Ever-increasing complexity in storage architecture is a major side-effect of growing sophistication in data storage products. There are long-standing concerns about interoperability between storage products from different vendors, especially in the case of expensive SANs. Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has all of the big names in the world of storage as members, with a mission to ensure that storage networks become more efficient, complete and trusted solutions across the IT community. Sheila Childs is the chairman at SNIA and V-P (product management) at Legato Systems Inc. Excerpts from an e-mail interview...

"If you talk storage management, you talk tools to take a function that is very complex to begin with and to simplify it—so that it is easily understood" Sheila Childs is the chairman at SNIA and V-P (product management) at Legato Systems Inc.

l What is your advice to enterprises looking to manage their complex storage infrastructure, and to achieve faster ROI?
Consider storage networks. Although the installed base for direct attached storage (DAS) is still significant, storage networking technology adoption is progressing at a rate faster than has been previously projected due to the strength of these technologies. Consolidating storage in networks enables the enterprise to scale up capacity in relation to the aggregated need of applications. ROI can be achieved more quickly with a well thought out storage infrastructure. Also, the deployment of appropriate software products to manage complex infrastructures is what delivers a faster ROI.

l How can SMEs benefit from a costly technology like SAN?
Small to medium enterprises generally don’t have the staff or the expertise to allow them to dedicate individuals to the effective management of storage, i.e. storage capacity, storage allocation and storage utilization. The deployment of NAS or SANs allows an individual administrator to manage more capacity via a centralized pool of storage. Once beyond the initial learning curve, the administrator can devote less time to the complexities of managing DAS and more to building and administering a better IT environment. Dynamic reconfiguration allows smaller enterprises to work through the processes of application migration and deployment of new applications according to the growth of the business in a more seamless manner.

l What are a few best practices that enterprises can adopt?
Many of the "best practices" today are designed to provide effective management of both the storage infrastructure, and of customer data. In a well-managed storage network (SANs, NAS), the management and provisioning of capacity for applications tends to become an easier function to deliver than in a direct attached storage environment. Companies are moving to either NAS or SAN (and a lot of times both) when it is determined that their current storage infrastructure won’t support their data growth. With respect to software, applications that perform infrastructure or data management based on policies have the potential to greatly simplify an administrator’s working day. Automated notifications and responses to failure, automated configuration and other infrastructure management functions provided by software tools enable more capacity to be managed per administrator.

l Has the storage management Initiative by SNIA simplified storage management?
SNIA released the SMI Specification version 1.0 for public review in mid-April. This represents a milestone in the effort to unite the storage industry on a common standard for storage management and deliver on the promise of interoperability. Version 1.0 is today being implemented by a number of vendors in SMI-compliant "providers" and "clients". The ultimate goal is to simplify development and testing time for vendors, with cost savings passed on to customers through applications that can be used to manage interoperable configurations. With version 1.0, the SNIA SMI Specification is in its infancy. Many additional features must be incorporated into the specification in order to provide a robust, all-encompassing management interface.

l What advances has storage management software made?
Many of the new improvements in storage management software involve ability to provide automated policy-based management. Other features include the ability to do path management, virtualization, provisioning and other advanced functions. The objective of these tools is to take a storage management function that is very complex and to simplify it in a series of well understood and automated steps in order to greatly reduce the time, effort and skill required to perform that task. Data management software products have also evolved, beyond simple backup and recovery. Features such as archiving, HSM (hierarchical storage management), remote replication/mirroring, snapshot management, and alternate backup methodologies are readily available. Perhaps the biggest evolution in "next generation storage management" is the move to the SMI-S standard. As the standard evolves, development costs for both hardware and software vendors are greatly reduced, and again, these cost savings will be passed on to the consumer.

l How far has SNIA been successful regarding open standards?
The evolution of any standard takes time. As noted earlier, in April, SNIA has successfully delivered version 1.0 of SMI-S to the general public for public review. SNIA understands that the benefits provided by incorporation of the standard into end products must be evangelized with both vendors and consumers. To this end, we have built a number of programs that support the technical work, most of which are administered and delivered by the SNIA storage management forum. Programs for vendors include education and training, developer support, and reference implementations such as CIM-SAN that enable vendors to test and debug their code. This has resulted in very good momentum for the adoption of the standard. The demand for compliance will also come from end-users. SNIA is promoting and evangelizing the SMI-S in the end-user community through many venues, including white papers, technical articles, conferences, tutorials and other educational activities.

l Do you think storage will get commoditized in the near future?
There is a likelihood that some degree of commoditization will occur as hardware and software products are delivered that conform to standards. However, functions that will be common to all hardware and management applications that conform are low-level functions that provide little incremental value to applications that need to use storage capacity. Many software vendors today spend a great deal of time and energy with the most rudimentary functions, like discovering what components they have in their storage network. IT professionals today are no longer responsible merely for assuring the availability of enough capacity and the recovery of data, but they are now expected to enable access to information. Storage vendors are anxious to deliver value-added functionality to assist with these business objectives, but without tools to perform appropriate low-level management of the storage infrastructure, customers struggle with how to achieve these objectives. SMI-S will provide these tools. While allowing for some commoditization, no simplified management scheme or standardization would be useful without the ability to incorporate vendor-specific advanced functionality. The SMI-S allows for the incorporation of each vendor’s unique and proprietary value-add functionality.

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