UTILITY COMPUTING VS. UTILITY STORAGE:
WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?

A short primer on utility computing and storage

Does your organization struggle with the economics of peak usage? Do you have excess capacity that could be shared with another part of your organization? If you’ve answered “yes” to either of these questions, your company could be a candidate for utility computing – or Utility Storage. So just what is the difference?

Utility computing is recognized as the next wave in the data center (following the distributed computing model, which largely supplanted the mainframe model). Utility computing promises to reduce IT cost and increase service levels by simplifying IT management and by permitting the seamless pooling and allocation of IT resources. IT services are provided easily and efficiently from a shared, virtualized and highly scalable IT infrastructure. The result is substantially improved utilization and operational efficiency.

Utility Storage is the storage cornerstone that enables utility computing. Just as monolithic storage was originally designed for mainframe-based computing, and later dual-controller midrange storage for distributed (open-systems) computing, Utility Storage was built for the new demands of utility computing.

Since Utility Storage rests on storage virtualization, you have two fundamental choices for deploying Utility Storage:

1) Layered virtualization and resource provisioning. This is an appliance or software that sits on top of traditional (non-virtualized) resources. The benefit of such an approach is that it promises storage vendor neutrality. These benefits are only realized, however, if the appliance or software supports each and every component, driver and operating system in your environment. In addition, purchasing these additional layers also adds to capital and operating expenses for license fees, product purchases and additional administration overhead.

The complexity of this multi-layered enterprise storage solution can result in a very brittle environment. One change of driver version or addition of a new product may require careful retesting, QA and scheduling downtime for the IT environment. These activities can delay the ability of IT to respond to the organization’s needs with the agility that today’s competitive environment demands.

2) Integrated virtualization and resource provisioning. This is integrated software (and/or hardware) that exists as a part of the server or storage platform. The benefit of this approach is that it is vertically (and deeply) integrated within the platform and with each release. This offers a robust environment and removes the incremental capital and operating expenses for license fees, product purchases and additional administration overhead. The Gartner Group provides a concise recommendation:

"Gartner recommends that businesses considering deploying in-band disk virtualization appliances should build alternative storage infrastructure scenarios that rely on functionally rich storage arrays and migration tools and then compare the benefits, operating costs and risks of each solution."

A Utility Storage environment using integrated virtualization offers many benefits, such as these highlighted by The Clipper Group, Inc.:

• Delivering IT as a service (vs. a box or a fixed asset)
  
• Providing the right services, in the right amounts, at the right time
  
• Responding quickly to support changing business requirements
  
• Raising accountability for responsible consumption and reliable service delivery
  
• Optimizing the reliability, performance and total cost of ownership of IT resources.

For example, the Allant Group has cut its storage administration burden by over 50%. Allant also calculates that it will save over 25% of its storage acquisition costs over 3 years thanks to 3PAR.

3PAR is the leading provider of storage arrays for the utility computing data center. 3PAR Utility Storage is a simple, efficient and scalable platform that can cut the total cost of storage and related infrastructure by 50%. With breakthrough hardware and software innovations, 3PAR overcomes the cost, complexities and functional limitations of traditional storage solutions. 3PAR Utility Storage is ideal for storage consolidation, utility computing and performance-intensive applications.

For more information
White Paper: 3PAR Utility Storage—Now and Beyond
3PAR Company Brochure
Article: SearchStorage.com—Get Ready to Charge for Storage
Article: Microscope—Utility Computing to Grow in Popularity

Top