An abridged version, for the full length report, click here.

Most companies have massive amounts of unused and underutilized storage scattered across their enterprise. A recent study of 200 organizations found that 15% of all storage was allocated but never used; 10% was left behind when the server was moved, and 40% had not been referenced by an operating system for six months.

That’s a lot of waste - of resources, of IT time, and of money.

“Increasingly, it is clear that IT can no longer afford to host discrete applications across discrete hardware for discrete organizations,” says IDC analyst John Humphreys in a recent white paper.

Enter storage optimization. This is a process of visualizing, accessing, and relocating the valuable wasted resource of your untapped storage. This allows the enterprise to look at its data as a single entity, rather than scattered silos. The benefits are wide-ranging:

• Data is no longer wasted.
• You can always visualize the amount of data you have.
• Data management is simplified and automated.
• You can align your storage plan with business needs, processes, and technology.
• The potential for security breaches, compliance issues, and backup problems is reduced.You can defer unnecessary capital expenses.

IT is freed from fighting fires and can move from a reactive to a proactive stance, spending time on more strategic issues.

More effective use of storage - capturing and using your untapped data brings performance benefits, as well, since the process not only releases more storage but helps you put a structure into place for using your storage in the most effective way possible.

Humphreys calls the current optimization landscape “Virtualization 2.0,” as companies leverage consolidation for ever-more-strategic purposes, including lowering operational expenses, improving service levels, and responding faster and better to changing business needs.

It’s important to keep in mind storage optimization is not one-size-fits-all and must be carefully designed to the specific needs of your organization’s priorities regarding flexibility, manageability, and other important considerations.

The five-step approach:

1. Define business requirements. Talk with all stakeholders and develop a strong understanding of all the issues that will affect the storage strategy, including customer expectations, compliance, and competition.
2. Assess current storage. By identifying business requirements and SLAs, you can quantify the short-term, mid-term, and long-term ROI for redeploying storage assets.
3. Tier, consolidate, and simplify. A centralized strategy will make it easier to control and manage storage centrally, using standardized IT platforms, tools, and interfaces, allowing you to find pockets of unused data. Currently, 40% of companies have just two tiers for their storage, meaning they typically have low-value data on expensive media.
4. Define service levels. Not all data is equally valuable or needs the same level of protection - and the value of data changes over time. Many companies have outdated reports still classified as important information that is kept on expensive media.
5. Monitor, manage, provision. Automatic monitoring and reporting capabilities makes data trackable across applications, platforms, departments, and vendors. You can have more efficient operations through better management and accurate charge-backs on a pay-per-use basis.

The information stored on computer systems is doubling every year, and the cost of managing storage is now nearly as much as the cost to buy it. With storage utilization rates running at only 40 to 60%, half of every dollar spent on storage may be wasted.

To see the payoff of storage consolidation in practice, let’s look at KnowledgeBase Marketing®, a subsidiary of one of the world’s most comprehensive communication services organizations with 2,000 offices in 106 countries. They implemented a “blended” storage model that consolidated storage for its open systems platforms across two tiers. Results: 40% reduction in storage TCO, 50% reduction in storage administration time, 3X improvement in I/O throughput, and 86% reduction in transaction costs.

Companies in a diverse array of fields - energy, media, and education, for starters - have reported similarly impressive benefits from their own storage consolidation efforts.

To fully benefit from storage optimization, you must approach this as a methodical exercise. The right approach to optimization can result in a system that provides the correct degree of flexibility, availability, and security for your specific needs.

An abridged version, for the full length report, click here.

Referenced Material:
Humphreys, John. Sun Microsystems’ Solutions for Virtualization Across the Enterprise. August, 2007. http://www.sun.com/datacenter/consolidation/docs/IDC_SystemVirtualization_Aug2007.pdf

How to Leverage the Business Benefits of
Eco-Friendly Computing
An abridged version, for the full length report, click here.

“Green computing” isn’t just about saving the world for the next generation. The primary focus is cutting costs, improving efficiency, and getting near-term, measurable results.

The following questions and answers address the business benefits of eco-friendly computing and show strategies for how you can profit by going green.

What is the business rationale for green computing?
Power consumption of data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005. Gartner estimates that by 2008, 50% of current data centers will have insufficient power and cooling capacity to meet the demands of high-density equipment…[and that energy bills which] traditionally have accounted for less than 10% of an overall IT budget… soon could account for more than half.¹

The upshot, Gartner says, is that 80% of the world’s data centers are now constrained by heat, space, and power requirements. Going green has become a business necessity to meet user demands within budget.

How much power is wasted in data centers?
Gartner estimates that anywhere from 30% to 60% of energy in data centers is wasted². Inefficient cooling systems are one problem. In addition to addressing this issue, another important step is to consolidate data centers by reducing hardware footprints and physical servers through virtualization.

Using this approach in three data centers, Sun Microsystems consolidated 738 storage devices to 225, yet increased storage capacity by 244%. The 2,177 servers were reduced to 1,240, yet compute power increased by 456%. Overall, energy costs were cut by $860,000 in the first nine months. On top of that, the initiatives earned nearly $1 million in rebates from Silicon Valley Power.

What are the best practices in green computing?
In August, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report, at the behest of Congress, recommending ways to reduce energy costs in data centers. The 133-page report identifies three sets of guidelines that define a data center: improved practices, best practices, and state of the art practices.

• Improved practices include low or no-cost activities, such as shutting down servers that are in use.
• Best practices revolve around things like “energy efficient” servers and buying more efficient, uninterruptible power supplies.
• State of the art practices entail aggressively consolidating servers and storage, while enabling power management at the data center of applications, servers and equipment for networking and storage.

This report can serve as a good model for companies wishing to move to a higher level of eco-friendliness.

What is the biggest deterrent to green computing?
As the EPA report states, “people” issues trump technology. At many companies, the facilities management department makes decisions on energy costs and availability but has little to do with IT decisions. In the past, CIOs often had no idea about rising energy bills until power and cooling issues prevented them from adding servers to the data center. That is changing quickly. “More chief financial officers are becoming aware of the energy bill and are starting to hold CIOs responsible,” says David Douglas, Vice-President of Eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems³.

What’s the best way to trade up to an energy-efficient server?
For a short time, Sun Microsystems is running a special promotion that could save you up to 18% off the cost of a new eco-responsible server Sun Fire T2000. Just trade in your qualified Sun, IBM, HP, or Dell servers. Companies have used the Sun Fire T2000 to achieve 4X the performance, 5x more performance per watt and nearly one-fourth lower Co2 emissions. With this ground-breaking technology, for example, EDS reduced power consumption by 50% and Digitar reduced operational costs by 75%.

For the full length version of this report, click here.

¹ Source: Gartner.com, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=499090
² Source: SNSEurope.com, http://www.snseurope.com/snslink/news/printer-friendly.php?newsid=5375
³ Source: BusinessWeek.com, http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2007/tc20070514_003603.htm