I am preparing a piece for Information Week on the topic of storage management. I have a few questions to ask of vendors of SRM products and of consumers of those products. I invite you to provide your two centavos.
For Vendors
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
6. What do you see as the key impediments to heterogeneous storage management today?
For Consumers
1. Do you use or are you considering using an SRM product for storage management this year?
2. What are your key criteria for selecting an SRM product?
3. What functions are you especially interested in obtaining to improve your management of storage?
4. If you are currently using SRM, have you realized any measurable benefits in terms of improved capacity utilization efficiency, improvements in administrator-to-storage capacity ratio, CAPEX or OPEX savings?
5. How much time do you or your staff devote daily, weekly or annually to the management of storage infrastructure and storage-related processes?
Unless requested, user identities will remain anonymous. Vendors may find their responses attributed to the commenter/company in the Information Week story.
I welcome reseller/integrators and service providers to answer these questions as well. Either post comments here, or email them to me at jtoigo@toigopartners.com.
Thanks!
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
First response back from an end user. Received via email.
As a customer, and UNIX/Storage/Backup admin, here are my thoughts:
1. Do you use or are you considering using an SRM product for storage management this year?
Yes, we have thought about it. We have found out that to do what we want to do, the price tag is too high to purchase something off of the shelf, and so Perl and my backup server have become fast friends to give me some analysis reports on storage utilization in my company.
2. What are your key criteria for selecting an SRM product?
Tell me where the crap is in my storage subsystem, so I can do something about it. I’m talking old files, multiple copies of the same file, by filetype (mp3s, etc), by user, and gather that information together across multiple fileshares/servers.
3. What functions are you especially interested in obtaining to improve your management of storage?
I’m fine with how I/we manage our storage. I’ve looked at Command Central Storage from Veritas/Symantec, and ripped it right out of my environment. No thank you.
4. If you are currently using SRM, have you realized any measurable benefits in terms of improved capacity utilization efficiency, improvements in administrator-to-storage capacity ratio, CAPEX or OPEX savings?
Based upon the Perl scripts that I’ve written. No, I can’t say that we have. I do have an idea of where the crap is, and have some pretty good reports on that, but it is getting management to back me on cleaning the stuff up. Without their backing, I can’t do anything to help our storage utilization.
5. How much time do you or your staff devote daily, weekly or annually to the management of storage infrastructure and storage-related processes?
Normally it is only a few hours a week.
If you have any questions about my response, feel free to ask.
1.What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
Storage management solutions need to empower the IT department to solve specific problems that IT and the business face, and not just ‘make storage better’. In broad terms they should be judged on how they help manage a company’s cost base, or help manage and reduce the risks involved with storing all types of company data.
Specifically the areas that are key in a storage management solution are:
Fit into an existing environment
Businesses are often forced to use different operating platforms and applications. Whatever the environment, a storage management solution should create a uniform solution to the business’ problems and not create stove-pipe type solutions that in themselves create further problems.
Businesses are also demanding that storage management solutions be based at a higher level than at a departmental or geographic location. It may not be feasible to share storage devices across locations but management should be achieved between sites.
Manage the cost base:
Much has been spoken about storage virtualization, allowing many types of storage devices to be presented in a common format, and this can give a big advantage to businesses. One advantage to virtualization delivered back to the business is making sure that hardware is utilized for longer as more uses will be found for it.
However there are also simple data centric actions such as compression and de-duplication that also save considerable amount of storage and cost and while these are not considered as cutting edge as virtualization, they deliver very high benefit quickly.
The solution should work with me not against me:
In order to consume a virtualized environment effectively you need a manageable way of applying and actioning policies, finding data with particular characteristics or value and making sure both the policies and the data are stored and managed appropriately.
The policy engine that will be included as part of any storage management application should be easy to use and allow the organization to apply the rules they want, not a limited set of policies that the solution is able to cope with.
Turn my stored data into usable Intellectual property:
Once a business has controlled storage, and identified what type of data it owns then it would be able to start making sure that they are able to turn the data stored into increasingly valuable, intellectual property. Often spoken about is the ability to mange eDiscovery operations but more pervasively businesses want to be able to use existing knowledge to make a competitive gain now and in the future.
To achieve this, a storage management solution should give the options to not only manage the ‘blob’ of data but also look inside the files to learn what they contain. While this is the last action to be achieved it’s clearly the most valuable to a customer, turning IT into a department that can deliver increased value back to the business.
2.What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
Clearly making sure that a solution meets the needs above is critical.
