Nate Anderson, Senior Product Manager at balesio AG, takes a look at how server optimisation can help companies to ‘green’ their IT infrastructure.

The data volume that needs to be saved on a company’s file server is growing at an increasing pace. Not only is the amount of files growing, but also the volume of each single file. More and more data needs to be saved, stored, accessed and archived for longer and longer periods. Despite falling prices for new storage disks, actual company spending for storage continues to increase. Beating the storage beast seems to be mission impossible and related topics like green IT are gaining immense popularity. While green IT solutions are mushrooming, not every solution is really green in the first place and the IT administrator, project manager or CIO is advised to analyse the offerings of green IT solutions thoroughly. If the question is to reduce storage costs, some solutions are greener than others.

SERVER OPTIMISATION, DEDUPLICATION, VIRTUALISATION

When we look closely at the pattern of how data storage is produced in a company nowadays, we can see that employees and managers save gigantic numbers of files on the company’s file servers. To a large extent, these files are typically graphic-rich office files like Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. People use the Office applications from Microsoft on a daily basis to create, send and share new documents and files to colleagues, customers and other stakeholders. This increases the storage volume in two ways. Firstly, graphic-rich Office files tend to be big by nature. Secondly, as the process of creating a file often involves more people and several revisions of the document, several versions of these big files exist on the server. This combination is the origin of a high need of storage space and, especially if the company uses inefficient servers, it is also the origin of high storage costs. It is very important to recognise the logic order. High storage costs are caused mainly by the fact that many, as well as large, Office files are created and stored, several versions of these files exist, and inefficient, energy-wasting servers are used. In other words, the IT administrator should work on improving the storage performance of the company by reducing:

• the file size of documents through server optimisation;
• the number of duplicated identical files through deduplication;
• the inefficiency of the server environment through virtualisation.

SERVER OPTIMISATION

There are enterprise solutions that feature a unique technology to optimise the graphics and objects in created Office files without changing the original file format or altering the quality directly on the server. The IT administrator can use the software to create different, flexible optimisation profiles that define which files located on the server shall be optimised and at which optimisation level. The actual optimisation can be launched directly or by using a scheduler service. In some cases, this can lead to single file size reductions of up to 98 per cent. On average, file size reductions of 70 per cent across all Microsoft Office files are achieved. In other words, the same number of Office files with the exact same content of information occupies on average 70 per cent less space on the server, which of course results in less storage volume needed for the same information stored. The storage reduction effect is immediately visible to the company.

As this solution is a software-only solution operated by the IT administrator, server optimisation is a fast and easy way to achieve immediate and massive storage space reductions and cost savings. And as all Office files now have the best optimised size, it is also the ideal starting point to move on to deduplication and virtualisation.

DEDUPLICATION

There are many solutions from different vendors in the area of deduplication. They all have in common that they can reduce the storage volume by replacing duplicated files on a company’s server. As an example, if two identical PowerPoint files of 30 MB are stored, a deduplication solution of replacing one of the files by a link to the other file saves a total of 30 MB in storage. This example also shows why a server optimisation solution should be implemented before a deduplication solution. If a server optimisation solution had been applied before, each of the two identical 30 MB PowerPoint files would have been reduced to 9 MB only, saving a total of 42 MB. A subsequent deduplication solution would then save an additional 9 MB, bringing the total storage saving to 51 MB. In contrast to server optimisation, deduplication solutions need to be assessed thoroughly. Some solutions also deduplicate different versions of a file keeping the oldest file as the reference and saving only the changes in the newer files. If the reference file is lost, restoration of all files is problematic if not impossible. This security issue needs to be weighed against the marginal storage gain. While the excessive use of deduplication can come with security issues, an implemented strict deduplication solution together with a server optimisation solution is key.

VIRTUALISATION

Virtualisation is the process of shifting physical servers to virtual machines (i.e. to more virtual servers sitting on one physical server). This leads to better eco-efficiency of this physical server because more operations can be done on this physical server through the virtual machines sitting on top of it. Also, it is argued that fewer physical servers are needed and therefore storage costs can be reduced. While this is true, virtualisation does not tackle the problem, it only fights the symptoms. If the amount of information stored by a company in files is saved in an optimal way using methods like server optimisation and deduplication, then virtualisation offers a good possibility to reduce storage costs further. In order to achieve this, virtualisation requires a major change in a company’s existing IT infrastructure, which reduces the total cost of ownership of a megabyte of data stored on the server. But without server optimisation and deduplication methods, the data volume increase of files will eat up much of this benefit.

THE BEST MIX FOR THE BEST RESULTS

If a company really wants to beat the storage beast, all possible options should be considered and wisely applied. The best possible result is if server optimisation, deduplication and virtualisation solutions work logically hand in hand to achieve better storage management and lower storage costs. Server optimisation should be at the core, reducing the data volume of each single file on the server without losing information, quality or accessibility. Deduplication methods can help to reduce further the data volume on servers and thus achieve the best possible efficiency in terms of storage use. Virtualisation is then implemented lastly to save the optimised data volume on cost-efficient servers.