Data storage technology and management

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Efficient Virtual Storage

From the Front Lines

Application-Optimized Storage

By Greg Schulz - Sr. Advisor StorageIO

Optimizing storage for applications can mean many things, from supporting various interfaces or protocols to application programming interface (API) and functionality offload. Application-optimized storage solutions are built on a common framework of storage, data, content and application services. The goal is to provide organizations with the ability to optimize their application storage requirements with a universal storage platform. 

For smaller environments, application-optimized storage solutions should support multi-tenant applications that have different characteristics, without impact to their neighbors. What this means is that different applications – for example, Microsoft Exchange e-mail, SQL Server, SharePoint, file serving and Web services – can coexist. However, storage and data service needs are optimized based on their specific requirements.

 

For larger environments, application-optimized storage solutions should scale to meet the different performance (throughput or bandwidth, as well as transactions and low latency), availability, capacity, energy and economic needs of various applications. Whether for small or large environments, application-optimized storage solutions need to provide situational-awareness capabilities, to help you avoid flying blind.

In selecting application-optimized storage solutions, you should look for:

  1. Support for various APIs, such as VMware vSphere VAAI, VADP and VASA
  2. Integration with applications such as Exchange, Oracle, SQL and SharePoint
  3. Tools that provide insight into performance activity as well as space capacity usage
  4. Wizards and configuration provisioning tools to aid in optimization for applications
  5. Ability to make recommendations along with manual and automated optimization
  6. Scale with stability in terms of performance, availability, capacity and ease of use

Conclusion

Your data storage platform should be able to sustain and analyze the environment and applications that it supports. Leveraging application-optimized storage solutions can help make your environment more flexible, agile and adaptive to different needs, without introducing additional complexity.

 

 

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