Application

Simplifying storage

Managing storage has become so complex that companies are adopting storage area management, says Atanu Kumar Das

Although storage costs are plummeting, managing storage infrastructure is a daunting task for IT administrators. Storage vendors are talking about a new technology called Storage Area Management (SAM) that shows a way to manage an entire storage architecture spanning SAN, NAS, DAS as well as related applications.

Opines Sharad Sharma, General Manager, India, & Vice-president, Product Operations, Veritas Software India, “SAM can be defined as a set of procedures, services and standards for comprehensively managing the infrastructure of a storage area network (SAN). This includes components such as servers, disk arrays, tape libraries, switches, routers and applications.” More often than not, this involves the co-ordinated management of devices and programmes from different vendors and locations.

The evolution of SAM began with basic SAN management, in which individual devices and applications were managed separately. The next phase of SAM saw vendors focussing on developing a centralised infrastructure that permitted interaction among different components of a storage architecture. Currently, SAM solutions have the capability to automatically identify devices connected to the SAN, identify problems and monitor performance.

Says V Vivekanand, Sales Director, SAM Solutions, APIA, Hitachi Data Systems, “Without SAM, storage management is a manual process. Several administrators, working in their own way and using a variety of unrelated tools and makeshift processes, struggle to manage an increasingly disparate collection of storage resources.” Features such as device zoning provide the ability to automatically arrange devices into logical groups and protect them with access control lists.

Comments P K Gupta, Director, Strategic Development, Asia Pacific & Japan, EMC Software, “Implementing SAM helps an organisation manage complex SAN infrastructure and allocate storage resources

quickly.” Gupta says that a SAM solution can help an organisation get a faster return on investment. EMC’s offering in this space, ControlCentre, lets organisations simplify storage management with a range of tools for storage allocation, event monitoring, performance management, data protection and backup. The application also has role-based access controls.

The changing economics of storage

A proper SAM implementation can change the economics of storage. It can lower TCO by making storage administrators more productive as they can manage and allocate greater volumes of storage. Automation takes over many laborious chores. It also lets organisations increase storage utilisation because they can reassign excess storage capacity to other users. This in turn allows organisations to defer additional storage purchases. Finally, SAM reduces the need for costly training and the need to hire highly experienced storage personnel by masking the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. Vendors believe that organisations can justify the investment in a SAM based upon the savings that they gain by reducing TCO.

Features such as storage provisioning can help storage administrators to allocate storage resources based on defined policies and user requirements. Using SAM tools, it is also possible to monitor and enforce service levels through network traffic prioritisation and bandwidth reservation.

Says Agendra Kumar, Country Manager, Veritas Software, “SAM is all about quality of service. It addresses the question of whether storage is delivered with the necessary level of service when a business application needs it, and if error-prone manual intervention is required.” Veritas’ CommandCentral storage management software gives CIOs a portal from which they can view consumption and accordingly manage service levels and costs.

Similarly, HP’s OpenView Storage Area Manager helps storage administrators analyse and predict storage demand by aligning storage with their organisation’s needs. Says Avijit Basu, Country Manager, Network Storage Solutions, Customer Solutions Group, HP India, “Using SAM, a CIO can reduce the total cost of ownership by identifying unused storage and avoid the need for new storage purchases.”

Enabling inter-operability

In a multi-vendor environment, being able to manage a storage network with a single management application is crucial. To this end, storage vendors such as Hitachi, HP and EMC have standardised on the Common Information Model (CIM), a data model for defining device and application characteristics so that system administrators can control storage devices and applications from different manufacturers in the same way. The CIM model provides definitions for servers, devices, operating systems, applications and network components along with details of each. For example, a company that has purchased storage devices from various vendors can view similar information about each vendor’s devices such as device name, capacity and network location. This model enables storage management systems to recognise and exchange information in a mixed storage environment that hosts solutions from several vendors.

Depending on user requirements, policies can be written to enforce service levels. The SAM solution can even send alerts to storage administrators in case the required service levels are not maintained. The SAM uses features such as path management, which monitors the flow of data from the storage resource to application. The path management feature is essential as it ensures that the application is receiving the required levels of storage to perform optimally. Policies can even be set so that once a critical application reaches a particular threshold, the SAM system automatically allocates additional storage to the application. Based on historic data, the SAM application can even provide the storage administrator with predictive management tools to anticipate future data demands.

atanu@expresscomputeronline.com