Managed Cloud storage. Turning to Storage as a Service for flexibility

Transcription

1 Managed Cloud storage Turning to Storage as a Service for flexibility

2 Table of contents Encountering problems? 2 Get an answer 2 Check out cloud services 2 Getting started 3 Understand changing costs 4 Today s costs of owning storag 4 Understanding the language 5 Increase savings 6 Gain meaningful options 7 Understand the value and benefits 8 Meet your needs 10 Data is growing, and so is the demand for its availability, security, and performance. Simultaneously, IT must do more with less, increase productivity and reliability, and drive down costs. Encountering problems? Do you know what data you should move to the cloud? Is the amount of data you manage exploding? Are you concerned about data security and compliance when using storage in the cloud? Get an answer To handle the steady growth of data, while combating the pressures of shrinking physical space, power, security concerns, compliance issues, and rigid budgets, many enterprises are turning to off-premise Storage as a Service. This model enables you to only pay for the storage you need, without incurring large capital expenses that come with purchasing and managing your own data storage. Equally important, the Storage-as-a-Service model provides robust security, with unlimited scalability and high availability. Check out cloud services A recent, yet increasingly popular solution among enterprises has been to acquire Storage as a Service. This offers the flexibility to order more storage as demand increases, while reducing storage and costs when demand subsides. It s called Storage as a Service because it is similar to a monthly home electric utility bill, with a higher charge for consuming more electricity and a lower charge for using less. (See Figure 2.) Storage as a Service replaces monthly costs administration management, assets, tools, and facilities with a flexible pay-per-use option. It is ideal for organizations with unpredictable storage growth, seasonal swings in storage demand, and short-term projects requiring temporary storage. Storage as a Service offers flexibility to order more storage as demand increases and reduce storage and costs when demand subsides. Storage as a Service helps you to: Eliminate storage capital from your financial books and move it to a variable operating expense Reduce upfront storage acquisition costs and overall storage expenses by eliminating excess capacity Improve storage cost predictability Increase storage flexibility and scalability Provide peace of mind that comes with secure, off-site backup for your most valuable data Reduce greatly the total cost of ownership of your data storage environment 2

3 IT executives should consider these factors when ascertaining the total cost of owning storage: Array-based software Implementation and de-implementation Management tools Maintenance services Staffing Facilities Energy Getting started To handle the steady growth of data, while combating the pressures of shrinking Forrester states: To stay relevant, you must accelerate your provisioning velocity with automation while also establishing fiscal responsibility with chargeback and showback resource analysis. For many organizations, these are new skills that they must learn or acquire. As we progress toward building hybrid cloud environments, service design will become more important to your organization than the siloed expertise we leverage for validation and differentiation today. 1 Most companies are just starting their journeys to becoming an agile user of cloud storage capabilities in support of corporate goals. One of the issues is managing legacy storage environment while capitalizing on the cloud. Companies can improve return on investment by increasing storage utilization, optimizing delivery management, and retiring old infrastructures. With a good consulting and management solution, you ll gain insights and capabilities to save 20 to 30 percent of your storage costs. A good consulting and management solution includes: A detailed analysis of your current application workloads and storage infrastructure Recommendations on where to store data so it s optimized across your legacy infrastructure or in the cloud Insights on how to maximize return on current investments, and avoid escalating maintenance costs A step-by-step plan to move to the future mode of operation Analytics and data management services to jump-start your Big Data journey An achievable financial savings target Understand changing costs It s important to consider that capital costs remain fixed on ledgers for up to five years essentially extending, for example, 2015 storage prices into In other words, the 2015 capital cost figure must be compared to what new storage may cost in 2020, and then extrapolated and estimated to determine the effect of rising management costs. It is possible, in this scenario, for your actual storage unit price to grow because storage prices will most likely be lower in 2020 than they were in The only way to achieve a satisfactory return on investment (ROI) is to actually reduce storage costs. When hardware remains on the books for years, there is no realized benefit to the expense statement from reducing capacity needs. With a Storage-as-a-Service model, however, monthly charges can be reduced as soon as excess capacity becomes available. This process of increasing or reducing storage capacity can be completed quickly, without further price negotiations or sell-back discussions and without the lengthy process of gaining additional capital approval. 1 Inquiry Spotlight: Five Ways To ModernizeYour Storage Strategy Forrester Research Inc., March 26, 2015 This paper examines the trend toward Storage as a Service: covering how it differs from cloud computing, the ways in which adding virtualization increases performance while saving time and money, and the many benefits of Storage as a Service, including low total cost of ownership (TCO). 3

