Is It Time to Consolidate Legacy Silos Onto Secondary Storage? – Veristor

This article was published on the blog of Veristor Systems, Inc. by Jason Grant, director, storage and data solutions.

Is It Time to Consolidate Your Legacy Silos onto Secondary Storage?
(In these four cases, it can lower storage costs and make life a lot easier for IT)

Many enterprises find themselves with legacy storage that’s been collected over the years. Multiple vendor storage systems, each with its own interface, can make the management and maintenance process of these systems fragmented and inefficient for IT teams. If the systems utilize tier-one storage, they’re also adding unnecessarily to IT costs.

The perfect opportunity to solve these challenges comes when it’s time to increase the capacity of storage systems. Businesses can also address the situation when one of their legacy silos requires a technology refresh or is up for a maintenance renewal. Veristor has worked with several enterprises recently that found themselves at one of these crossroads, and we showed them how to turn it into an opportunity to move certain workloads onto secondary storage.

With the explosive surge in data, secondary storage is starting to become more popular. Available at a lower cost than tier-one storage, secondary storage is ideal for workloads that do not require high-performance throughput and low latency, but do require 24×7 access and availability.

The Four Cases Where Secondary Storage Helps Most
Secondary storage solutions enable businesses to consolidate storage onto one unified platform. In addition to reducing costs, this model easily scales and allows IT to shift storage resources among various environments.

Many of our customers have found that migrating to secondary storage is particularly beneficial in these four use cases:

• Unstructured file share systems
• Backup/archive systems
• Enterprise file sync and share
• Application dev/test environments

Historically, businesses have often utilized disparate tier-one storage systems for many of these environments. This approach not only requires a large capital investment, it also adds to the burden on IT since it requires staff to manage and maintain multiple platforms.

Key Attributes That Make Secondary Storage Tick
Many secondary storage solutions provide reliable performance and are built on platforms that use proven object-based technologies. Previously, the platforms were only accessible via APIs, which may have their own proprietary web service and may not support all applications.

But recent technology developments have made the systems more consumable for various use cases.

Backup and archive applications as well as development and test applications can write directly to secondary storage via traditional file services or APIs. In addition, unstructured file shares along with sync and share files can now be hosted directly by cloud platform providers.

A key differentiator between secondary storage and tier-one primary storage is the SLAs that are offered by vendors. Businesses typically store data in secondary storage platforms in cases where mission-critical SLAs are not required. Here, it’s all about efficiency, productivity, and lower costs-and that’s where secondary storage delivers.

With secondary storage, management is also streamlined for IT. That’s because as storage needs change, IT can easily scale resources up or down. Uniting isolated silos into a single storage platform also eases system management since all systems can be monitored and configured from a single unified view. This helps IT proactively detect issues while better managing SLAs and governance policies-which is key in complying with regulations.

Conditions for Moving to Secondary Storage
Businesses can opt to migrate the four environments listed above all at once to secondary storage, or they can choose to take a phased approach. For example, if a current sync and share storage system is due for a technology refresh, that system can be moved now to the secondary platform.

Then, as each of the other environments-unstructured file shares, backup/archive, and dev/test-reaches end-of-life or the end of a maintenance contract, they can then be migrated, one-at-a-time.

Secondary storage handles this type of incremental usage extremely well, scaling storage resources as needed.

Another scenario in which secondary storage can come into play is when additional capacity is needed for tier-one, high-performance storage. Instead of adding additional, more costly tier-one hardware, if the business is using tier-one storage for any of the workloads referenced above, they can be migrated to the consolidated secondary storage system. This will free up tier-one storage for the appl,tions that require high-performance throughput and low latency, such as databases and other structured data workloads.

• ‘When’ Rather Than ‘If’
  As your company begins to consider whether to consolidate its isolated storage environments onto a unified secondary storage platform, the key benefits may help you make the business case:
• Lowers overall storage costs
• Eliminates the overhead costs of managing multiple disparate islands of storage
• Provides on-demand scalability with the ability to shift capacity from one system to another
• Delivers predictable performance
• Enables IT to manage storage environments from a single plane of glass
• Bolsters DR capabilities
• Protects against ransomware attacks

Given the success of our customers across all industry verticals, it may not be a matter of ‘If’ your company should deploy secondary storage, but rather ‘When’ the time is right. As your current systems reach capacity, become too costly to maintain, or grow technically obsolete, that moment could be just around the corner.