To minimize the risk of working with a new vendor the goals should be able to be modeled before they are actually undertaken and a good clear process for achieving this should be available. A good example of this would be to create reports of file systems for example and how they would change after the implementation of a solution and then action that report.
3.What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
There are many metrics that can be derived from the implementation of an SRM solution. Some customers may not be driven by cost saving and could be driven by the need to implement compliance media. This means that consistent metrics about what is ‘good’ are very specific.
The most consistent benefit that an SRM solution gives to virtually every company is solving, or vastly improving, the backup headache. It’s a known fact that more that 80% of a company’s data is static and should not affect the backup SLA for the primary system. Sadly this is rarely the case. An SRM solution that effectively manages the 80% of old content is the one that will resonate with most organizations.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
If virtualization is used to add ever more types of storage device to an organization then ultimately it will be too expensive and add little advantage to IT. Used in conjunction with a SRM solution the biggest advantage virtualization gives an organization is reuse of existing devices. For example compliance data ‘could’ be managed by the same devices being used by back-up devices.
Virtualization’s greatest advantage to an organization is it will extend the time before a device becomes ‘legacy’, allowing new applications to use older storage methodologies.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
Sadly, we are far away from a unified world. As mentioned previously your SRM vendor of choice should be able to interact with all of your storage systems, operating platforms and applications, meaning they should limit this problem. SNMP is a good example of a standard that has added value by allowing interaction between different vendors. Clearly, web services and the move to SOA will aid this and any vendor should be showing how they can fit into open standards. None of these moves will singularly solve the stated issue.
6. What do you see as the key impediments to heterogeneous storage management today?
Question 5 virtually answers this question: “lack of pervasive standards”. There are many organizations dedicated to creating standards, many of which are stuck with the politics of different vendors and have failed to deliver their stated goal. Single vendors alone often fall short of integration with their own product set.
Customers themselves look to solve specific issues and until they state “heterogeneous storage management is a key must have” then the market itself will not deliver this. Companies tend to buy from best of breed for a particular solution rather than purchase a unified or heterogeneous solution.
Response from Ken Barth, CEO, Tek-Tools
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
Configuration and Asset Reporting—DAS, NAS and SAN componentsPerformance Utilization Monitoring Reporting and Forecasting –Servers/DAS and NAS
Storage Networking Physical Infrastructure Reporting and Monitoring—Incl ISCSI and Fibre Channel
Storage Network Infrastructure Utilization, Performance Monitoring, Reporting, and Forecasting—Incl HBA, Switch and Array
File Reporting, Monitoring, and Forecasting—DAS, NAS
Event Monitoring and Reporting and Alerting—DAS, NAS, SAN
Policy-Based Reporting
Virtualized Server (ex VMware ESX) Server Monitoring Reporting, Forecasting
Virtualized Storage (ex VMware ESX) Storage Monitoring Reporting, Forecasting
Backup Reporting Monitoring and Forecasting VTL
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
Ease install (basics need to be up and running in an hour or less), ease of Use (must be intuitive to use and flexible), ability to solve immediate needs quickly and then grow if needed to incorporate other parts of the infrastructure including visibility into heterogeneous infrastructure and applications, must be able to offer visibility into both the physical and virtual environments.
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
I agree with both statements of the value of SRM and the savings really come from two areas
(1) Savings by using the existing storage more efficiently and visibility to be able to plan and forecast future needs without holding your finger in the air.
(2) Operational savings by increased staff productivity. Let me explain here that consolidation of the storage data into a single pane of glass brings clarity and visibility to what can be a complex and difficult task when trying to get a handle on things like root cause analysis, application/business unit forecasting and trending, load balancing (particularly in a virtualized environment both from a storage and a server perspective, etc.
All of our customers will tell you that staff productivity greatly increases when they install our Profiler and gain visibility. So if you pick the right product, then you should see tremendous gains in staff productivity— To summarize, when you take into account both areas of potential savings, we certainly have customers that have cut at least 40% from their storage operational costs (in most cases I would argue even more savings and happy to arrange phone calls with some of them for discussion).
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
Server Virtualization actually greatly improves server utilization but it adds a layer of complexity to storage management. Numerous studies have shown that the majority of companies that virtualize their servers are actually seeing and increase in the growth of their storage spending due to lack of visibility into the storage environment and hence are not gaining the true potential savings. I liken it to trying to drive with a blindfold on.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
Yes, although SMI-S has made some tremendous strides to get an accurate view we need to be prepared to tackle all of the above that you mentioned. The best approach is with an architecture that is flexible and modular to accept information from many different sources.
