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The role of Storage Resource management (SRM) in managing
complex storage environments is an undisputable one. Let us consider a
multi-vendor storage environment with storage platforms, SAN and NAS. In a most
likely scenario a typical large enterprise would have networked their storage,
but where is the benefit? They have not really consolidated much of anything-certainly
not people or management. It's not about management tools. It's about how
you manage everything? This is where IT management people are frequently
overwhelmed. Hence one needs different tools, lots of people, lots of time to
manage the multivendor storage repositories. This kind of a scenario can be best
managed by a combination of storage techniques. In addition to physical
consolidation, Automated Networked Storage also enables centralized control. Now
everything that the organization owns is visible to the organization in one
place. The organization is leveraging automation to hide the complexity of the
infrastructure so that its people can concentrate on the business.
The term managing storage might sound like an oft-repeated
term. Let us get into the heart of the matter: What does the word
"manage" really mean? It's the ability to discover, monitor,
automate tasks, provision storage, and report on the information infrastructure.
(see box Best practices for storage management)
Notwithstanding the solutions advocated, managing storage
resources from multiple hardware vendors is an issue that is not going away.
Surveys by several industry analysts have shown that heterogeneous storage
management is a significant issue for more than 50% of respondents. Surveys have
also shown that storage is growing in complexity, at a time when companies are
reluctant to invest in new storage hardware. To succeed in the storage
management game, you want to do whatever you can to avoid having disparate tools
that do not communicate. By selecting a single storage management approach-one
that functions as a single, integrated system regardless of the specific
hardware devices employed-you need to streamline management and make your IT
staff members more effective.
Storage Pain Points
Hope and despair seems to go hand in hand when it comes to managing storage.
Putting in place a storage infrastructure and managing the set up post the
storage solution rollout is equally daunting. With enterprise storage being a
dynamic entity, the issue of scale and ramping up as per the needs is indeed a
challenging task for every CIO. As we take a closer look at the plethora of
issues surrounding storage, one would be baffled by the amount of time and
resources spent in making the storage architecture reliable, secure and a set up
that can run 24/7 with absolutely no downtime. Given that we took on the task of
identifying the storage pain points, a report from the Storage Networking
Industry Association (SNIA) caught our attention.
This report, made sometime back, brings to fore the CIO
challenges in managing storage in a business environment that demands optimal
utilization of IT spend. The report titled "Top Ten Pain Points
Survey" puts storage cost as the number one storage pain point. As the
enterprise infrastructure grows they are forced to scale up their storage and in
the bargain need to spend more on storage, and that in a way is a challenge as
CIOs need to justify their investments. The second pain point was managing
growth and capacity followed by infrastructure management. The fourth pain point
was lack of integrated or interoperable solutions, which leads to increasing
complexity of the storage infrastructure. Lack of desired functions and
features, justifying expenditures, undelivered promises and lack of automation
for provisioning are other pain points that complete the list. The SNIA report
clearly elucidates the multi pronged issues CIOs and CTOs face today.
Global Storage Networking
As CIOs ponder over the pain points, we bumped into new and emerging
concepts in the storage space. It's called 'Global Storage Networking'. This
concept is gaining momentum mainly because of large enterprises expanding across
the globe. This calls for remotely managing various storage sites and taking a
view of the big picture that is actually composed of storage clusters spread
across the world. And networking all those clusters is global storage
networking. The beauty of the concept lies in remote managing the storage that
is spread across. No wonder then analysts are comparing global storage
networking with on demand computing and utility computing. Again, this leads to
the elementary question: how does one manage storage effectively?
Shrikanth G
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