Storage Special: Storage Management

Storage management: Automation is the future

The demand for Network Attached Storage and Storage Area Networks is on the rise. But who will manage and run these huge networked storage systems? As GAURAV PATRA points out, many companies find themselves short of both the infrastructure and talent needed to manage them

Worldwide, the major trend is that while the cost of storage is coming down, the cost of storage management is soaring, says P P Subramanian

Storage management is the management of storage assets with an eye towards maximising application availability, service levels, speed and flexibility. Data storage is increasingly being recognised as the key to effectively and efficiently supporting enterprise IT applications. Driven by the growth of e-commerce, globalisation and user expectations of zero latency, the need to intelligently manage access to and storage of data is becoming mission-critical. At the same time, sound storage and backup strategies are essential to a business continuity plan.

But some companies just do not have the staff to put networked storage into place. The reasons for this might be budgetary constraints because the concept of storage management is relatively recent. "Worldwide, the major trend is that while the cost of storage is coming down the cost of storage management is soaring. Among people who have embraced technologies like SAN/NAS/DAS, the perception of management is very high," says P P Subramanian, country manager, India, Hitachi Data Systems. With the growth of businesses, the demand for bigger storage systems will also increase. This means management of storage will become a key focus.

"It is estimated that 50 percent of overall IT expenditure will be directed towards storage management solutions and associated labour and materials cost by 2004. Storage management is no longer the need of just large organisations. It is equally important for mid-size and smaller organisations, which have moderate storage requirements," says B Chandrasekhar, manager for storage at Sun Microsystems India.

A few years ago, enterprises used to spend more on raw storage than on managing it. Now that approach is changing. "Organisations are realising that raw storage will not give them the operational efficiencies, productivity improvements and business continuity that is required in today’s competitive environment. They need automated storage management tools to manage raw storage. So organisations are now spending on this, but not to the desired extent," says P K Gupta, director for Intercontinental Operations at Legato.

"As of date, companies are investing more in hardware. However, realisation is dawning in software too. Any storage network has to be managed properly, which is done through a software suite. The software provides for dynamically allocating and load-balancing the data," says Avijit Basu, marketing manager for NSSO at HP India. Adds Veritas India’s country manager Agendra Kumar, "Storage management software continues to be a hot segment with customers, but the overall market, from a revenue perspective, continues to be challenged by economic conditions."

Challenges

With ever-increasing data, never-increasing staff, and continually tight budgets, the need is to increase the efficiency of storage operations several times over. As the information explosion continues, with data growth doubling yearly in the foreseeable future, storage managers will have to find ways to double their productivity as well because they cannot afford to double their staff. Experts opine that by reorganising their storage staff companies can increase the productivity of their people. More automated processes based on intelligent tools will also ease the pressure. In this, policy also plays a significant role. Intelligent policies, which are business-driven and technically sound, will also help storage managers to increase their productivity.

E-mail is one application that should not be ignored by storage administrators. Managers face the challenge of providing adequate storage space without affecting the system’s reliability, setting limits without compromising the organisation’s effectiveness, and ensuring disaster recovery and retention of e-mail messages long enough to satisfy external requests. "E-mail management is going to be a very critical sub-set of storage management. The government of India is in the process of coming out with a law, which says that every enterprise has to keep
e-mail for seven years for audit and other purposes," says Gupta. Once this law is in place, it will be a must for enterprises to store all the e-mail exchanged on their servers, and management of this will be important.

The increasing cost of IT labour is another factor that companies should keep in mind. "In this case, automated storage provisioning tools play an important role. The market is just coming up," says Subramanian. Says Gupta, "Storage management practices encompass policies, user ativities, system processes and workflow by which you deliver information management services across your storage network. Automation improves the quality, consistency and responsiveness of storage infrastructure execution."

Industry standards usually help customers mix and match best-of-breed systems. However, things are not crystal-clear when it comes to storage management software. "I agree that there are not many standards in the storage industry, which is creating interoperability problems. But organisations like the Storage Networking Industry Associa tion have come up with some standards like Storage Management Interface Specifi ca tions. I think it is just the beginning of the evolution process, and we will see many standards in future," says Gupta.

With the growth of business, the demand for bigger storage options will also increase, which means management of storage will become a focus area. Experts say for that for each $1 spent on storage, you need to spend $5-7 to manage it. Though the need for storage is growing very quickly, you cannot keep adding people at the same rate to manage it, so automation becomes very important. This is the reason one needs more storage management automation tools.

It is expected that as infrastructure demands intensify, there will be a need for companies to create a dedicated team of storage workers. Since storage is becoming a separate entity, one needs storage administrators the way one needs network administrators. Some large enterprises have already started moving in this direction since storage infrastructure is evolving into a major component of IT infrastructure. Research groups like IDC, Gartner and Aberdeen have also suggested this.

Best practices approach

Resurgence in spending and the continuing climb in the amount of data generation means companies must get a grip on storage management by creating and implementing a solid best-practices strategy. So far, IT organisations have handled storage planning in an ad hoc manner without considering storage as a strategic part of their IT agenda. But with changing times and needs, corporate data has become critical to business operations, and storage spending constitutes a significant portion of an enterprise’s IT infrastructure budget. Enterpri ses are spending more on storage as they explore ways to prioritise, consolidate and automate storage systems and deal with the growing amount of data. "Investing in an enterprise storage management solution is not just a tactical tool but a strategic component for any IT environment. There are many storage management solutions in the market, and choosing which one to implement may be a difficult decision for customers. Most often, IT managers look for solutions that work well with their existing hardware, but some companies are now implementing storage solutions proactively rather than reactively," says Kumar.

While selecting the right storage management tool, managers can start by adopting the best-practices approach. User companies should analyse the enterprise’s storage environment by listing existing management tools—especially automated tools—and the applications they support. They should also find out which applications consume the most storage space, and use basic storage resource management techniques to analyse their current usage. Enterprises should also establish policies for the availability, performance and measurement of storage assets against business priorities, and guarantee service levels based on these priorities. "It has been observed in many instances that organisations in India often add storage resources in a haphazard manner. A majority of enterprises have not put in place a proper storage management policy. It is always better for enterprises to do so," says Chandrasekhar.

IT administrators and business managers have to figure out which data is critical and that which can tolerate some downtime and loss. This can help IT staff match need and availability. The IT department should also have a plan for the next two or three years, with the TCO always kept in mind.