6. What are the key impediments to heterogeneous storage infrastructure management today?
The key impediments are the variety of vendors and the variation among the varying vendors on how they implement and continue to support the varying standards both from a business perspective and a development perspective. This is due to the nature of the storage and server infrastructure which has grown up as a stove pipe purchasing and implementation process—ie HR has Netapp and backs up with Legato, Acctng has Clarion and backs up with Veritas.
However I believe this is changing, server virtualization is driving server, storage and data protection refresh everywhere it touches—refresh includes hardware, software and methodologies and is allowing the leeway for organizations to rethink this stove pipe approach and drive more centralization of these long stove piped business units. As a consequence, this centralization, particularly in the SME can bring huge savings to the customer if they have the right visibility. As the stove pipes collapse, the customer is beginning to demand this visibility and want to be able to mix and match components and demanding that the vendors support the standards. We are still a long way off but centralization is putting control a lot closer to the customer than it has ever been which will drive the vendors to true interoperability over the next few years.
Thanks, Ken.
From Roger Reich, former SMI-S developer, former Veritas technologist, now CEO of Olocity.
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
Layer -1 : Configuration management: How is my storage physically configured and what is its state in terms of reliability, maintainability, performance, cost, expandability, security,,,,
Layer – 2: The design center for most SRM systems is capacity management. Good old MVS style how many bits are being used/unused, how many bits am I going to need the future, and how can I minimize what I am using.
Layer – 3: Data management: What user/app data is on my storage bits and is it secure, available, reliable, being handled in accordance with compliance requirements,,,,,,,,,. also, how can I minimize this data.
Layer – 4: Storage Analytics (invented here): What is the availability, and performance, security, and compliance RISK associated with the complete storage environment and the way it is being operated. Are the operating POLICIES for the storage environment optimal and being adhered to uniformly and reliably. Also is the OP-Ex and CAP-Ex for the environment optimal give the way it is being managed.
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
Capabilities across the four layers above.
Ease of installation and cost to maintain the SRM software configuration across the entire installation over time.
Cost of the software.
Cost of support.
Is the source available.
Support for the software and the cost of support.
Leverages industry standards.
Span of hardware and OS vendor support.
Reliability and consistence of software operation.
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
Cannot offer hard data – In fact this pisses me off. I’m not aware of any analytical studies of the actually human efficiency gains of implementing and using a large SRM solution versus the cost of using individual hardware element managers and operating systems features. I do know that high-end SRM solutions that span large storage networks often are unreliable and difficult to maintain such that they are often used only as a show piece/supplemental advisor.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
Aggregate more applications/users across more storage. Primarily capacity allocation flexibility and thus, reduced hardware expenditures over time. There are secondary benefits like a single (more efficient) point of control for managing storage and the ability to more evenly balance performance across physical spindles. The best example of this is the EVA from HP. Fully virtualized back end for an enterprise array – impressive. SAN based virtualization generally introduces an additional (horrible) failure mode and should avoided without due cause.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
Actually, most hardware vendors have SMI-S interfaces now – which is cool – its been a long HARD road to get here – and frankly this is a bit of a break through for the across the landscape of the computer industry. These interfaces need to be easier to deploy in a datacenter (embedded) and a few need better quality/completeness. Olocity corporation is structured to help with this. None the less, yes. Most SRM solutions still rely on an underlying software infrastructure of millions of lines of code that integrates a rats nest of disparate vendor proprietary interfaces that often have horrible reliability. These interfaces have wildly differing degrees of function and generally render SRM software a net net efficiency drag to an IT shop in multi-vendor configurations. SMI-S has proven that it can fix this problem. At Olocity we have proven that using SMI-S we can monitor all the elements of a SAN across a wide variety of hardware vendors with only 30K lines of code. Yes, this is the breakthrough that was intended. We are not quite to the finish line – the IT consumers need to help the industry with one final PUSH (i.e., request SMI-S interfaces in hardware that are embedded, SNIA CTP certified, and integrated with the open source StorageIM monitor).
6. What do you see as the key impediments to heterogeneous storage management today?
Not to harp. But, if you look at the software development teams at most SRM companies shipping into heterogeneous environments you will find that the bulk of the resources are taken up simply integrating devices, operating system platforms, and host software integration infrastructure rather than creating actual user visible functionality the makes the users task of management radically more efficient. They need open management interfaces – SMI-S. If fact we (the industry)are never going to deliver Layer 4 SRM products (storage analytics) as the developers who should be engineering the advanced features required in this class of software are tied up integrating disparate and proprietary hardware.
Thanks, Roger.
