Interview of TAdviser with the associate director of department of computing systems of CROC company Andrey Tyshchenko

Andrey Tyshchenko: Information technologies in general are mistakenly perceived by many only as an expensive part of the budget though actually it not absolutely so. IT are historically called to develop the industries, separate businesses and indirectly to make profit, and those companies which will begin to curtail implementations, most likely, will be left in the basket. Speaking about computing resources, really, It should be noted that demand for heavy iron falls. There is no money in economy, and purchase of the expensive equipment of the company try to postpone. It, meanwhile, does not cancel a problem of storage and processing of constantly growing volumes of corporate data. We see this trend and we try to propose to the customers such solutions which would be at the same time available and gave almost instant positive effect for business. We integrated a pool of such solutions under the general name of "data storage optimization". These solutions are designed to reduce operational expenditure, to prolong the term of life of the old equipment, to reveal bottlenecks which influence work of business services, to detect the hidden reserves of the equipment.

Andrey Tyshchenko: It should be noted that we mean by storage optimization first of all the complex service connected with classification and ordering of data depending on their importance for the customer. It includes audit of infrastructure in terms of need of optimization of data, data migration between systems, their archiving and so forth. Within projects we implement different technologies, in particular, a compression, deduplication, multilevel storage, virtualization, etc. At last, as the most radical, we will call it so, an optimization method of storage we can offer use of cloud services. Thanks to them about questions of upgrade the equipment, purchases of the new systems, technical support of computer systems can be forgotten in principle. These tasks are completely transferred to shoulders of cloud provider. Our customers use cloud resources often for placement of heavy applications and the high-loaded databases, reducing thereby capital costs. They can be sure of the high speed of work of service as performance up to 100,000 IOPS at us is guaranteed thanks to a flash disks, and reliability and safety is ensured both at the expense of various means of protecting, and using reservation of data on the neighboring platform and uses of the last solutions EMC in the field of ensuring data protection.

Andrey Tyshchenko: There is a lot of specialized products, one medicine is absent on all cases. In this context it is important to consider the factors working for benefit of the choice of these or those tools. It is the amount of data, type and required performance of applications (the number of users, address frequency), growth rates of the database, compatibility of tools of optimization with the current infrastructure of the customer, existence of special requirements of the state regulators (for example, there can be a requirement of storage of not less certain term or on not re-recorded information media). A large number of projects is connected today with solutions in which are effectively combined use highly productive a flash memory and different technologies of optimization of physical volume of storage (deduplication, a compression and so forth). The brightest representative and the market leader of a similar class of solutions is EMC XtremIO.

Andrey Tyshchenko: If tasks of the customer are connected with performance improvement of computing systems, improvement of operation of applications, upgrade or life extension of systems, then practically there is always an issue of optimization of infrastructure of storage.

Andrey Tyshchenko: First of all when implementing the project it is required to obtain from the customer the comprehensive information about features of work with data therefore with it close interaction should be organized. As with the doctor who makes the diagnosis according to the patient and based on inspection. The more we will be able to obtain information at the initial stage, the "treatment" will be more correct. In practice at first we book project audit, analyzing load of systems, we reveal bottlenecks and we formulate the first idea of project tasks. Then during consulting these tasks clear up, implemented, technical support is performed if in it there is a need. During maintenance new bottlenecks which are eliminated the same way, for example, within the service contract can come to light. In case of small and average projects of optimization of data (for up to a month and the budget less than 1 million rubles) all this is implemented within a special range of services of CROC called Express services.

Andrey Tyshchenko: We are aimed at long-term cooperation with customers, including in projects of optimization of data storage. As a rule, they go together with implementation projects of systems or service maintenance. Regular preventive actions for monitoring of the recommendations about their optimization made with issue can be provided in the complex project of support of infrastructure in which SLA on data availability are stated.

Andrey Tyshchenko: At each level of infrastructure (at the level of the server or DWH, a data network, OS, DBMS, the application) there are own built-in control facilities. But any of them separately does not give the broad picture, final user services how effectively work. There are also specialized solutions on monitoring of infrastructure, for example EMC ViPR SRM. But also they require expert evaluation, and their implementation is relevant more for the large companies. We have own know-how: we collect indicators of operation of the IC at the different levels, thus, we receive the broad picture of functioning and also correctness of their configuring and settings. Happens so that it is possible to optimize work of the specific application by simple change of internal application controls. Such examination forms at the specialists who are highly qualified and long-term practical experience on installation and support of solutions. And we also offer such examination within mentioned by us before express services in optimization.

Andrey Tyshchenko: I would compare optimization of data of the company with tuning of the car. As tuning can have different tasks (operational development of the engine for increase in power, reliability augmentation, replacement of elements of the suspender for improvement of passability), and in a case different problems can be solved with optimization of data. Generally within the project of optimization it is necessary to provide fast, reliable and inexpensive data access, and optimization is based exactly around the solution of these three main objectives.

Andrey Tyshchenko: Any system will work slowly, expensively, inefficiently if data which are used in its work are stored and processed non-optimal. Existence of the key systems is characteristic of each business. Various databases, e-mail, file storages are universally critical. Depending on industry accessory also multimedia archives, electronic document management and so forth can be critical.

Andrey Tyshchenko: From the point of view of the business head the guarding sign can be considered the fact that the IT department constantly asks money for purchase of new storage systems. For the Chief information officer complaints of users of information systems should be a disturbing signal, certainly. The program is long loaded, accomplishment of functions is slowed down, the report is long generated and so on — it is necessary to pay attention to all this in time. In this context it is important that in the company there was internal SLA on availability of applications and, respectively, internal classification of data on criticality degree (mail, documents, these ERP systems and so on), to storage levels and also regulations of work with each data type. For example, according to regulations, e-mail is more senior than several months the archive can be transferred in special, is more senior, let us assume, than three years — in deeper archive and so on. It is useful to spend at least once year audit, to review relevance the politician, to address specialists for consultation.

Andrey Tyshchenko: The most current trend in the market — transition from traditional disks to a solid-state memory. The hybrid DWH combining components based on mechanical disks and flash will be upgraded in parallel. Respectively, in hybrid DWH will gain development intellectual diversity of data on storage levels (so-called "tiring"). In my opinion, in very fast time in the market there will be only solid state drives — for data in online access and to them to addition very big slow traditional disks — for archive storage and seldom used data. The second trend of the market of data storage — development and distribution of the solutions SDS (Software-Defined Storage). The product EMC ScaleIO which allows to combine storage and data processing in one system can be an example. Such approach well is suitable for deployment of test and virtual environments. The following trend is also visible: the different industrial systems and DBMS will better understand both possibilities of the equipment, and the application software, and to be integrated with them in the automatic mode more and more closely, optimizing work with data. At last, the increasing number of customers begins to pay attention to the hyper convergent systems representing the ready-made easily scalable solution integrating in one complex servers, DWH, network components, means of virtualization, a number of additional functions for increase in protection and utilization of resources and also management tools all components as one solution.