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The reliance on business-critical applications has driven enterprises to
deploy and maintain complex and expensive storage infrastructures. For today's
distributed large enterprise, managing the data explosion, having visibility
into how the data is being used and by whom, ensuring continuous business
operations, and allowing for efficient access to data from remote offices has
become more critical than ever. The
need for continuous data availability across a diverse infrastructure with
different standards and technologies has increased the cost of manageability
challenging enterprises who have already been struggling to lower the total cost
of ownership. The emergence of new business models demanding non-stop
application availability has made organizations also feel the need for storage
management solutions, such as Storage Resource Management (SRM), SAN Management
etc to ensure that end users can work uninterrupted.
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Doing a Storage
Resource Due Diligence
There are various products available, which discover and analyze storage
resources on a periodic basis. With its pre-configured reports, these
products answer the high level questions about your enterprise storage
utilization:
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Who or what is
consuming storage resources?
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How are storage
resources being consumed?
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Which users consume
the most space across the network?
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Which servers are
nearest capacity?
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Which volumes are
nearest capacity?
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When will storage
capacity be exceeded?
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What is our
enterprise storage capacity?
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How rapidly are
applications growing?
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How rapidly is
enterprise storage capacity expanding?
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An Advantage Enterprise
SRM solutions help enterprises avoid the guesswork, out-of-capacity planning
by forecasting future needs. It helps organizations to truly operate at peak
performance. Scheduling and automating reports, queries, and processes to
eliminate data access and storage-related failures before they occur while
maintaining storage infrastructure available round the clock.
SRM solutions also help in planning more effectively the storage capacities
and lower administrative costs and training time. It helps one take complete
control of tasks such as viewing, analysis, and control at the fingertips and
enables business continuity. Let's look at how to manage a SAN environment
using a storage software tool. For instance, a SAN can be broken down to three
layers, the array, connectivity and hosts. Each layer has its own objects that
make up the SAN resources to be accessed by the hosts. The first step is to to
discover these objects in a multi-vendor environment and map the relationship
with an integrated storage resource management tool. Next is to monitor the
status or usage of these resources/objects. It is only then we understand how
these resources are being utilized in the SAN. It is critical to have in place
these basic capabilities using an integrated tool to capture the data from
multiple sources that enable planning and manage changes in the SAN, thus
improving service levels, performance and availability.
| It is said
that for each $1 spent on storage, an enterprise needs to spend $5 to $7
on managing it. As storage is growing at a very high speed, one cannot
keep adding people to manage it. Given this ground reality, storage
automation becomes very important |
Is it possible to fully automate the storage infrastructure? To an extent
yes. Every vendor is working
towards that goal and an answer is possible in near future. SRM helps increase
the storage resources utilization and RoI. Automated billing for network storage
infrastructure, Enterprise Storage Automation, Storage virtualization, Serial
ATA, S-AIT, CIM, SMI, IP connectivity (iSCSI, IFCP, CIP) etc. are few other
aspects where automation can impact positively. New enterprise storage
management practices are evolving, which encompass the policies, user
activities, system processes, and workflow by which one can deliver information
management services across the storage network. Enterprise Storage Automation (ESA)
increases the quality, consistency, and responsiveness of storage infrastructure
and execution. Unlike traditional solutions, storage automation tools are
designed to automate the complete range of processes across the diverse systems
in the organization and deliver application-consumable storage management
services.
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The Implementation
Phase
Once you have had a snapshot of
the enterprise wide storage consumption patterns, you are all set for
deploying the SRM package, but the solution you have planned should
deliver the following:
Consolidation:
Data and application integration can help simplify systems management and
improve security. Centralized storage management tools can contribute to
better scalability, higher availability, and improved disaster
tolerance.
Virtualization: Without changing applications or disrupting user
behavior, virtualization could make your IT infrastructure more
responsive, scalable, and reliable.
Automation: Given that storage needs will only continue to grow in the
future, autonomic capabilities could help protect your data.
Integration: When all servers
have secure access to all data, your infrastructure will be positioned to
better respond to the information needs of an on demand world. |
Another best practice is taking a component approach. By packaging complex or
repetitive tasks performed by IT administrators as reusable, on-demand services,
storage automation products helps MIS managers in moving from passive monitoring
to proactive control of the storage network, enabling administrators to deliver
higher service levels to storage service consumers. This is done while reducing
the total cost of storage ownership. A good storage automation product can
eliminate outage due to error or delays, empower storage administrators to
manage larger environments, freeing storage experts for higher-impact
activities. It can also reduce unused storage needed to buffer provisioning
delays and accelerate adoption of technology and practice innovation while
reducing maintenance burden.
Issues at Large
Some of the issues in the route to automation solution are:
Speed of the network, density of the file systems, restoring speed of the
tape devices and disaster recovery of backup server. Customers still have
shortage of specialized expertise required to meet their storage-related
challenges across the enterprise that really understand the data management.
Needed skills are broad-based but not available in-house. Customers need to align technology, business processes, and
an effective operational model, which is very critical to long-term success.
Customers also need solutions to leverage their existing strengths and
resources, while responding to their real business needs.
Another important factor is that each customer has different information life
cycle. Therefore to manage it, one needs to understand different data types and
their value to the organization at any point in time, based on the business
requirements for a specific application. So
customers want customized solutions for their requirement and also looking for
one stop shop kind of model, they want one vendor to take ownership of the
complete solution. There are some other factors in the route to storage
automation-Storage automation has transition pangs and it will take time to
stabilize. Inoperability is the key, hence arriving at compatible set of
solutions is indeed a challenge. Moreover, automation consumes good deal of IT
spend hence budgeting becomes the key issue. Also it is not a one time
investment, one has to keep improving storage infrastructure and keep it in the
pink of health.
Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
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