Change is constant. Optimal is a moving target.
These are facts of life for most CIOs. There is always technical innovation emerging on the horizon while IT teams focus on maintaining service levels amid the challenges of more applications, more data and more customers. Yesterday’s optimal infrastructure is today’s legacy hardware. For years, clever CIOs have been cascading their storage assets to solve the perennial problems of integrating the next technology while keeping their growing data volumes safe and accessible and extending the useful life of their installed storage. The search for optimal solutions has now led many CIOs to reconsider their established cloud strategies.
The original cloud journey took key data off premises to reduce costs, with the promise of ensuring its safety and keeping it readily accessible to those applications and users that need it. As the newness of the cloud has worn off and the promises forgotten, approximately 40% of organizations with public cloud experience have migrated systems back from the public cloud to in-house data centers. According to a recent Datalink/IDG survey, the top reasons cited for the move were security (55%), cost/pricing concerns (52%) and manageability (45%). Rather than investing in new storage capacity to repatriate data previously on the cloud, CIOs are being purposeful about how that data is stored in the most cost-effective and strategic ways
Cascading storage prolongs the use of aging storage by aligning applications and data sets that are appropriate for the feature sets and performance of these legacy systems. This strategy stretches the useful life of standing storage arrays several years beyond the typical lifespan of three to four years. While new applications demand the performance and features associated with the newest technology, many applications and their data sets remain perfectly suited for the existing storage infrastructure. By cascading data to the older storage systems, service levels are maintained, and upgrade expenses are deferred.
Cascading is not a new practice. In fact, IT organizations have been using this strategy since the early 2000s. IT professionals have seen that storage remains fully viable well past the common three-year OEM support window. Previously, the cost of extending maintenance contracts beyond their original three years has forced many organizations to prematurely retire otherwise fully productive assets. Recently, organizations have seen the cloud as a relief valve for staging less IO-intensive workloads but have found the economics of cloud to be less favorable than expected. Through the re-alignment of workloads to the most appropriate on-premises storage investments, organizations have been reducing overall storage costs through postponing of storage replacement. Additionally, by moving only the most demanding subset of workloads to new storage systems organizations minimize the scale and capital outlay of next-generation infrastructure acquisition.
Large Co is a manufacturer with a primary data center North of Chicago and a DR site in Wisconsin. Their production storage array is running well, but its capacity and performance are pushing IT to consider a faster, all-flash solution to power their MRP system. Since the current storage array has several additional years of useful life, Large Co decides to cascade (or repurpose) the array to the DR site after they migrate the workload from old to new.
Medium Co is an advertising firm running their production apps in a co-lo facility outside Washington DC. They have maintained a five-year upgrade schedule for their production storage systems for years. As media sizes continue to grow, Medium Co realizes that they need additional capacity for their backup systems. Rather than spend money on a costly upgrade of secondary infrastructure, they decide to upgrade production and cascade their current production storage to support their backup environment.
The benefits of cascading storage are both financial and strategic.
CIOs are chartered with providing maximum services at minimum costs. Of course, this struggle is ongoing with few avenues of relief. Cascading is a potent strategy to exploit current storage assets and further reduce costs without affecting IT’s ability to deliver on service assurances. Incumbent storage is familiar with established best practices and current administrative experience and talent. Retaining storage assets on the data center floor longer avoids acquisition costs, thereby allowing CIOs to direct their budget to meet more urgent business priorities rather than maintenance.
Reverse cloud migration has become a recent trend. Moving less demanding IO workloads to the cloud has been a common practice over the last decade. Cloud services are beneficial in many ways, but frequently turn out to not be the most economic game plan. Costs associated with ingress and egress along with other fees have made cloud costly at scale. Vendor lock-in, security concerns and performance have joined cost as reasons why organizations are now migrating workloads back to on-premises infrastructure. Storage cascading presents a more economical option, avoiding new in-house infrastructure costs to become an appealing alternative to cloud.
Then there are strategic benefits. By differentiating workloads that require next-generation technology from workloads still suited for existing technology, the introduction of new technology can be right-sized. New, innovative storage will always arrive with a premium acquisition cost, but better understanding of actual requirements can mean that both new and legacy assets will enjoy maximum utilization. A deeper understanding of the workload requirements results in reduced initial capacity requirements for premium storage and efficient utilization across all assets.
The first step to delivering storage cascading within your organization is to address the costs associated with obtaining enterprise-level support beyond the original three-year maintenance contract and even beyond the end of service life (EoSL) designated by the storage vendor. By partnering with a multi-vendor service provider like CDS, support and optimization services with capabilities and features will parallel the OEM support experience at a lower cost. The service life of your incumbent storage will be extended to maximize your investment in infrastructure.
The next step is to identify and align workload requirements. A straight-forward assessment of workload performance and storage feature requirements will quickly identify which workloads can be fully supported on the legacy storage systems, and which workloads require the benefits of next-generation platforms acquired at premium costs. Such simple evaluations will ensure that service levels are achieved, storage resources continue to be best utilized, and overall storage costs are driven down.
The strategy of storage cascading enables IT organizations to increase control of service-level delivery while preserving budget for major priorities. By extending the useful life of storage at reduced costs and aligning appropriate workloads to aging but highly functional infrastructure, CIOs can satisfy both the pressure to deliver across the domain of service levels while managing tightly controlled budget constraints. Cascading provides expense relief, efficient service level attainment, and offers more growth options to IT organizations.
Not only can CDS help by maintaining existing storage past the OEM service window and end of service life, but it can also assist with managing an even wider range of current assets to ensure optimal results.