Getting a handle on storage

Storage demands are following a dramatic, exponential growth curve, say storage experts. This is fast-becoming a statement of the obvious, because of the proliferation of services, e-mail and corporate governance legislation that have all become significant drivers in the current thirst for storage.

The business challenge to streamline storage management is becoming increasingly important as businesses use greater amounts of storage resources and add more diverse storage systems.

In today`s fast-paced business environment, storage managers need access to quick, accurate storage resource information. Essentially, businesses need to ensure application availability through the use of proactive storage resource management (SRM) tools to generate storage-related capacity and performance alarms and prevent problems before they occur.

Because the price of hardware will still continue to go down for a while, the major differentiator between good and average solutions will be the supporting management software, Christopher Broderick, CA`s business unit executive for storage management, points out.

Key to this will be the software`s ability to manage heterogeneous hardware back-ends, he adds.

Regulations in their respective countries will demand that corporations become smarter with their storage management, Broderick explains. "It is unfortunate for most corporations that they only find out they are not operating according to regulations when the government makes an enquiry, and the consequences are usually serious," he adds.

Also of this view is Martin Blignaut, head of storage and systems automation at IBM SA, who notes that when it comes to storage, his company manages storage by two criteria: active and inactive, with the inactive being backed up or archived.

On the hardware side, Broderick says storage area networks (SANs) are fast becoming an affordable option for companies of varying sizes, adding the only major issue is setting up and managing SANs is still relatively complicated.

In addition to this, according to IDC statistics, the purchase of storage hardware is growing at an average rate of about 32%, Blignaut says.

There are many point solutions out there that masquerade as storage management software, according to him, but what is missing are complete integrated suites of solutions that provide management capabilities.

On the other hand, Manoj Bhoola, business group manager of server and tools for Microsoft SA, says he sees many more of his company`s customers going the network-attached server (NAS) way, which he views as being more economic that the SAN route.

Essentially, the industry seems to agree that storage needs will continue to centre on the management of data and be driven by the high costs associated with the support of growing amounts of electronic information in circulation within the business to meet regulatory and corporate governance requirements.

There are a lot of point solutions out there that masquerade as storage management software.

Martin Blignaut, head of storage and systems automation, IBM SA

Against this backdrop, it is important for companies to regularly perform "health checks" on their storage networks that must reveal what resources are available to the enterprise, how they`re being used and how they relate to each other, suggests Sagaran Naidoo, business technologist at CA.

Using software solutions, organisations will finally be able to achieve simplified monitoring and management of complex networked storage resources and applications resulting in improved operational efficiency. This will in turn help to avoid over-provisioning some resources while others remain under-used.

Despite speculations, Bhoola explains, software solutions will not impact the growth in storage hardware sales, adding that the biggest effect they will have is improving and centralising the management of the resources.

"Software allows for better identification of data characteristics, be it business or non-business data, and because business intelligence tools are being bundled into a lot of these solutions, companies are being given the capacity to make quicker and better informed decisions," he says.

Additionally, customer relationship management and enterprise resource management solutions are also big drivers in as far as storage resource growth is concerned.

Analyses that monitor how much new content is being added to storage on a daily or weekly basis, which departments or users are consuming the most capacity, and how quickly the backup window is shrinking, are key to gaining an in-depth knowledge of the storage environment, says Naidoo.

In line with this, centralised reporting and monitoring of multi-vendor backup and recovery applications can increase operational efficiency and mitigate the risk of data loss and mismanagement.

Using software solutions, organisations will finally be able to achieve simplified monitoring and management of complex networked storage resources and applications resulting in improved operational efficiency.

Sagaran Naidoo, business technologist, CA

In addition, this knowledge will drive innovation in storage systems, an example of which is the automation of essential storage processes.

Automation will also improve business flexibility, which in turn, can improve overall staff efficiency by minimising time spent on routine tasks within the storage environment.

When looking at information management, companies need to be cognisant of certain factors, such as the software solution has to be policy-based and information management has to be built into the architectural design of the solution, comments Blignaut.

