Maximising the capacity of company storage systems is becoming increasingly important. However, implementing hardware and policies alone are not good enough, organisations need the right software to glue these elements together.
Dion Gerrans, brand manager for storage at Computer Associates Africa, takes a closer look at storage resource management (SRM), discussing key topics that will provide users with a better understanding of the software.
Selecting the proper storage hardware is critical to the effective and reliable running of any business system, but choosing the right software is just as important.
Essentially, without software, storage devices are nothing more than a bunch of disks linked to a database, applications and Web servers.
Even more importantly, companies will keep on buying more and more hardware - mainly because they have no idea how much existing storage capacity is being sapped by their customers and employees.
This brings us to one of the strongest growing segments of the storage software marketplace. According to research authority Gartner Dataquest, storage resource management (SRM) will grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% to reach $849 million by 2007.
Significant indeed, and indicative of the software`s growing role in the management of storage infrastructure.
Smarter storage
SRM tools enable IT administrators to use their company`s existing storage resources more effectively. It also provides valuable information on the storage capacity availability of the various storage devices, who`s saving data to these storage devices, and how storage requests are being executed.
Using SRM, a company can learn how to optimise the use of its storage systems. It might find, for example, that it was only using five terabytes of its 10-terabyte capacity.
Subsequently, a company can then utilise its IT budget on areas that need more urgent attention.
What`s even more, SRM enables companies to manage large amounts of storage, which also translates into improved ROI (return on investment).
Indeed, SRM tools provide information on all physical and logical objects, file and server systems and storage subsystems that offer enterprises insight into how storage is affecting the overall IT landscape.
Storage capacity planning
A key benefit of SRM is that storage administrators can effectively plan and accommodate for future server and application growth, as well as performance requirements.
Through SRM, software storage-related data is collected via automated, policy-driven data-collection engines. Historical and current storage metrics are, therefore, in the SRM repository and patterns are identified through trend analysis and forecasting.
Importantly, the software also provides reports on aged, duplicate, obsolete, un-owned or temporary files that can be migrated or removed to improve capacity planning.
Migrating to NAS and SAN
Migrating to centralised storage solutions such as NAS (network-attached storage) and SAN (storage area network) means that IT administrators must determine which I/O files or intensive files, applications and servers are being accessed the most.
Again, SRM can provide IT administrators with information on the location of files and the owners, file types, files of certain sizes, grouping of files and read/write frequency.
This all will provide information on the overall storage capacity, stress on server as well and application and data bandwidth - enabling a more effective and seamless migration to storage centralisation.
Challenges ahead
Gartner Dataquest notes that the challenge for SRM tools now is to move beyond just reporting and alerting, enabling storage administrators to prevent unnecessary downtime, and identify and correct bottlenecks that are impacting application downtime.
The good news is that leading SRM providers are already starting to incorporate policy engines and workflow capabilities into their products - all to set the stage for incorporating automation into the management process
A policy engine will essentially automate storage policies, providing an umbrella for all storage management activities from the application to the disk or tape.
Policies define what information a company want to keep and where it wants to keep it.
A good example of policy automation would be the deployment of a filter to prevent the storage of certain types of files on corporate storage, for example, MP3 music files.
Lastly, SRM has become the cornerstone for any storage management discipline. Without it companies will not be able to map, visualise and understand the large pools of corporate data residing on their IT infrastructures.
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