4 Storage as a Service makes the most sense when it s incorporated into an organization s environment through a provider that has the strategy, assets, and expertise gained from experience, and established market presence. 19% 29% 52% Hardware Software Services and miscellaneous Figure 1: Storage spending analysis of DXC Technology clients Today s costs of owning storage The price of physical storage remains high but it is decreasing, by as much as 30 percent annually. That s good news for IT executives but that s where it ends. In fact, the hardware purchase price represents barely more than half of the costs associated with maintaininga storage environment, and significant related costs may lock organizations in for years. IT executives must consider these factors when ascertaining the total cost of owning storage: Array-based software Implementation and de-implementation Management tools Staffing Facilities Energy Maintenance services Software costs are often bundled into the storage equipment price and may even represent half of the hardware cost. Additionally, annual maintenance services for hardware and software have been estimated at up to 20 percent of the purchase price. And with data being retained for longer periods, managers must also factor refresh costs into TCO calculations. Plus, with any new equipment, the vendor may include professional service charges, setup fees, and shipping costs. Then, to accommodate changes and growth, costs for a highly trained and dedicated staff that specializes in storage management must also be added in. (See Figure 1.) There is also the matter of storage capacity versus use. The prevailing formula most enterprises use is to acquire sufficient storage to scale capacity, meeting variable demands and service-level commitments. This breeds overprovisioning and underuse, which are wasteful and costly especially when a 300-GB storage drive represents the minimum capacity presently available for purchase in the enterprise storage market. There is yet another factor. Because storage is so vital to an enterprise s survival, it is imperative for the physical equipment to be managed inside a high-quality and expensive data center environment. While this promotes service availability by reducing the risk of system loss, the cost is exacerbated by ever-rising energy costs power and cooling. 4

5 In short, even though the cost of storage technology including disk, tape, and servers decreases every year, the cost of paying for ancillary resources, such as people, facilities, and energy, increases at roughly the same rate. So the constant pursuit of inexpensive storage in the face of exponential data growth means IT executives must continue to search for the greatest value in their storage environment. Capital expenditure or leased storage infrastructure deployed Excess capacity Aligned capacity with actual usage Figure 2: Storage-as-a-Service model Understanding the language A broad set of terms have been developed over the last several years, and while these terms are becoming well known, significant developments in technology could cause these definitions to continue to evolve, The following terms are used most commonly to describe the delivery models used to deploy infrastructure technologies. Traditional: Provides on-premise solutions designed to specific details within each company. A traditional on-premise model is what most companies are using: Servers are located at your office, you purchase hardware and software, and it is the property of your business. Traditional models have to incur high, upfront costs for hardware and software while most companies use less than a quarter of these resources to enable growth and short-term needs. Private cloud: A pool of shared configurable resources that is implemented within the corporate firewall, under the control of the company s IT department. A private cloud is designed to offer the same features and benefits of public cloud systems, but removes a number of objections to a shared resource model, including control over enterprise and customer data, worries about security, and issues connected to regulatory compliance. Virtual private cloud (VPC): Uses on-demand configurable pool of configured shared resources allocated as needed for a company s use, providing certain level of isolation among the different companies using the resources. The isolation between one VPC environment and all other users of the same cloud is achieved through allocation of a private IP subnet, and a virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN or a set of encrypted communication channels) per company. 5

