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Leveraging Storage Automation to Optimize SSD Technology

By Brent J. Rhymes

Recently I had the opportunity to discuss 2012 storage trends with George Crump and Eric Slack of Storage Switzerland. One of the trends we discussed for 2012 was the increasing use of solid-state disk drives (SSDs) in high-end storage arrays and some of the IT administration challenges SSDs present. 
 
SSDs provide a significant increase in performance over traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), but at a higher cost (though the cost difference is shrinking). While many argue that high-end storage arrays will eventually use 100 percent SSD devices, most see us in a transitional period where organizations combine SSD and HDD technology to optimize cost and performance. They?re achieving this by storing their "fast access" dynamic data on SSD technology and their static data on HDDs (think about how we used HDDs and tape 10 years ago). (For an excellent discussion of the evolving relationship of SSD and HDD, check out Storage Search's blog. 
 
But there's a trade-off to this SSD/HDD optimization. Organizations are discovering a hidden cost: added complexity to several common administrative tasks, most notably in storage provisioning. As one storage admin shared with Storage Switzerland, adding SSD optimization increased the storage-provisioning time for high-end Oracle applications from a couple days to more than a week.  
 
In fact, some whitepapers and blog posts now cover the topic of optimizing SSD/HDD storage for applications and databases. An excellent example is Anthony D. Noriega's blog post on Oracle database performance using a dual-pairing (hybrid) drive solution. 
 
How can storage automation help organizations that want to use SSD/HDD-hybrid solutions?  
 
An enterprise storage automation platform allows users to encapsulate the complex process of provisioning SSD/HDD-hybrid storage (or other application storage) by creating storage service templates. The platform creates and exposes a fully automated service to storage admins through a self-service portal and catalog. Storage service templates don't remove the complexity of initially defining and creating SSD/HDD-hybrid storage, but they reduce the time to service subsequent requests (from weeks or days to minutes) while ensuring those requests follow the organization's best practices for storage provisioning.  
 
Stay tuned to iWave's website in the coming weeks. We'll post an example of leveraging storage service templates to automate storage allocation for Oracle databases.  

Private Storage Clouds - The Killer Cloud App for 2012

By Brent Rhymes

In 2009 and 2010, enterprise IT organizations undertook strategic initiatives aimed at turning the concept of private cloud computing into reality. Many organizations are aggressively adding cloud service management and automation software to their server virtualization projects in an attempt to tur...

Gartner Poll: Managing Storage Growth is IT’s #1 Challenge in 2012

By Brent Rhymes

Greetings from fabulous Las Vegas where iWave Software today announced our new automation product for enterprise storage systems, called iWave Storage Director.  
 
One of the things I like most about Gartner conferences is their instant pole of the audience. The second poll question asked in David C...

Layering Makes for Good Cakes, Cloud Automation Architectures

By Brent Rhymes

In our last blog post we talked about the different options solution providers (SP) have when considering automation technologies for their public and private clouds.  
 
Just to recap, those options are: 
 
- Cloud automation products: These provide out-of-the box functionality, fast deployment and qui...

Happy Hour with Service Providers (SPs)

By Brent Rhymes

Despite the demands of our booming business (we just closed out a record-setting quarter for the company), I had the privilege of spending time with some of the world's largest Service Providers (SP). First at the TM Forum in Dublin held back in May and then later at events hosted by EMC both in th...

Storm Front: Hot Cloud Tech vs. the Cold Reality of Existing Infrastructure

By Brent Rhymes

Sitting in the Alumni Lounge at EMC World 2011 today, I overheard a conversation between an EMC partner and customer in which the word "cloud" was used about four times in every sentence. Adjective, adverb, noun, verb... didn't matter...  
 
It reminded me of the lyrics from the 1960's hit song "Sur...

Welcome to iWave Software's blog on enterprise IT orchestration for private and public cloud infrastructures!

By Brent Rhymes

Our goal for this blog is to share with you our observations of the operational and technical challenges our partners and customers face as they develop, deploy and operate cloud-computing environments. All posts will focus on general issues/challenges and all customer situations will be generalize...