{"id":4969,"date":"2020-09-06T11:08:01","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T09:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/?p=4969"},"modified":"2020-09-06T11:08:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T09:08:02","slug":"5-signs-its-time-for-a-nas-or-san-upgrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/5-signs-its-time-for-a-nas-or-san-upgrade\/","title":{"rendered":"5 signs it&#8217;s time for a NAS or SAN upgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 3<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>It&#8217;s easy to tell when it&#8217;s time to modernize your storage infrastructure if you know the warning signs. Find out what they are and how Liberty Mutual Insurance handled its upgrade.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.ttgtmedia.com\/rms\/onlineImages\/edwards_john.jpg\" alt=\"John Edwards\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>By <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techtarget.com\/contributor\/John-Edwards\">John Edwards<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Upgrading an enterprise&#8217;s storage infrastructure isn&#8217;t easy. That&#8217;s why many managers hesitate before committing to a NAS or SAN upgrade. However, sticking with outdated storage that isn&#8217;t keeping pace with an enterprise&#8217;s growing data requirements can lead to missed business opportunities, regulatory compliance lapses and other serious &#8212; and costly &#8212; problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The good news is it&#8217;s relatively easy to tell when your storage infrastructure is running out of steam. Pay attention to these five warning signs to tell if you need a NAS or SAN upgrade:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>End users complain about storage response time and performance.<\/strong>\u00a0User complaints are an obvious red flag. Managers who fail to\u00a0improve storage response time\u00a0and performance may soon find their job security in jeopardy.<\/li><li><strong>IT staff members spend much of their time responding to capacity and performance issues.<\/strong>\u00a0IT teams already have their hands full dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and other important issues. The last thing an already overwhelmed staff needs to be doing is chasing down storage complaints.<\/li><li><strong>End users and business units are moving workloads onto their own storage platforms or implementing new workloads with cloud providers.<\/strong>\u00a0When an enterprise storage system starts to fail, users may be tempted to\u00a0turn to shadow IT solutions. Piecemeal, ad hoc storage encourages chaos and can lead to business disaster.<\/li><li><strong>Ransomware and malware can lead to data loss\u00a0and the need for expensive data recovery projects.<\/strong>\u00a0Both issues are core storage security problems, and they indicate existing safeguards are failing to protect storage resources.<\/li><li><strong>The\u00a0data center is running out of space.<\/strong>\u00a0On-premises storage resources consume a significant amount of floor space. This can be a serious issue, particularly for data centers that don&#8217;t have room to spare and may indicate it&#8217;s time for a NAS or SAN upgrade. There are two ways to address this problem: Find more space &#8212; this isn&#8217;t always possible, of course &#8212; or turn to or expand cloud storage.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"What is SAN? Storage Area Networking Explained\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zEXSvhl5Zjc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Embracing modernization<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Sooner or later, all enterprises will face one of the many warning signs that a NAS or SAN upgrade is needed.\u00a0Storage modernization is inevitable\u00a0and necessary. &#8220;Our storage platform was starting to become a heterogenous mashup of different vendors and technologies that had accumulated over the past 10 years,&#8221; said Chris Lund, director of hybrid compute and storage at Liberty Mutual Insurance. Lund oversees a team of 100 infrastructure engineers and administrators and is responsible for 60,000-plus server and VDI instances and 38 petabytes of storage. &#8220;There have been three major shifts in the storage ecosystem over the last few years that make a data storage modernization project really pay off,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Our storage platform was starting to become a heterogenous mashup of different vendors and technologies that had accumulated over the past 10 years.<\/p><p><strong>Chris Lund<\/strong><\/p><p>Director of hybrid compute and storage, Liberty Mutual Insurance<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Lund acted after observing the increased operational overhead that was needed to support moving data across the various storage silos that had accumulated over time. Applications weren&#8217;t delivering at their full performance potential and that drove the need for tactical point solutions to overcome I\/O challenges, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Liberty Mutual&#8217;s modernization effort took a\u00a0greenfield deployment\u00a0approach to storage modernization. The fresh approach made sense, Lund said, given the existing environment&#8217;s heterogenous composition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The company selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise as its main storage provider. &#8220;Once we selected a vendor, we approached the project in several agile iterations that worked to address each of the shortcomings of our current environment,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We then focused on quick wins to deliver early value, such as our VMware-based environments that could be easily replicated to the new environment using Storage vMotion or HCX migration capabilities featuring little or no downtime for our applications.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Liberty Mutual also deployed\u00a0cloud-based data replication services. &#8220;These provide the ability to replicate our mission-critical data off site to AWS S3,&#8221; Lund said. &#8220;Not only does this drive a serious unit cost reduction per terabyte by not having to manage replicated data on site, but it also enables our data protection team to expand upon their infrastructure engineering skills in the public cloud.&#8221; Feedback from team members has been highly positive, Lund said. &#8220;This is something they all really enjoyed getting to work on.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Enter solid-state storage<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Solid-state storage is beginning to play an important role in the insurance company&#8217;s storage environment. &#8220;In the past, it has been somewhat cost-prohibitive for anything but critical high I\/O workloads, but, more recently, the price of flash storage has made it easy to consolidate most SAN and NAS onto a single platform that&#8217;s both highly performant for high-end workloads as well as friendly on the budget when it comes to less-critical applications and environments,&#8221; Lund said. &#8220;Not only have we seen much lower failure rates relative to spinning disk, but we&#8217;ve also seen much longer service life, allowing us to spread the cost of these systems over five-plus years in many cases.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lund offered one final bit of advice to managers considering a NAS or SAN upgrade. &#8220;Whatever solution you choose, implement the storage operational functions through a\u00a0RESTful API\u00a0to simplify operations and improve stability [by] managing the environment end-to-end with code.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 3<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span>It&#8217;s easy to tell when it&#8217;s time to modernize your storage infrastructure if you know the warning signs. Find out what they are and how Liberty Mutual Insurance handled its upgrade. By John Edwards Upgrading an enterprise&#8217;s storage infrastructure isn&#8217;t easy. That&#8217;s why many managers hesitate before committing to a NAS or SAN upgrade. However, sticking with outdated storage that<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/5-signs-its-time-for-a-nas-or-san-upgrade\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,62,69,16,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-backup-and-archival-tools","category-data-storage-backup-tools","category-data-storage-backup-tools-backup-and-archival-tools","category-how-tos-and-other-useful-tips-and-tricks","category-primary-storage-devices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4970,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969\/revisions\/4970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}