From John Foley, TPC Market Manager, IBM Software Group
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
The core functions are:
Topology discovery and visualization
Capacity and performance monitoring
Change and Configuration planning
Capacity Reporting/trending
Device Configuration
Storage provisioning
Emerging or differentiating features include:
Data Classification
Application to storage correlation along with availability management
Root Cause Analysis
Chargeback
Performance analytics
Backup Reporting
eMail Reporting
Audit control and reporting
Task Automation
Change process management
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
When selecting an SRM offering, customers should determine their specific needs and consider the size of their environment. Customers may evaluate SRM tools based on a need for a particular function (chargeback, email reporting, change management, or capacity utilization) and will therefore choose a product that addresses their specific need.
Many enterprise customers are just trying to get a handle on their entire environment and require an SRM tool that provides the entire list of core functions above and perhaps provides one or more of the differentiating features, but will absolutely be able to manage everything currently deployed in the data center (heterogeneous storage, fabrics, and server platforms).
In addition, customers need to evaluate the quality, usability, and ease of use and maintenance. They might ask themselves if they want a product that deploys agents (for deeper reporting) or would they prefer an agent-less solution that provides less information, but simplifies deployment and ongoing maintenance.
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
IBM uses a business value tool at each customer location to evaluate ROI based on specific customer input. IBM does not publish these numbers, though we find that in the vast majority of scenarios the savings and productivity gains are quite substantial.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
The factors driving virtualization in today’s enterprise data centers are: explosive growth of data to be managed, the inability of IT organizations to respond quickly enough to business demands, the difficulties in establishing and managing appropriate service level arrangements, lack of skills to effectively administer storage, and overall poor asset utilization. For server virtualization, being able to run several specialized applications that require different operating systems on a single server is a significant capability. It greatly improves administrator efficiency with respect to server management and allows the administrator to provision storage to a single server and then divvy it up for each of the applications instead of trying to provision multiple volumes to multiple servers. Customers still say that storage provisioning is one of the leading causes of consumption in the data center.
Storage virtualization is also gaining a lot of traction in enterprise data centers. As storage hardware becomes commoditized, customers are choosing the least expensive storage that meets their particular needs. This creates heterogeneous data centers that require a bevy of tools to manage. SRM tools play a role in simplifying this management, but storage virtualization can play an even greater role. Storage virtualization, the aggregation of various storage entities into a single storage pool by hiding the complexity of working with multiple, different storage devices, significantly increases the flexibility in storage management and speeds responsiveness to business demands. Storage virtualization alleviates the problem of host application disruption during the tasks of individual disk maintenance and upgrades as well as offering replication capabilities, which again provide another dimension of data management while leaving the host applications to go about their business.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
IBM continues to support and help lead the SMI-S initiative. In today’s environments with mergers, acquisitions, and combinations of old and new technology, the ability to provide unified management for these environments and the method in which all vendors implement management support, could be considered the final frontier. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center offers a robust set of management features that addresses these challenges by using a combination of SMI-S, API hooks, SNMP traps, MIBs and agents. That said, there is a concerted effort within IBM to drive the SMI-S initiative forward to increase performance, stability, and function, such that it is comparable to the legacy management methods that are in place today.
6. What are the key impediments to heterogeneous storage infrastructure management today?
The key impediments to heterogeneous storage management are:
Proprietary systems and lack of API’s (causes vendor lock-in)
Lack of a single SRM tool that can manage the storage environment
Slow adoption of SMI-S initiative including support for all available sub-profiles (many vendors don’t support SMI-S sub-profiles for data that exists in their legacy management interfaces)
Need to deploy and maintain agents to get depth of information required for management.
Thanks, John.
From Dean Snyder in HP’s Business Server Automation group,
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
A competitive SRM solution today manages and reports on all elements of a customers heterogeneous SAN storage infrastructure. It is business application aware, includes SAN infrastructure such as Fibre Channel and iSCSI networks, hosts dependencies, backup strategy, it deals with managing file and block data, includes policies, reporting, change management reporting, performance management and automated provisioning. In addition SRM solution must be extensible by offering value-add integrations into Enterprise Management tools such as IT reporting systems, help desk integration, change/configuration management, IT event/trouble ticketing systems and workflow orchestration systems.
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
Surprisingly today many customers still to not understand the total amount of available storage resources and the utilization of their resources. Many first time SRM purchases made in order to satisfy this very fundamental requirement. Customers with medium size SANs (4 or more switches, arrays and hosts) and large heterogeneous SANs being managed using point management tools from each vendor will find immediate benefits from deploying an SRM solution.
