CIM—the key to interoperability and storage management

Storage management has always been a brow-crinkling problem for enterprise managers trying to deal with the superabundance of data. Adoption of the Common Information Model will lead to a collaborative approach towards developing storage solutions, says V VIVEKANAND

Information has become the most important asset for organisations as they are increasingly turning data and information into knowledge that is critical for succeeding in a highly competitive business environment. Even as information sources driving businesses are continuously expanding, organisations must manage the escalation in the physical quantity of storage, the reliance on universal access to information, the growing complexities of storage environments, and the accelerating emergence of confusing and often competing technologies. As a result, today’s enterprise managers and support teams are facing considerable challenges in managing their storage architectures. This complexity increases as various enterprise applications demand diverse sets of information and data, leading to a very heterogeneous information environment. In order to address these storage requirements companies are looking for storage solutions that would enable them access to information ‘anytime, anywhere.’ It means that many businesses operate on a 24x7x365 basis, collecting, generating, transferring, and analysing information.

Moving away from direct attached storage (DAS) systems, businesses are increasingly using Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN) to address their various storage requirements. With the advent of SAN and NAS, enterprises have greater flexibility and control over their storage environments than they have ever had in the past. However, most storage managers are faced with administering a myriad existing components—new, complex storage topologies that lack a clear and consolidated approach to management. It is no longer good enough to provide basic services such as logical unit number (LUN) management, device monitoring, and backup; now, it is critical to provide integrated management of all aspects of storage across a heterogeneous environment made up of multiple devices, such as SAN switches, complex storage systems, and storage appliances. This has led enterprises to invest in various point solutions from various vendors, as they understand that no single vendor can meet all their storage requirements.

Therefore, managing a multi-vendor-based storage environment has become a very tedious, time-consuming and cost-intensive exercise for storage managers today. Going forward, in such a scenario it has been found that an open standards-based Common Information Model (CIM) will hasten the development of a unified management environment to support a diverse set of heterogeneous storage technologies. This would mean that the foundation of the system architecture would be a message bus that allows individual functional components to plug and play. This entails functional components to be incorporated into the overall solution, based on a usage of CIM that provides a clear set of information content for management and monitoring of the entire storage system. This approach enables solutions to communicate with all network-attached devices while performing specific functions. This allows complete, integrated hardware and software management. Adoption of such a model is the key to overall interoperability in the storage and systems management environments.

This model is being strongly supported by the emergence of XML (eXtensible markup language) as a standard. Using XML to express messages within the CIM model enables not only a common understanding of the required content but also a clear and universal understanding of the message format. Using the CIM model in conjunction with XML to express messages ensures a common understanding of these messages and provides a flexible application integration platform.

CIM enables enterprises to resolve their need for interoperability, creating more functional management applications and enabling integrators to construct multi-vendor solutions easily. In view of the benefits that enterprises derive out of using CIM, vendors should work towards inclusion of CIM in their solutions when they cater to heterogeneous storage environments. It is because CIM provides a common model with which all vendors can work. Adoption of CIM translates to adoption of a collaborative approach towards developing storage solutions. Enterprises derive numerous benefits out of using a CIM-enabled storage management environment.

Since neither a single solution nor individual point solutions can meet enterprises’ long-term comprehensive storage management and interoperability requirements, an open standards-based approach provides enterprises with scalability at the functional level, capacity level, and addresses their interoperability concerns. CIM-based storage management environments provide enterprises with the assurance that products and solutions deployed today can be expanded and enhanced to meet emerging interoperability requirements in the future.

Further, enterprises derive the benefit of viewing and operating networked storage as a holistic resource rather than a heterogeneous storage environment that needs individual attention at the solutions level. CIM provides a common, normalised, yet extensible view of all the storage resources, their relationships and the operations that can be performed against them. By spanning the management of all components in the storage stacks, from the application to the physical storage medium, CIM allows a management application to be focused or all-encompassing, as it needs to be, all within a single standard.

CIM also enables enterprises to avoid being locked into a proprietary management environment. Storage solutions vendors need to move away from offering solutions that are bound by proprietary protocols and standards so that they offer their customers solutions that accommodate future changes in storage requirements and technology. They should be able to differentiate by providing value rather than point solutions so that the products and solutions communicate with other SAN elements in the storage architecture. Enterprises who choose new and innovative companies that can create competitive or complementary functionality— built on existing management infrastructure and components based on the CIM standard— realise total investment protection, purchasing leverage, and additional options. This also makes them future-ready so that they can scale up existing infrastructure both in terms of technology and capacity, whenever the need arises.

Therefore even as the storage industry is busy consolidating technology standards for the market, CIM offers many possibilities for enterprises to manage storage systems easily, avoiding the cumbersome task of managing the storage system in a heterogeneous storage environment. It is also clear that in future CIM will be an essential reference frame for any standard that evolves in the storage space.

The author is business development manager at Hitachi Data Systems. He can be contacted at vivek.anand@hds.com