How storage virtualisation has helped Quorn to cut storage spending by one-quarter

DataCore's Adam Mager explains how Quorn, Capgemini and VW cut storage costs and increase flexibility

Storage virtualisation - a key part of data centre infrastructure as it moves into the software-defined stage - can help organisations to get more out of their storage hardware, and cut costs, according to DataCore's Adam Mager.

Food maker Quorn, for example, improved the performance of its storage architecture by 500 per cent, according to Mager, speaking at the Computing Data Centre Summit. "They have been running for two years now, with no storage-related downtime, and have reduced their storage spend by more than 25 per cent.

"Capgemini needed 100 per cent uptime, a huge task. It achieved that with DataCore. It also doubled its storage capacity in the process with no extra investment, and the time spent administering its storage infrastructure has been cut by half.

"Volkswagen Financial Service has been running now for four years with no storage-related downtime at all," said Mager.

In the process, it deferred two planned hardware refreshes and the time it would have spent on data migration has been cut by more than 90 per cent, he added.

What companies need to do this, he continued, is hardware agnostic, software defined storage - like DataCore SanSymphony. "The vendors focus on the disk, but you should really focus on the data because that's where the value really is," said Mager.

"The disk could be flash, mechanical or whatever comes next, but it's just hardware. Intelligent data services [software] though, protects the value that's in your data," he continued.

Ideally, that software ought to be hardware agnostic, enabling different vendors' systems to work together seamlessly. "You should be able to pool all of your capacity and use it with a single management console, regardless of who it comes from. Hardware refreshes should be easy. The word migration should no longer exist in your organisation," said Mager.

What this means is breaking vendor lock-in, and will pave the way for broader "software defined" architectures in the future, in which inter-operability will be key, and will also ensure that storage hardware can be procured at the best price.

"You need a hardware resource? Go right ahead and buy one, and buy the correct one at the best price. And if you want to move away from your vendor, you should be able to do so. There shouldn't be that inertia that traps you onto one vendor's roadmap," advised Mager.

"If you want a complete change of direction, you should be able to do so, and on your terms. There should be no more 'tactical deployments'. If you want a federated SAN [storage area network], you don't want to waste any capacity and you don't want siloed storage then you really need to look at this," he said.

Storage virtualisation software can help reduce the cost and frequency of data migrations because storage becomes "one line" and there is no difference between different hardware and, as far as the software is concerned, it's just a hardware refresh, not a heavy-duty migration. "All of the pre-planning, all the misery of data migration just goes away," said Mager.

At its simplest, the technology involves synchronously mirroring "writes" as they come in to two, three, four, five or whatever number of storage arrays you want to store and back-up your data to. "It's instantaneous, seamless failover and completely automated," said Mager, which can be tested live and can be done with no down time.