A huge area of concern for businesses, besides security, is controlling and managing information housed on pervasive devices like notebooks and PDAs. Today`s effective storage software solutions must accommodate such devices, which also need to be included in the corporate policy formulation around storage procedures.

Backup and recovery are also becoming major focus areas because of the need for business continuity, says Frans Nijeboer, data centre practice manager at Dimension Data. "The two major disciplines here are backup and replication," he notes.

Optimisation of storage resources makes for better management and decision-making, he stresses, adding that virtualisation is a concept the storage industry is embracing.

The last two years have seen great development in the enterprise storage arena. Most of the focus has been on regulatory compliance and reducing operational costs. Naidoo says this is the reason for the concept of "information lifecycle management" becoming increasingly relevant.

Companies also need to adopt solutions that address "big picture" issues such as the improvement of data and application availability as well as overall productivity, Naidoo stresses.

Many software vendors and their partners agree the future of storage management technology lies in a broader landscape, for example that of information lifecycle management (ILM).

ILM is a strategy that closely aligns the management of data with storage assets and business goals and priorities.

Central to an ILM implementation is the integrated management of software products and services that add intelligence, simplicity and cost-efficiency to storage and information management procedures and policies.

Businesses need to understand how their data evolves, determine how it grows, monitor how its usage changes over time, and decide how long it should survive, while adhering to all the rules and regulations that now apply to that data, explains Deon Roos, principal sales consultant Oracle SA.

Effective ILM can be described as a combination of processes, policies, software and hardware.

Deon Roos, principal sales consultant, Oracle SA</P><P><I>&nbsp;</I>

This, he says, can be addressed by employing effective ILM, which can be described as a combination of processes, policies, software and hardware so the appropriate technology can be used for each phase of the lifecycle of the data.

With ILM in mind, the best way to maximise the benefit from a company`s stored data is to identify and classify it. Of course, this process must go beyond simply keeping the data to include business relevance metrics such as classification by application, line of business, and other metadata such as file type, file size and file owner.

For this to be a success, it has to be coupled with a number of processes that are hardware focused, like identifying and classifying the disk subsystems or repositories that will be used to store the data.

Referred to as storage tiering, it commonly consists of establishing three or four storage tiers. The first tier generally consists of expensive, redundant RAID arrays to address the immediately available, mission-critical data, says CA`s Naidoo.

The second tier, consisting of cheaper RAID arrays (or ATA disks if this is a three-tiered environment), addresses data targeted for near-term storage. The last tier, generally tape systems, addresses data that must be transferred to the deep archive. The obvious benefit of tiered storage is the significant reduction in storage costs for near-term and deep archive data.

As storage demands have increased, so has the amount of money organisations are investing in it, explains Bruce Busansky, solution specialist at Aptronics. Organisations are seeking to get a better return on investment, and to obtain faster, more efficient disk space, reducing backup windows and increasing productivity at the same time, he adds.

Due to the trend of storage hardware commoditisation, Busansky observes that customers can buy far more, for far less.

"Due to corporate governance legislation surrounding information (such as Sarbanes Oxley in the US and the ECT Act in SA), customers are buying much more. Furthermore, everything is bigger - servers, hard drives and storage configurations," says Busansky.

Apart from storage hardware commoditisation, the two fastest growing trends, without a doubt, are those of storage management and storage virtualisation, he comments.

Typically, organisations have several different pieces of storage, from different vendors.

"A good storage management solution will provide a holistic view of the entire storage landscape and the information required to do an effective analysis of its efficiencies, as well as potential hotspots, bottlenecks, and the overall utilisation of the storage resources," he says.

Furthermore, with rapid storage growth, backup requirements grow; and therefore the need in organisations for effective backup management is growing. "A storage management strategy and solution in place can enable organisations to take proactive steps to improve or adapt their storage resources to changes or challenges as they arise; and do accurate reporting, capacity management and planning," he explains.

