven’t implemented server virtualization?

We recently completed a storage project using a Compellent SAN solution for a large customer in the healthcare sector. They had a scenario where they were allocating LUN’s (chunks of storage) to individual systems. In some cases these LUNs were only using a fraction of the allocated storage e.g. a 750GB LUN with only 100GB of Data.

This means they were powering and cooling 650GB of disks with no data on them. By implementing a new cutting edge SAN solution which was able to do things like Thin Provisioning which allocates virtual disk to a server and only actually uses physical disk when data is written. This meant they were able to address this problem which saved them a significant amount of money on Power and Cooling and also on staff overtime as the previous scenario meant that staff had to come in at weekends and re-allocate the storage associated with over-provisioned LUN’s.

One of the other key benefits they were able to take advantage of was the ability of the SAN to automatically tier the data across different levels of Fibre Channel and SATA disk based on its usage patterns . This allowed the customer to purchase significantly less High Performance Fibre Channel Disk and a lot more low cost high density SATA disk yet still keep the performance levels of a typical Fibre Channel solution while massively reducing the day to day Power and Cooling.

Set as favorite

Bookmark

Email this

Hits: 1967

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Write comment

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment