SRM tools keep track of capacity and allocate more capacity as needed. For example, if the tool sees that more storage is needed by CRM applications, it will locate and re-allocate some unused capacity

When Fujitsu Software launched Softek Storage Provisioner 2.1 early this year, the storage industry sat up. For one, the growing popularity of the solution and the rave reviews it got in the US set the stage for intense competition between storage majors. The Provisioner launch assumes significance because it liberates enterprises from being tied down with one vendor for storage software. Available for $50,000, the Softek Provisioner can run on any hardware and, hence, makes it easier for organizations to manage multi-vendor storage resources. The Provisioner has intensified the issue of storage automation because enterprises are increasingly demanding more proactive tools.

Storage automation has always been a debatable issue. Organizations are realizing that raw storage will not give them operational efficiencies, productivity improvements and business continuity. Thus, it is becoming necessary for enterprises to go for storage automation for mission-critical information and applications. “Storage automation software could relieve IT staff of tremendous burden around backup/restoration and storage provisioning in complex environments,” says P K Gupta, director, strategic development, intercontinental operations, Legato Systems.

SRM solutions help enterprises avoid the element of uncertainty by forecasting future needs. It helps them to operate at peak performance by scheduling and automating reports and processes

Arun Rao, national manager, storage business, CA India

Gupta adds: “For every $1 spent on storage, an enterprise needs to spend $5 to $7 on managing it. As storage needs are growing very fast, you can’t keep adding people at the same rate and thus automation becomes very important.”

The message to the enterprise as well as the industry is clear. Enterprises today need 24X7 reliable and available storage infrastructure, but in reality blackouts happen as concepts like storage provisioning, virtualization and storage on demand do not always function in a seamless fashion. The reason being that enterprises either entrust the whole task to one vendor or there is an inability on the enterprises’ part to map current storage demands and growth patterns. While any set up of storage architecture takes the enterprise to a managed level, it will be devoid of maturity until it has proactive storage management software, which becomes the nerve center of any good storage infrastructure.

The key question then is: does the industry have enough technology to automate storage infrastructure? A typical answer is “it depends”. This element of ambiguity clearly puts storage automation as one of the most debatable enterprise issues and is every storage vendor’s major challenge.

SRM is a challenge for large and distributed organizations. It is an issue for all organizations where data is increasing at a tremendous pace and it is important for them to implement these solutions

Sandeep Dutta, director-strategic partnerships, Network Appliances

The soft part of storage
Enterprise storage automation (ESA) is a relatively new concept. Though vendors have been offering storage resource management (SRM) tools for some time now, the concept has not been discussed separately. This is because storage is more often seen as a hardware issue and, hence, automation is not considered important. But over the years with the size of the applications and users growing by the day, enterprises have started taking a closer look at their storage set ups, started demanding more from vendors and are now looking at ways of getting optimal returns from IT investments. Therefore, SRM has come into focus in recent times and the term has also become more defined. According to a definition given by the Gartner Group: “The SRM infrastructure is a complementary set of products, standards and procedures that provide reporting, analysis and automated management of physical and logical storage availability, capacity, configuration and performance.” In simple terms, an SRM enables seamless availability of storage resources and the ability to take corrective actions based on some rules driven by business requirements for the enterprise. Says Vijay Pradhan, CEO, StorageTek: “SRM’s role in an enterprise storage management architecture is to deploy the appropriate storage technology for every layer so that storage resources can be leveraged optimally.”

In large distributed storage environments, storage automation is quite challenging. Hence, even in advanced geographies like the US, storage automation is still in its infancy and no vendor can claim supremacy in this space. Says Arun Rao, national manager, storage business, CA India: “The market for SRM is just beginning to ramp up. The increased demand we see lends credence to this prediction. Today customers are faced with three realities: tight budgets, doing more with less and reducing cost of ownership. For a long time, storage was not being properly used and the IT staffs had little idea about what they had and how it was being used. Customers are now taking a hard look at what they have, where they are going and where they want to go down the line. Given these business realities, the time certainly seems ripe for SRM and it will certainly be a technology to watch out for.”

The current developments in the storage space clearly foretell a trend. It is not concepts like SAN and NAS that will provide value propositions to the enterprise; instead it will be the back-end software tools that will drive these storage architectures.

For instance, if an enterprise is putting in place a SAN initiative, it has to align its storage repositories in sync with the three layers of SAN. Typically, a SAN constitutes three layers—array, connectivity and hosts. And every layer has its own objects that make up for a larger SAN and these objects are from diverse platforms in terms of OS and vendors. Integration being one of the objectives of a SAN, it can happen only when these objects and layers talk and integrate seamlessly. Here simply putting a SRM solution does not work; one has to first map out how different objects utilize storage and only after analyzing the consumption patterns is the enterprise ready for automation. It is not surprising then to see major storage vendors taking an open approach and offering multi-vendor storage integration. For instance, Ajit Nair, director, technology solutions group, EMC South Asia, says: “We support the world’s broadest range of multi-vendor network devices, host storage resources and storage systems. We have an open storage strategy that masks the complexity of the multi-vendor storage environment without diminishing the value of various components. The open strategy consists of three elements—intelligent supervision, information safety and infrastructure services and on top of it is our ControlCenter family of products that automates a number of tasks.”

EMC’s open storage strategy is a clear pointer that drives home how vendors are going aggressive in this space and focusing more on the software part of the storage. For instance, EMC has acquired nine software companies in the last three years and has invested close to $6 billion in developing storage software. Another player who is making aggressive forays in the SRM space is IBM. The company is working towards extending its Tivoli storage resource manager range to all vendor platforms.

According to Sunil Jose, country manager, Tivoli Software, IBM India: “We are currently offering the Tivoli range of SRM, which has capacity provisioning technology that maximizes application availability by automatically provisioning storage as necessary to prevent file systems from running out of space.” The key point is that vendors are slowly shedding their unilateral approach and making their SRM solutions available to different vendor storage environments.

The SRM drivers
The key driver for automating storage infrastructure is optimal utilization and maximizing the benefits out of storage infrastructure. A good SRM makes the storage environment agile so that without manual intervention it multitasks and keeps the system up and running. Agendra Kumar, country manager, Veritas, says: “Enterprises today spend a lot of money in managing their storage infrastructure. There is still a lot of manual intervention. Hence, they need to seriously look at automation that will bring a high degree of productivity. For instance, we have the SANPoint Control storage automation tool that will discover all the storage devices in a DAS, NAS and SAN, and manage it by defining a set of policies, allowing the software to manage the network and take corrective action when needed. Since the software does the major part, a single administrator can manage literally hundreds of servers.”

However, despite its deliverables, SRM like any other best practice has its pitfalls. For instance, in a study conducted by a company called Glasshouse Technologies in the US, enterprise IT managers and storage users were surveyed, and the results revealed that 60% of the users surveyed had not even heard of SRM. Hence, vendors need to educate users of the benefits of SRM. Enterprises need to take an SRM-aware approach and align their SAN or NAS initiatives with their business objectives. An SRM roll out can be related to this analogy: one person with a good map can efficiently find the way to a 100 destinations rather than a 100 people with maps and no direction. The point here is an SRM empowers the storage network and it ushers in lots of self-healing capabilities to the storage infrastructure. But like all storage initiatives, implementing an SRM is not easy and nor it is plug-and-play.

In today’s complex business world, data is increasingly becoming a critical asset. Says IBM’s Jose: “Organizations today are asking themselves: how much data storage do we have? How can we reliably forecast future needs? Why is storage growing? How much worthless data is being stored? How much downtime is storage-related?” SRM will play a key role in seeking answers for these complex questions.

SHRIKANTH G in Chennai

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