How To Help Your Clients Navigate The Myriad Of Database Storage Solutions

By Todd Chudoba, Senior Account Executive, StorTrends 

Not Surprisingly, Protecting Your Clients’ Lifeblood Can Be Quite Profitable

Data is the lifeblood of virtually all business organizations. Whether the business is a 50-man shop or a Fortune 50 enterprise, the odds are that their daily business workflow is reliant on its database operations. And, regardless of the database environment size, database administrators (DBAs) face a number of challenges when its comes to deploying and managing databases. With the variety of products on the market today, choosing the right solution, and then knowing how to configure, deploy and manage that solution can be a rigorous task — one that can really earn you that coveted “trusted advisor” status.  Here, you can help your client to find a solution able to address their organization’s goals — one that efficiently manages and protects the data, while reducing the cost of database deployments and management.

• Optimizing Performance

Ensuring optimal performance is critical in any database deployment. With the cost of solid-state disk (SSD) becoming a more viable piece of the storage array, many vendors are providing SSD options. However buyer beware: a majority of these storage vendors simply throw SSD disks into their existing arrays and hope that the SSD performance can handle the I/O loads. You need to help your clients to source a storage solution that was designed specifically to exploit SSD and one that offers a variety of features and tools to not only handle the I/O load, but also enhance the performance to satisfy the endurance of the load. The solution should have the flexibility to add SSD as a cache tier, a data tier, or a mixture of both caching and tiering.

Further, with quality of service (QoS) policies such as tiered residency, users can decide how much of the data volume resides in the SSD tier versus on the spinning disk tier within a hybrid array. Having the option to appropriately designate where a where a particular database resides on the array is vital to ensuring an efficiently running deployment. This allows the user to finely tune the hybrid SSD storage array for ultimate performance. 

These technological features combine to allow for blazing fast read and write performance which has traditionally been a bottleneck for high performance databases.

• Ensuring Availability

You would be hard-pressed to find a DBA that didn’t agree that database downtime is unacceptable. In many enterprises, even a maintenance window of an hour or two can be near possible to achieve without some level of discontent.

The ideal storage solution should provide dual controllers for upfront redundancy, as well as automatic failover and failback for ease of management while keeping the data available. Dual controllers reduce the amount of rackspace necessary in the data center, while also decreasing the power and cooling cost. This virtually eliminates downtime for software upgrades, fully automates failover/failback functionality, and provides for Active/Active or Active/Passive configurations to meet reliability and availability requirements. The solution should also provide application aware snapshots and consistency groups to ensure that the data is available and consistent in the event of a rollback. With a Redirect on Write (ROW) snapshot technology, performance hits are minimized during snapshotting and the capacity overheads that are found in many of today’s leading storage arrays, are reduced.  Finally, the snapshots should be mountable, making data validation simple before rolling back an entire volume or selecting a specific file to recover. 

• Providing Redundancy

The chosen storage solution should be equipped with a feature set that will make data recovery simple and fast when facing anything from a routine onsite data issue to devastating natural disaster. It should offer a very robust set of tools allowing for replication of data to your client’s off-site repository for disaster recovery (DR) or archival. Look for a solution that offers wide area data services (WDS) technology that provides adaptive compression to reduce compression overhead, data-deduplication and WAN optimization to overcome the latencies that are inherent to TCP/IP over the WAN.  WDS technology allows you to deploy a very cost effective strategy and greatly reduces your backup windows.

• Reducing Cost (CapEx And OpEx)

To reduce upfront cost of database deployments, look for a storage solution that offers thin provisioning (a method for optimizing the efficiency with which the available space is utilized in the storage area network [SAN]). This lays the foundation for simple capacity growth and performance scaling. Additional cost savings can be achieved with auto-tiering technology, as it reduces the number of higher performing, more expensive disks necessary within the array (i.e., SSD or SAS) when dealing with less critical data. Auto-tiering will automatically demote older cold blocks of data down to the less expensive disk types and/or RAID sets, leaving the more expensive, higher performing disks available for active data, or hot blocks. This allows for the more frequently accessed data to be stored in the highest data tier for faster, more reliable service to the databases and users. 

You should also help your client to seek a solution that offers workflow management features, such as those that perform data migration during off-peak operating hours, ensuring optimal performance for their database during peak operating hours. 

In the past, a company would need 256 spinning disks to provide the IOPs that can now be obtained in a single hybrid storage array. Hybrid storage solutions deliver major savings on rackspace, power and management expense, as compared to spinning disk.

What’s the difference between SSD and flash hard drives you may now be asking yourself?  Well, modern SSD hard drives are now flash-based, so there is not really any difference.  So, what’s the best storage for your client’s database environment — all flash (AFA), hybrid-flash or spinning disk.  I guess the answer is, “It depends.”  What is your client’s budget?  Need for speed?  Tolerance for downtime?  etc. …  Here is where a little homework and partnering with the right storage vendors will not only make you your clients’ trusted advisor, it will move you into the irreplaceable hero role.

Senior Account Executive, Todd Chudoba, has twenty-two years of technology experience in storage, RAID, virtualization (VMware, MS Hyper-V, Citrix and RHVS), SAN, NAS, Linux and DB applications (MS SQL, Exchange and Oracle). Chudoba has spent the past eight years with American Megatrends, Inc.'s StorTrends Data Storage Division. Chudoba is responsible for customer engagement, developing client relationships and finding new clients while creating innovative proposals and delivering strategic sales presentations to sell clients on specific technologies within the StorTrends All-Flash Array SAN Products. Chudoba enjoys spending time with clients and ensuring that they achieve their targeted business goals.