Evaluation Criteria:
1) Number of agents required to deploy solution
SRM tools are increasing being used to help align IT with the business. Your SRM solution should provide integrations into a wide variety of Enterprise management tools. Server and storage management tool integration may also be important if you are looking for ways to improved collaboration between server, DBA and storage administrators
Ease of use for the solution
2) Depth of heterogeneous vendor support (arrays, switches, HBAs, hosts, operating systems, backup devices and applications)
3) Business application awareness. Includes discovery, mapping and reporting on all infrastructure dependencies – (MS Exchange, Oracle, etc)
4) Cluster and virtual machine awareness – Includes discovery, mapping and reporting
5) Does the solution simplify the task of provisioning heterogeneous storage capacity
6) Standards are very important to many vendors as it ensure interoperability with other vendors, prevents vendor lock-in and can dramatically improve the deployment time of the solution and improve the time it takes to insert new resources into the mix
7) Other considerations that may be important for customers evaluating SRM solutions: integrated policy manager, CLI/API’s, scalability of solution, ability to customize reports, tiered storage accounting/billing
9) Viability of the supplier: (Company financial strength, vision, has demonstrated consistent delivery track record, demonstrates trust, integrity, receives positive marks for delivering services and support)
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
Customer ROI varies significantly because each have their own unique environment and dependencies and business practices. HP typically performs 1 on 1 consulting with our customers using an ROI Analysis tool. We sit down with the customer and enter in their environmental and business attributes in the the tool. HP does have a number of SRM related Customer Success Stories. It’s possible we could provide un-named customer examples of operational efficiencies. In fact our entire HP IT is currently rolling out our SRM solution as part of the largest IT transformation ever undertaken in the industry.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
VMware, XEN and other virtual machine resource management solutions are increasing being deployed in IT. Chances are you will run across storage attached to a number of physical hosts under virtual machine management. As mentioned earlier competitive 2008 SRM tools will need to discover, report and map storage resources that are attached to a virtual host. Lack of supporting VM’s in your SRM solution will case issues on reporting accurate capacity/utilization of your resources and your SRM topology maps do not properly stitch the VM hosts and their associate storage resources. This complicates performing a number of tasks such as provisioning storage resource, compliance reporting, correct identification of storage infrastructure dependencies for troubleshooting, performance management, etc..
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
All of the major storage vendors continue to provide SMI-S providers. A number of SRM vendors have updated the architecture of their SRM solution to support SMI-S. In addition, most major technology suppliers continue to certify their solution for SMI-S compliance. SMI-S has helped push forward broad industry improvements in the deployment of SRM solutions and improved vendor interoperability. Has it solve all of the complexities associated with deploying and managing a heterogeneous SAN, no. Most vendors continue to offer a variety means for discovering various storage infrastructure devices. The mix between SMI-S and other integration methods vary vendor to vendor. Many of the large SRM suppliers today will use SMI-S to talk to an array for system health, status, performance and provisioning. They will then write SMI-S like value-add extensions for something such as replication management.
Host agents continue to be deployed for LINUX and UNIX hosts primarily to retrieve host volume data. Some vendors such as HP talk directly to WMI provider for Windows, therefore it does not require agent deployment. Again, implementation varies by vendor. HP’s SRM offering can also run without hosts agents, however doing so restricts your discovery and reporting to the server HBA ports and SAN infrastructure.
6. What are the key impediments to heterogeneous storage infrastructure management today?
SRM’s role is in the market is evolving from a tradition SAN management discovery, reporting and provisioning tool to something that provides the storage underpinnings of a complete end-to-end IT automation solution. HP no longer see’s any major impediments for managing heterogeneous storage infrastructure. There is always room for improving the deployment of our software solutions and it’s of interest to continue providing some deeper heterogeneous management features for performance and replication. But honestly we are very satisfied with our progress in managing heterogeneous storage infrastructure. We believe there are a number of high value portfolio integrations that will open up new chapter in how storage infrastructure is managed going forward.
Thanks, Dean.
From Northern Software President, Thomas Vernersson:
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
First and foremost [but sometimes overlooked]: make storage more cost efficient – reduce hardware requirements and reduce administrative overhead. Secondly: the ability to manage user-generated data – achieved through administrative processes and, most importantly, through the involvement of the originators of this data.
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
The performance cost must be paramount. The solution must match the existing and predicted needs – not exceed those needs – and it must not carry a performance cost that outweighs the benefits it offers. Poorly engineered and mistakenly selected products lead to policies that demand excessive administrator involvement and drain CPU, network and I/O resources – creating a more troublesome bottleneck than they were deployed to resolve.
