8 Ways Which Can Improve Data Storage Performance

8 Ways Which Can Improve Data Storage Performance

Learn the best eight tools to use in business environments to boost the data storage performance.    Tuesday, November 11, 2014:  Are you overflooded with ever-increasing amounts of data? Well, this is the biggest headache for IT departments and IT managers are always combating to make the most out of the hardware system, even in limited budget. There are certain ways which can help you to improve the performance of the existing storage hardware. Learn the best eight tools to use in business environments to boost the storage performance: 1. Add Solid State Drives to existing storage: Storage vendors usually add Solid State Disks or SSDs to the existing enterprise Storage Area Network (SAN). It has certain restrictions in the drives which are deployed with bandwidth limitations. Hard Disk Drives need to be utilised the most and if SSDs are added to the existing architecture, then it needs special caution, as it may cause severe damage to the entire system. Well, this is the simplest option which comes with lowest possible risk factor in tackling bottle-necks. It can also prove beneficial for existing storage management practices. It can also be used in tackling the involved technical challenges. 2. Make use of built-in features: Storage Quality of Service (QoS) is not a very popular performance booster. It's used in input-output-intensive virtual machines (VMs) and it don't impact performance of others. SCSI commands are implemented and not emulated controllers, to boost data storage performance. 3. Throw Hardware at the problem: Data center infrastructure is a broadly discussed issue. Hardware is sometimes added to solve performance problems and this approach is a time-tested one. It's easy approach but expensive one. It involves adding more hard disks to the existing storage in order to add IOPS. It's a legacy way to address the storage issue and it's one of the most effective ways. 4. Add Flash Cards to servers: This is one of the simplest ways to address performance challenges. It involves opening servers and adding flash card like PCI Express Cards to the storage design. This is the best approach for single applications and single server environments. But adding flash cards to enterprise storage needs extra caution again. It can sometimes limit the growth factor and functionality of a virtualised solution. It can also limit expansion and restrict direct data and solution growth. But it contains low risk and in this case only the host configuration is modified and not the entire enterprise storage architecture. 5. Place data on the appropriate storage: Auto-tiering has received a lot of attention and it has become an essential practice in reducing latency. It's not a brand new technique but now it's gaining further importance as more people are using flash in their enterprise storage arrays. 6. Boost performance with hybrid storage and flash cache: If there is a blend of flash and spinning disk in a hybrid storage model then it offers high performance. Flash hybrids are used to determine which written data receives most number of read requests and copy the same data to SSDs, to give quicker access. They also help in transactional applications. 7. Utilizing All-Flash Arrays: All-flash arrays (AFAs) have flooded into the storage market over last one year. They can provide extremely high input/output rates and they are designed for low latency data delivery. In most cases the project costs minimise the cost justification for standard enterprise class projects. But sometimes it's the most unsuitable and unbalanced approach as they require extremely high capital and operating expenses. Long-term development plans are affected too. 8. Storage virtualisation technology: There is always a need of virtualising and pooling storage to improve performance of data storage systems. Storage capacity needs to be aggregated and spread the value-added features of the hardware across the storage. This also creates pools and permits similar results of high-performance storage. Multiple hosts also reduce I/O consumption and it provides features like high-availability storage like load balancing.