Struggling with supersized storage

Tasty Baking Co. produces more than 4.8 million cakes, doughnuts, cookies and pies each day. And the Philadelphia-based snack food giant also manages to generate another crucial commodity -- computer data -- in equally impressive amounts. "It's something to be concerned about," says Brendan O'Malley, Tasty Baking's vice president and CIO.

Like a growing number of businesses worldwide, Tasty Baking is facing a data explosion. The use of e-mail and rich media applications plus the need to stay on top of regulatory compliance are stretching storage resources to the limit at a time when budgets are shrinking. Handling rapidly spiraling storage needs without spending tons of money is a challenge that's facing just about all IT managers. O'Malley crystallizes the need into a single phrase: "More space for the money."

To get a handle on storage demands, IT managers need to carefully examine internal storage practices, use specialized software tools and find appropriate storage systems for various kinds of data. Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., says that they must look first at the two best ways of cutting storage costs. "One is using more-dense drives, and the other is reducing your footprint," he says.

Footprint reduction is relatively easy, says Reichman, asking, "Can you use the Delete key?" But David Hill, founder of The Mesabi Group, a storage management consultancy in Westwood, Mass., notes that many businesses, particularly those in regulated industries, are scared stiff of deleting anything other than spam. "There are a lot of legal reasons, tax reasons," he says. "You have to be careful about how you go about getting rid of data."

Fixed vs. Fluid

Although managers may be reluctant to flush files, they can bring greater efficiencyand cost savings to their storage processes by organizing data more efficiently. Hill recommends separating fixed content -- e-mails, boilerplate documents and other rarely modified files -- from active archives that contain more fluid types of data, such as transactional data.

Virtual Storage Headaches

What is the top challenge related to storage for your virtual server environment?

* Maintaining high performance: 23%

* Completing backups on time: 19%

* Efficiently managing storage capacity: 14%

* Controlling costs: 11%

* Provisioning storage: 8%

* Deploying tiered storage solutions: 7%

* Performing effective application restores: 6%

* Generating accurate and useful reports on the environment: 6%

* Maintaining a high backup success rate: 3%

* Deploying effective multipath solutions: 2%

* Other: 1%

Source:Forrester Research Inc. survey of 124 global IT decision-makers currently using x86 server virtualization technology, September-October, 2008

Hill notes that many businesses unthinkingly use costly, high-performance Fibre Channel storage environments for both types of data. Yet splitting up fixed and active data makes it possible to use less-expensive storage technologies for less volatile information. "You can use what's called capacity storage instead of performance storage," Hill says.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.