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
One of Scandinavia’s largest financial institutions commissioned Northern to perform a study on the benefits of implementing an SRM solution within their data center. It was estimated that 32% of primary storage capacity would be reclaimed during the first six weeks after deployment and that growth rate reductions of more than 40% would push back initially scheduled capacity investments by more than 18 months. The first year savings alone were estimated at more than $400,000.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
Virtualization adds an additional layer of flexibility within storage architecture design. It can add value by allowing storage infrastructure to be organized in a more logical way than is otherwise possible – the logical nature of the infrastructure in-turn making SRM policies easier to design and deploy. Virtualization can also add cost – a fragmented storage infrastructure could be logical from a usage perspective but overly complex from a management perspective.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
If ‘we’ means administrators: An SRM solution can offer storage administrators the same level of device type transparency as is enjoyed by the users who are connecting to these heterogeneous devices. Deploying multiple device types and operating systems does not have to mean multiple SRM tolls and fragmented storage policies.
If ‘we’ means the groups working to make life easier for storage administrators then yes, we are forced to identify and adapt to the diverse protocols and APIs that exist within the market. Then make our architectures in such a way that storage administrators are insulated as much as possible from the complexity and demanding nature of this heterogeneous platform support.
6. What are the key impediments to heterogeneous storage infrastructure management today?
The time required for SRM solution developers to adapt to individual platforms and transparently integrate support for these. Also the level of importance afforded to proprietary APIs forms a frustrating bottleneck.
Thank you, Thomas.
From Symantec, courtesy of Sean Derrington, director of storage management.
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
SRM solutions should deliver on a few key features.
It should support an agent-based or an agent-less based deployment model. This allows each IT organization to decide on the level of information they require
It should support a broad number of server, HBA, SAN connectivity, and storage devices to give organizations visibility into the heterogeneous SAN, NAS, DAS storage
It should support hardware devices via industry standards (e.g., SMI-S) but go beyond SMI-S and work with each hardware vendor to provide detailed information about the storage infrastructure where industry standards are not designed to address.
It should be able to provide monitoring and reporting capabilities across the storage infrastructure, and have the ability to provide visibility from the application to the spindle in both physical and virtual (servers and storage) infrastructures
The monitoring and reporting capabilities should have rich information about how the storage assets are being utilized (on an array level, data center, or global basis). Capacity utilization (from the application perspective), port utilization, capacity trending and the ability to provide this level of information in the physical and virtual infrastructure
Lastly, it should have the ability to provide business-level reporting capabilities. These reports should be easily customized and ‘on-demand’. Moreover, the reporting capability should provide insight into the global infrastructure (rolling up detailed information across multiple data centers) and enable chargeback/accountability if the organization wants to use the information that way.
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
Support of existing physical and virtual infrastructure (applications, databases, platforms, SAN, NAS, DAS, etc.)
Agentless versus agentful capabilities: How many agents are required for full functionality of the SRM offering
Ease of installation, configuration and deployment
Secure web based interface
Operational reporting for servers, switches, arrays in physical and virtual environments
Detailed file level reporting
Change management reporting
Capability to report in a customized, business context with dashboards
Scalability: With a single management server how many hosts, PBs, switch ports are supported?
Performance—polling frequency, agent overhead on the server, etc
Role based access and access privileges
Security – support for AD, LDAP, NIS, NIS+
Chargeback capability
Pricing/licensing model
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
Symantec works with customers in a number of ways to demonstrate the value of Veritas CommandCentral Storage. The first is to perform an ROI assessment of their environment. We use this process to gain and understanding of the current environment and our proposed solution, following which we can articulate the value of the ‘after’ environment. Additionally, we provide a service offering where Veritas CommandCentral Storage will be installed in a portion of the infrastructure, we’ll demonstrate the information that Veritas CommandCentral Storage provides, detailed information about capacity utilization (where lost/unused storage resides), topology, health, etc. This services offering is a two week engagement.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
Virtualization complicates storage management. When virtual machines or vLUNs are introduced, an additional layer of abstraction is introduced, thereby reducing visibility from the application to the spindle. This inhibits effective enterprise storage resource management tasks, such as providing insight into application storage utilization or server-to-storage topology. Enterprise SRM solutions should be able to “decompose” the virtual environment and map virtual machines to the hypervisor (e.g., VMware) and provide application to physical spindle visibility. Moreover vLUNs (e.g., IBM SVC, HDS USP, NTAP vfiler) should be “decomposed” as well so the application can see ‘through’ the vLUN and the application to physical spindle topology is understood. It’s only when both of these are understood that storage capacity management, health, storage operations, etc can be efficient and effective. Users should have the ability to answer questions such as: how much tier 1 storage do I have? How much replicated storage do I have? Which applications are consuming what storage and where is that storage located? This information should be provided for both the physical and virtual infrastructure.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
While SMI-S hasn’t fulfilled its utopian management promise, it’s still an important criterion for SRM solutions. Customers should continue to evaluate standards-based ways of management. However, API hooks, SNMP MIBs, etc will be an important requirement as well. This combination will provide the breadth and depth of hardware support/compatibility. There are also standards initiatives, such as Virtual HBAs, that will enable more information to be gathered in agentless deployments.
