While the informatization society drives the substantial increase of IT construction investment, the increasing of data also enlarges the data centers and servers. Insiders are concerned that if data centers become "jumbos", enterprises will have to pay a large amount of fees to keep the regular operation of data centers, thus cause a large cost burden.
It has become a tendency to optimize data, slim data centers and "conserve energy and reduce emission" to servers, because it is necessary for data volume increase that supports the corporate operation, and it is true that the increasing cost adds up to a burden for enterprises. It is rather important to strengthen data centers' management. Especially at the time of being influenced by the international financial crisis, all enterprises are digging potential and reducing expenditure, so how to manage data centers and expand the storage utilization is paid more and more attention in the industry day by day.
The data center is an IT infrastructure, and also the home of numerous data. Industries as banking, civil aviation, telecommunications, and IT are all large families of data with extremely complicated data structure. For enterprises, the data center is the operating center of the whole company.
However, since the unit price of storage was rapidly decreasing in recent years, many enterprises neglected their control of data or storage consumption. A survey from insiders found that investment to storage of enterprises took up one quarter of the whole IT investment, but the average utilization of the storage capacity was only 30 percent to 40 percent with large capacity remained. Therefore, calculating from the current average utilization of 35 percent, if the left 65 percent usable space can be utilized through potential digging and effective measurement, enterprises can reduce the usage expenditure and save cost.
Currently, when the IT budget decreases, it is imperative to further improve the IT system utilization rate and reduce investment to storage.
The industry has a lot of thoughts to reduce storage cost. Wu Xiyuan, Vice President of Symantec Corporation and President of the Greater China Region, has his own opinion on storage resource management. He believes that to manage the data center, it is primary to learn the storage capacity of the data center, just like we should know clearly how much space is left in our wardrobe and how much space can be saved after reorganization and optimization.
Li Gang, director of the presales technical department of Sumantec (China) Corporation thinks that at present, almost in all enterprises there are storage resource wastes. The larger the company scale is, the lower storage utilization rate will be. The fundamental reason is that no one performs real-time monitoring on its storage resource condition and real usage condition, and no one learns about its own data structure. For instance, the server virtualization is a source of a large number of duplicate data. Li Gang explained that virtualization is to generate many data backups on a physical server, in fact, it is unnecessary to backup them one by one, and these duplicated data can completely be eliminated.
To lower the operation cost, improve the utilization rate of data centers and optimize the storage capacity, many new application technologies appeared on the market currently, such as cloud computing. As learned, the globally leading security, storage and system management solution supplier Symantec Corporation launched the storage command center strengthened edition of a storage optimization kit software recently, which helps customers perform peer-to-peer monitoring on data centers by introducing storage change manager and non-agency function, improve storage utilization rate, reduce storage purchase cost, and finally closely combine the storage consumption and practical businesses, thus accelerate the corporate investment return. Symantec's storage optimization technology saved cost for many companies. As introduced, the archiving technology of the storage optimization saved over US$2 million for ING, a world-renowned investment management company; in terms of grading storage, since the online data of ING were cancelled, the storage space was reduced, which can further save over US$7 million; furthermore, since the emails, files and printed data of ING were compacted and grading storage was applied, cost of over US$600,000 was saved.
