Cost effective storage mgmt with SRM soln

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 SAN Point 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.