Thank you, Sean.
From Jay Kid, CMO for Network Appliance:
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
Before looking at a storage management solution, it is extremely important to get a clear idea of exactly what business goal you are trying to accomplish. Increasingly, businesses are trying to evolve their IT from a cost center to a value center. This is accomplished by associating business services with the storage services. Businesses should make their decision on which storage management solution is best for them with an understanding of what storage services their storage solution will deliver and whether or not they are delivered in a cost-effective manner. And finally, they need to make sure that required service levels are continuously met despite all the changes happening/planned in the data center.
Traditionally SRM solutions do an inadequate job of managing to Service Levels, focusing too much on device and feature management of storage. This change to manage in a more Service-driven manner with more focus on the business, changes the key features for Storage Management and is causing all SRM and Storage Management vendors to redefine the products they bring to market.
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
Starting with the business drivers, the evaluation criteria are fairly simple.
Can your Storage Management product help you to:
* Increase allocated capacity utilization to reduce CAPEX
* Increase actual utilized capacity to reduce CAPEX
* Reduce outage risks during migrations and consolidations
* Accelerate time to market for applications
* Maximize general resource utilization while delivering the right service levels
* Maximize VM consolidation
What needs to be common is the emphasis on service level approach to storage management.
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM).
Most of the early SRM claims just never came true. However when deployed in the right environments, SRM products can produce great returns:
On deployment of NetApp products, the results we have seen from actual deployments at Storage 100 accounts include:
* Reduce outage risk by 50%
* Reduce CAPEX by 20% through improved capacity planning
* Accelerate migrations and consolidations by 50%
* Increase VM consolidation by 30% or more
* Other various benefits include improved service levels and improved response time troubleshooting.
What we have not seen is organizations reclaim already allocated space. It’s just too expensive to do these operations.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
Virtualization is a catch all term – most importantly you need to consider storage management needs for Server Virtualization and Storage Virtualization. These need to be considered in turn.
Server Virtualization – This can be a double edged sword as it holds the promise of reduced capital costs, but VM sprawl can actually increase storage costs. Storage Management products need to help customers optimize the mapping of VMs to storage/fabrics in order to reduce CAPEX on storage while meeting customer service level needs. In addition, different storage products can help to optimize the storage for VM environments with capabilities like thin provisioning, de-duplication and snapshot management. Storage Management products need to help manage and optimize the storage for VMs.
Storage Virtualization – Modern storage systems provide the capabilities to optimize storage utilization by providing storage abstraction layers. NetApp storage systems for example provide Physical Storage Virtualization (FlexVol, Thin provisioning, De-duplication), Virtual Clones (FlexClone), operational sub-domaining of storage (Multistor) and the ability to load balance storage I/O usage by application (FlexShare). Storage Management products have to be able to effectively manage these capabilities from storage systems like NetApp and others.
So I would phrase this the other way around — there is tremendous value, but storage management applications must now be able to cope with the increased complexity that is brought about through the virtualized environment.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
While getting agents on the host is a challenge, a great deal of storage service management can be achieved without the need of agents.
Agents should only be used for functions such as file system utilization and reporting and application-aware data management operations. Furthermore, with server virtualization environments like VMware it is often possible to get this data without agents through integration with those management tools.
The merits to SMI-S are still strong and hopefully vendors will continue to support this important standard. Unfortunately today it is just not standardized enough to support SRM.
6. What do you see as the key impediments to heterogeneous storage management today?
As our SRM experience has shown, actively provisioning devices from one large manager is neither cost effective nor realistic from a development or maintenance standpoint. This has been one of the very weak points of the SRM solution. Active provisioning has added a lot of complexity to SRM solutions without delivering real benefit.
But having said that, there are many areas of CAPEX and OPEX reduction that are essentially low hanging fruit that should be pursued.
The biggest impediment comes from people chasing the active provisioning problem or the file system allocation problem. Both of these are problems, but there are lots of other savings areas that are easier to solve and show an immediate ROI.
Thanks, Jay.