According to Busansky, most South African enterprise-level organisations have already invested and continue to invest in some form of storage management solution.

"Storage virtualisation is really the next logical step, after storage consolidation and management. This effectively allows disparate storage resources to be viewed as one piece of virtual storage, or infrastructure object.

"In the long run, this reduces operational expenditure, and allows for better utilisation of existing storage assets and investments within the organisation," Busansky points out, adding that this makes the IT environment more resilient and flexible.

"In essence, this makes storage technology and solutions far more adaptive. The situation we are fast moving towards is one where we will see that storage is becoming a 'plug-in` utility, much like we view electricity today," says Ken Marsden, professional services manager at Aptronics.

"Each vendor will, of course, have their own storage virtualisation strategies - but these will become a lot more heterogeneous, heading towards a scenario of 'storage democracy` where everyone`s storage will connect to everyone`s servers and so on," Marsden maintains.

For some time now, companies have been pooling storage and making use of NAS or SAN technology, comments Roos. This pooling of storage can be virtualised and provisioned among multiple applications and environments within the organisation, getting the most out of the storage resources and capacity. This is the same concept his company uses for the entire enterprise grid stack.

Although much is being said by industry players about software solutions handling heterogeneous environments, Tim Knowles, CEO of Storage Technology Services, points out that vendors such as EMC are also concentrating on technology that essentially ties users to their hardware technology.

The likes of Symantec/Veritas are developing platform-independent solutions, he adds. Knowles believes vendors that develop both the software and hardware solutions will try their best to lock the user into exclusively using their products.

While management tools are still in maturity stages, there are some good tools available in the open systems environment, he adds. "End-users are beginning to realise that throwing tin at the problem only results in other problems and sometimes they just end up with multiple copies of the same data."

Vendors should rather concentrate on helping end-users overcome the complexities of having mass amounts of storage through effective management rather than simply selling them more capacity, he stresses.

It is still cheaper to buy more storage capacity than it is to manage it, says John Dormon, business solutions manager at BMC Software, noting that this is, however, only a short-term solution.

In as far as handling heterogeneous back-ends through a single front-end dashboard, Dorman says the challenge vendors face is the standardisation of technology.

On the other hand, Nijeboer comments, SNIA Storage Management Initiative (SMI) is an industry movement away from proprietary interfaces towards common interfaces for each type of storage resource. The SMI brings together the resources of the SNIA to deliver this interface, called the SMI Specification or SMI-S.

There are two basic divisions of work with respect to SMI-S. The "providers" provide data in the common format and are generally, but not exclusively, hardware-oriented. The "clients" are the management applications that use the data generated by the providers.

The SMI-S members include representatives from most of the storage hardware and software vendors, including HP. They discuss requirements and specifications, participate in regular "plug-fests" to test their progress, and begin to incorporate SMI-S details into their respective products. The members are organised into a number of technical work groups.

At the spring and autumn Storage Networking World Conferences, there is usually an SMI area in the interoperability lab where attendees can observe demonstrations of the progress of various products using SMI-S.

Businesses need to rethink their storage and backup strategies," says Nadine Barnard, storage and security business unit manager at Comztek.

Regulatory compliance has caught many companies, particularly medium enterprises, totally unprepared, with many scrambling almost blindly to get it together, she says. "Combine this with the 24/7 business environment that is the hallmark of the Internet age, and many are forced to run backups and archiving within a shorter window period. This is putting increased pressure on users to become more selective in the types of data they store.

"In many companies as much as one-third of the data being stored is not even business related - think of employee generated data such as MP3s and video clips - and there emerges a need for storage and backup technology that is smarter in order to gain the most cost-effectiveness per megabyte."

The storage industry has responded with new tools that overcome current problems while ensuring reliability and cost-effectiveness in the longer term.

The goal for vendors now is becoming the ability to make managing storage a pillar for other business processes, Dorman says, adding corporations have to ensure storage, like other aspects of business, is managed from a policy point of view.