6 Public cloud: Pool of fixed, configurable shared resources in which consumers and companies rely on a third-party services provider for infrastructure services, such as servers, data storage, and applications that are delivered to the company through the Internet. A public cloud is shared among multiple consumers, individual users, and groups of users, and for small, medium to large enterprises. Shared resources are usually fixed or have little configuration options, leading to worries about security and proprietary interfaces. Hybrid cloud: A combination of two or more delivery models listed above. Where, for example, some critical data resides in a traditional model, while other data is stored and accessible from a virtual private cloud. With hybrid cloud options, companies are able to mix and match cloud models and resources among local data center infrastructure, scalable, and on-demand infrastructures, with the cloud services they need. Storage tiers: Is the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media to reduce total cost. Tiers may be based on levels of protection needed, performance requirements, availability, security, frequency of use, or other considerations. Since assigning data to particular media may be an ongoing and complex activity, some vendors provide software for automatically managing the process, based on a company-defined policy. (See Table 1.) Table 1: Common storage and backup tiers Increase savings Storage virtualization is another modern tool that enables enterprises to increase their ROI by migrating data to optimal storage tiers without downtime. Virtualization adds agile capacity management functionality that reduces unused capacity, enables data tiering, and lowers storage costs. Just like the general idea behind server virtualization, storage virtualization pools and shares resources so use is optimized and supply automatically meets demand. Within the Storage-as-a-Service model, storage virtualization enables the storage environment to be hosted at the vendor s site. It can be deployed as part of your storage infrastructure through a services-only model, or it can be bundled as part of the vendor s underlying Infrastructure as a Service. 6

7 Virtualized storage services reduce the TCO of an organization s environment by improving use and data movement through thin provisioning or data tiers. Thin provisioning taps unused storage space within a network and creates a pool that each storage instance can use. By pooling together available storage space, you can maximize storage assets use to keep costs in check. Data tiering helps organizations eliminate downtime, and to more efficiently store critical data by enabling you to move data based on priority, from one tier to another, without an outage. Gain meaningful options Archiving is one method to facilitate the containment of explosive data growth in applications on primary storage, including databases and semi-structured or unstructured data. Archiving is designed to work with applications to enable access and retrieval for regulatory compliance, legal response, or to address corporate retention policies. You also can couple archiving with Storage as a Service and deduplication technologies to provide additional cost-effective scalability throughout the information s lifecycle. Archiving leads to reclaimed disk space, lowered storage costs, delayed tier-one storage purchases, improved active data performance, and an improved backup window while access to active data becomes more efficient. Understand the value and benefits Storage as a Service makes the most sense when it s incorporated into an organization s environment through a provider that has the strategy, assets, and expertise gained from experience and established market presence. Storage as a Service offers attributes to deliver flexible business outcomes that many enterprises are seeking, especially when it comes to increasing performance and protecting data at a low TCO. Storage as a Service usually constitutes a predefined, prebuilt, and energy- efficient standard environment delivered through standards from professionally managed, state-of- the-art global data centers. Most Storage-as-a-Service models include assets, facilities, and services to convert capital investments into a monthly operating expense. Storage as a Service can help you effectively address a variety of storage concerns, including: Scalability to address rapid or unexpected storage growth Ability to control costs and reduce risks Ability to manage complexity and bring standardization to your storage environment Accessibility of mission-critical data across the enterprise Authenticity to address regulatory compliance Virtualization to reduce waste and improve environmental footprint 7

8 Storage as a Service eliminates paying for future storage because it removes the large initial purchase price. Similarly, the as-a-service model eliminates paying for yesterday s storage by eliminating multiyear capital depreciation. You no longer have to pay for excess capacity pay only for what is actually used at the time it s needed. Meet your needs As storage growth increases an average of about 30 percent every year and facilities and management costs also are rising many organizations are looking at off-site cloud storage options as an alternative to current storage environments. Storage as a Service means paying only for the storage needed when it is needed without the cost of purchasing and managing owned data storage. The Storage as a Service model also answers the need for security, scalability, and availability. Storage as a Service replaces the monthly cost and management of administration, assets, tools, and facilities with a flexible pay-per-use option. By including storage virtualization and archiving into the mix, enterprises also are able to increase their ROI by increasing the use of their storage capacity. As a result, Storage as a Service is ideal for organizations seeking a more cost-effective solution with a low TCO and whose storage needs are difficult to predict. Learn more at About DXC DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) is the world s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, helping clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. Created by the merger of CSC and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, DXC Technology serves nearly 6,000 private and public sector clients across 70 countries. The company s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner alliance combine to deliver powerful next-generation IT services and solutions. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. DXC_4AA3-3060ENW. September 2016, Rev. 6