CA’s Marco Coulter and Todd Michaels collaborated on this response:
1. What do you think the key functions should be of a storage management solution?
The value of storage management comes from reducing CapEx (spend on storage) and OpEx (impact of storage on those who manage it).
Reporting – You save money by finding where you are spending too much. Reporting is key to being able to look at things from all different angles: from the hardware angle; the database angle; the application angle; the user angle; and, of course, the business angle. So look for lots of canned reports (easier than creating from scratch) and lots of different points of views. Also, ensure you can easily export storage asset information into your IT portfolio management and chargeback systems.
Thresholding – You want to know trouble is coming, so the ability to set and trigger thresholds matters. Otherwise, you are looking everyday for potential trouble.
Actions – Knowing trouble is coming is good, but automating the response is even better! The hardware’s ability to expand, shrink or move storage automatically is still extremely primitive. Yet the ability to create such actions is an important part of reduce OpEx.
Collection and Scheduling – You will end up gathering a LOT of information about your environment. Once you hit file-level scans for e-Discovery support, there is the potential to overload systems during scans. So you need the ability to balance the collection load (agentless, agents, hierarchical proxy collectors, etc.) and schedule it around your actual production load.
2. What criteria should consumers use to evaluate competing SRM offerings?
Over the years the definition of storage management has become diluted. Is it capacity management, backup reporting, storage device health monitoring, volume management, virtualization, all of them or some combination of these?
First, know what you are looking for. The consumer should know why they are looking for. Are they looking for capacity planning, health monitoring, root-cause analysis, Regulatory Compliance assistance, etc? If the consumer goes in with the general thought of “I need a storage management solution” they will wind up with a bottomless project that just continues to eat time and resources. Identify where you plan to make savings that will pay for the product and deployment.
Second, consider coverage. Does the storage management solution cover your storage environment? Not having support for the entire storage environment or at least most of the environment will leave gaps in their analysis and could potentially render the solution valueless.
Thirdly, look for reusability. For Storage Management purposes you will be scanning and retrieving a lot of information. Everyone starts at the volume/device level to understand their environment, and work out where the savings can be made. As you get comfortable with the environment, you will drill into the files, databases, mailboxes to identify the next level of CapEx savings. About this time you will realize that the information you are collecting supports compliance and governance needs. Look for how you can reuse the indexing needed for governance for file classification and storage tier placement decisions.
Finally, consider the fit to your overall IT strategy. The storage environment is a subset of the whole IT environment and should be managed as such. If the consumer has an Operations Console or another central way of managing their IT environment the storage management solution should fit as an extension, not a new island.
3. What data can you offer to show the value of SRM from a cost savings or operational efficiency standpoint? (Statements by analysts on this score are about ten years old, such as Gartner’s claim that deploying SRM can cut 40% from storage operational costs, or another analyst’s claim that SRM enables a single storage administrator to manage 10 times more capacity than what he can manage without SRM.)
We have a calculator we provide customers based on aggregated experiences, but not individual data.
4. What value does virtualization have with respect to storage management?
Virtualization makes managing storage more complex, and thus harder. Virtualization makes other device management functions like snapshots, replication and provisioning easier, so it assists in keeping data accessible. But it does not really add value to storage management.
We see virtualization, and hardware commoditization driving better and simpler device management by making the chores of provisioning, and reconfiguration less technical and more procedural.
5. With unified management via SMI-S an unfulfilled promise, how do we manage heterogeneous infrastructure? Are we still tied to a combination of API hooks, SNMP MIBs, SMI providers in those few platforms that offer them, and agents?
The lack of a strict standard does make it more difficult manage a heterogeneous environment. Such environments are easier for a vendor to deal with than in the days before SMI-S, at least we can agree on some basic handshakes. However to reach normalization across hardware vendors, we first need to translate SMI-S responses into a common paradigm. Finally, to generate CA’s complete picture, we still must collect information from API hooks, CLI, MIBs, SNMP, etc. This delays support for the latest devices and related firmware. Storage Management Agents have become optional, and are only needed where demanded by performance or to complete full path details.
6. What do you see as the key impediments to heterogeneous storage management today?
The most significant impediment is the lack of a paradigm for managing storage, along with the lack of a strict and comprehensive standard for device management. Device or hardware management should have progressed much further than it has. With each HW vendor providing a different way to communicate with their devices and not exposing all necessary information there are holes in a heterogeneous storage management environment.
Perhaps an ITIL-style approach extended to storage could help. If it identified standard roles, models and processes for storage; we could move past the differentiated views for simple device functions like snapshot, replication and provisioning.
Thanks to CA for getting this one in under the wire.
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