This paper looks at the requirements of both sets of customers and the challenges that each faces. It then overlays the NetApp strategy as a storage supplier in serving both sets of customers by providing policy-based storage automation and thus enabling IT service automation.
1. WHITE P APER
Enabling Storage Automation for Cloud Computing
Sponsored by: NetApp
Laura DuBois
January 2012
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
www.idc.com
Today, most datacenters are trying to achieve operational excellence by providing the
right service at the right time to the right application. However, the growth in storage
capacity, datacenter infrastructure, and virtual machine sprawl, in concert with
constrained IT budgets, is driving firms to consider policy-based automation as a
means to gain operational excellence and improve service delivery.
F.508.935.4015
Large enterprises and service providers seeking to build out either private or public
cloud offerings view automation as a central tenet in executing on the vision for IT
service automation. For this audience, service-level integration between management
and orchestration frameworks and technology components (storage, server, network,
P.508.872.8200
applications) is required. For the midsize enterprise, policy-based automation is a way
to gain operational efficiencies by automating and simplifying complex, manual, and
time-consuming processes for provisioning, backup, restoration, recovery, and
cloning of physical or virtual application-specific assets.
Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA
This paper looks at the requirements of both sets of customers and the challenges
that each faces. It then overlays the NetApp strategy as a storage supplier in serving
both sets of customers by providing policy-based storage automation and thus
enabling IT service automation.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Today's Datacenter Trends
Economic Hurdles with Data Growth and Storage Costs
Firms are seeing, on average, a doubling of data storage requirements every year. To
keep up with this reality, firms are making the storage budget an increasingly larger
component of the overall IT budget. This challenge is leading to increased investment
in storage optimization and efficiency technologies. Another core challenge is the
management of growing storage infrastructure. On average, every incremental
500–700TB of storage installed requires an additional storage administrator to
manage this capacity, according to IDC. This equates to spending an incremental
$110,000 in operating costs (fully burdened storage administrator) to manage every
incremental 600TB or $654,000 in storage cost. Storage capacity is increasing an
average of 52% annually, but storage management is not scaling to match this
growth. The last overarching economic storage challenge is low utilization in concert
with infrastructure costs, specifically floor tile, power, and cooling requirements.