Storage Revelations: No Substitute for Planning

A snapshot of storage implementations across India Inc. revealed that there

are three crucial issues where most CIOs usually falter. These include

undertaking a proper planning exercise before implementing the storage solution,

comparing different storage vendors across multiple parameters before deciding

on a particular one and finally to devise a few quantitative as well as

qualitative parameters to measure the effectiveness of the storage solution.

Each of these functions includes several micro issues; most CIOs concur that

broad compliance with several of these issues across all three functions spell

success for a storage implementation in an enterprise.

No Substitute for Planning



Planning for a proper storage solution involves a careful consideration of

four parameters-these include capacity planning, the type of application,

throughput generated and storage consolidation. Pramod Deshpande, vice

president, Information Technology, Central Depository Services (India) advises

on the necessity of performing a storage capacity audit based on the business

projections of the organization.

"In our case, we took into account capital market peaks, and planned for

three times the peak capacity for all our processes. Since it was extremely

difficult to predict on the networking requirements for the next three years,

the overall planning was done for one year only." Depending on the

criticality of the data stored and the type of organization, planning for three

times the peak capacity would be a good measure. A scalability factor of at

least 20 times the peak capacity would also be advisable for organizations like

banks and telcos that are witnessing an explosion of customer data.

The type of application and throughput generated are two other important

issues that most CIOs tend to overlook while planning for storage. It is very

crucial to factor in issues like permissible downtimes for the applications that

are running, as well as the sizes of the data stores generated. While

customer-driven organizations like banks and telcos might not be able to afford

a longer downtime, the case could be different for manufacturing organizations.

One effect of an increasing data mart could be reduction in throughput;

therefore, it is imperative for CIOs to consider this while planning for

storage. Deshpande informs that in CDSL's case, the decision taken at the

beginning was to change the server in order to increase the throughput.

In case data is being accessed from multiple sources, appropriate planning is

absolutely vital as otherwise this might lead to data replication, loss of data

integrity ultimately leading to loss in business revenues. Once CIOs had taken

into account all these four factors while planning for their overall storage

environment, they could plan differently for individual areas of storage.

Ishwar Jha, vice president, business technology, Zee Networks, advises that

CIOs should plan separately for their backup, nearline, online and even DR

strategies. Dataquest, through its interactions with different CIOs, have come

out with a matrix in this regard that could act as a rough guideline for all

enterprises embarking on storage adoption. (See box "Storage Modes: Guru

Speak".)

Choosing the Vendor



Most CIOs agree that pedigree is the most crucial element to look at while

choosing a storage vendor. For V Chandrasekhar, general manager, IT, Bank of

Baroda, the vendor should not only have the total product range starting from

standalone DAS to NAS and SAN in different capacities, it should also provide

total solutions for the lifecycle management of information rather than just

storage.

Jason Gonsalves, general manager, IT and costing, Goodlass Nerolac, feels

that having a well charted out product road map and a proven, efficient and

robust storage technology are absolute musts for any vendor.

Both Jha and Chandrasekhar are discerning about whether the vendor has a

focused R&D commitment and budget-this could become crucial as otherwise the

vendor might not be able to easily adopt emerging technology in storage. In

today's environment this could have a serious impact considering that new

concepts like information lifecycle management (ILM) and utility computing and

storage-on-demand are gradually gaining mainstream acceptance. In addition,

vendors must offer 24x7 support to answer any technology/solution related query,

must have a strong support network to provide faster recovery in case of

failure.

Gonsalves even suggests a closer inspection of the business partner who is

actually deploying the solution. Adds Deshpande, "the CIO must check out

whether the storage vendor and the system integrator have a global mutual

agreement to support their solutions. Otherwise, the CIO often might end up in a

situation where he is forced to change the solution or get tied down to one

vendor for all his requirements."

Speaking about a single vendor for all storage requirements, Venkat Iyer,

CIO, TVS Motors informs that they have been following the single vendor

principle (HP in its case). Though this arrangement has both its merits and

demerits, of late the idea is gaining ground that for specialized storage

management solutions, it is better to seek the software only vendors, since the

rest have a hidden hardware agenda about pushing their boxes.

Last but not the least, all CIOs agree that it makes immense sense not to

ignore basic issues like the standing of the vendor in the industry, the number

of reference sites it can offer, the ubiquity of the storage solution as well as

its inter operability on various operating systems. Another key driver in

selecting the storage solution/vendor is the design of the storage box itself

and also the point in time copy solution available with the it.

Avers Gonsalves, "the design of the storage solution offered us the

feature by which we could have independent storage boxes for various application

with independent resources with in the same storage solution, which in turn

meant guaranteed performance for various applications without sharing of

resources."

Measuring Success



Deshpande suggests that while planning and vendor selection are no doubt
crucial, most important is to document a host of qualitative and quantitative

parameters that would measure the effectiveness of the storage solution.

Gonsalves feels that the effectiveness of the storage solutions is specific

to a site and can be measured only with reference to the requirements of the

site and the reasons for going in for storage solution.

But how do CIOs determine these measuring parameters? Iyer suggests that

speed, reliability and expandability could be the key concerns. No wonder, the

SAN storage in TVS Motors is benchmarked against all three of these. "Every

three seconds a barcode needs to be printed which defines the speed of the

entire architecture. We ensure

99.999% uptime that defines the reliability part; 0+1 mirroring is done on

the storage, hence even if six hard disks fail in one single shot which itself

is quite rare, our storage will not go down. Lastly, for expandability we can go

up to 16 TB of data whereas our current sizing is 4.3 TB. So for the next three

years we expect to have no issue on data growth."

Another key parameter that Goodlass Nerolac has used to measure the

effectiveness of the storage solution is the performance of the system in an

OLTP environment. The system performance problems encountered with JBODS have

receded to the background with the implementation of the storage solution.

Freeing of the server resources for end user computing is also important, which

in turn resulted in better response time to the end users. Optimum utilization

of the available storage capacity is also one of the quantitative benefits

Chandrasekhar has seen in the Bank of Baroda set up.

Insulation of data against individual disk failures could be another

effective measure. Deshpande informs that monolithic storage solution,

therefore, can often become a serious limitation. Independent monitoring and

early warning alerts for the storage subsystem is another key advantages felt by

CIOs. Simplified, centralized management of storage, reducing administrative

workload to save time and money plus flexible configuration of storage are other

quantitative benefits since these could directly impact the RoI.   

Adds Jha, "CIOs should also do well not to forget focusing on

information life cycle management, content expiry and security

integration."