Ward Off Those 'Storage Blues'

 

As enterprises expand, so do their storage.

Given that a CIO has to do a lot of groundwork to make storage work for his

enterprise

The role of Storage Resource management (SRM) in

managing complex storage environments is an undisputable one. Let us consider a

multi-vendor storage environment with storage platforms, SAN and NAS. In a most

likely scenario a typical large enterprise would have networked their storage,

but where is the benefit? They have not really consolidated much of

anything-certainly not people or management. It's not about management tools.

It's about how you manage everything? This is where IT management people are

frequently overwhelmed.






Hence one needs different tools, lots of people, lots of time to manage the
multivendor storage repositories. This kind of a scenario can be best managed by

a combination of storage techniques. In addition to physical consolidation,

Automated Networked Storage also enables centralized control. Now everything

that the organization owns is visible to the organization in one place. The

organization is leveraging automation to hide the complexity of the

infrastructure so that its people can concentrate on the business.

The term managing storage might sound like an

oft-repeated term. Let us get into the heart of the matter: What does the word

"manage" really mean? It's the ability to discover, monitor, automate

tasks, provision storage, and report on the information infrastructure. (see box

Best practices for storage management).

Notwithstanding the solutions advocated, managing

storage resources from multiple hardware vendors is an issue that is not going

away. Surveys by several industry analysts have shown that heterogeneous storage

management is a significant issue for more than 50% of respondents.






Surveys have also shown that storage is growing in complexity, at a time when
companies are reluctant to invest in new storage hardware. To succeed in the

storage management game, you want to do whatever you can to avoid having

disparate tools that do not communicate. By selecting a single storage

management approach-one that functions as a single, integrated system regardless

of the specific hardware devices employed-you need to streamline management and

make your IT staff members more effective.

Storage Pain Points



Hope and despair seems to go hand in hand when it comes to managing storage.

Putting in place a storage infrastructure and managing the set up post the

storage solution rollout is equally daunting. With enterprise storage being a

dynamic entity, the issue of scale and ramping up as per the needs is indeed a

challenging task for every CIO. As we take a closer look at the plethora of

issues surrounding storage, one would be baffled by the amount of time and

resources spent in making the storage architecture reliable, secure and a set up

that can run 24/7 with absolutely no downtime. Given that we took on the task of

identifying the storage pain points, a report from the Storage Networking

Industry Association (SNIA) caught our attention.

This report, made sometime back, brings to fore

the CIO challenges in managing storage in a business environment that demands

optimal utilization of IT spend. The report titled "Top Ten Pain Points

Survey" puts storage cost as the number one storage pain point.






As the enterprise infrastructure grows they are forced to scale up their storage
and in the bargain need to spend more on storage, and that in a way is a

challenge as CIOs need to justify their investments. The second pain point was

managing growth and capacity followed by infrastructure management. The fourth

pain point was lack of integrated or interoperable solutions, which leads to

increasing complexity of the storage infrastructure. Lack of desired functions

and features, justifying expenditures, undelivered promises and lack of

automation for provisioning are other pain points that complete the list. The

SNIA report clearly elucidates the multi pronged issues CIOs and CTOs face

today.

Global Storage Networking



As CIOs ponder over the pain points, we bumped into new and emerging

concepts in the storage space. It's called 'Global Storage Networking'. This

concept is gaining momentum mainly because of large enterprises expanding across

the globe. This calls for remotely managing various storage sites and taking a

view of the big picture that is actually composed of storage clusters spread

across the world. And networking all those clusters is global storage

networking. The beauty of the concept lies in remote managing the storage that

is spread across. No wonder then analysts are comparing global storage

networking with on demand computing and utility computing. Again, this leads to

the elementary question: how does one manage storage effectively?