Managing Storage for Agility
ComputerWorld Singapore Vol. 9 Issue No. 36
By IBM Total Storage Solutions
Economic and business pressures, greater emphasis on IT departments
deliver on significant return-on-investment and the emphasis
to operate on a real-time, mission critical basis are driving
organizations to relook their infrastructure closely. Experience
shows that management and control of IT infrastructure empowers
the organization to operate in an increasingly competitive world.
The appropriate management and control of this infrastructure
will enable the organization to respond rapidly to changes,
thus giving it a competitive advantage in the market place.
In essence, making the organization agile.
Increasingly evident is the fact that effective management of
the storage component of an IT infrastructure has become critical.
A leading international research firm recently stated that the
pressure for IT managers to maximize the return on investment
in storage assets has never been greater. In today's economic
environment, effective management will be critical in ensuring
the organization's survival and perhaps, success.
In addressing the issue of effective control and management
of the storage infrastructure, there are several concerns. Principally,
these are:
Capacity - What are the demands
on the organization's storage capacity and how fast is it
projected to grow?
Cost - What investment does it take to ensure that the storage
infrastructure is up and running 24 x 7?
Management - Does the organization have the appropriate
resources and capability to manage this storage infrastructure?
Performance - Can the storage infrastructure deliver
on the changing needs of the organization?
Reliability - Is the storage infrastructure reliable
in all kinds of weather?
Scalable - Can the storage infrastructure be scaled,
either higher or lower, to meet the operating needs of the
organization?
Where Does The Organization Start?
The starting point to effective storage management lies in
assessing the organization's infrastructure and needs. Successful
infrastructures must be flexible and dynamic and fit the business
model they are intended to serve. The next step involves planning
and this basically requires a strategy to be mapped out. It
has to factor in the e-business needs, disaster recovery and
business continuity planning, amongst others.
Taking the next step, organization needs to design an appropriate
architecture that factors in its unique requirements. IT managers
should address areas such as IP convergence, mobility, VPN
networks, call centre continuity and workplace continuity.
Once in place, the next task is to execute and implement the
plan. But it does not stop here because storage infrastructure
has to be monitored and assessed continuously. Successful
organizations will make resiliency part of everyday operations
and ensure that it grows and adjusts to the needs of the market.
Are There Roadblocks?
Much as this is clear, the process is not as easy as it sounds.
Experience shows roadblocks along the way.
International Data Corp. ( IDC ) says the manner in which
storage is deployed in smaller organizations limits the IT
manager's ability share storage across servers. This is because,
typically, storage systems in these organizations are embedded
within servers or through direct attached storage ( DAS )
via SCSI. This type of deployment also limits options for
data replication services to enhance application availability
and recovery. With direct attached storage, options are often
restricted to proprietary, embedded function of the server
or storage controller, IDC says.
Larger organizations face similar challenges with remote and
departmental servers. They also have large pools of high-capacity
storage arrays that support critical business applications
within the data centre, according to IDC. Hence, in theory,
these organizations are able to take advantage of storage
area network ( SAN ) solutions based on Fibre Channel ( FC
) switched fabrics to enable greater sharing of storage systems
across departmental and data centre arrays. For IT managers
at large organizations, however, the reality of shared storage
is often less satisfying than the promise.
Therein lies the challenge for IT managers today: Developing
an effective strategy to address these shortcomings and balance
the shorter and longer term needs of the organization.
IBM's Approach
IBM's strategy is to take a comprehensive, holistic approach
that addresses all aspects of the storage infrastructure.
This includes the block subsystem, block aggregation, file
/ record subsystem, and the services ( management ) subsystem.
Storage that is readily on demand in an operating environment
can only provide significant reductions in total cost and
improvements in organizational agility when all areas described
in the shared storage model can be addressed in an architected
modular and integrated manner.
Storage for an on demand operating environment must provide
customers with the flexibility to exploit the assets they
have today. First, customers must have the flexibility to
purchase components from a variety of vendors, both IBM and
non-IBM.
Second, they must have the ability to have all of the components
to work together efficiently.
IBM's storage strategy is to deliver products based on open
standards. Products based on open industry standard interfaces
can offer customers significantly more benefits than products
based on proprietary interfaces. The history of the information
technology industry has shown by and large that open systems
offer three key benefits:
Better solutions at lower price. By harnessing the
resources of multiple companies, more development resources
are brought to bear on common customer requirements such as
ease of management.
Improved Interoperability. Without open standards,
every vendor would need to work with every other vendor to
develop interfaces for interoperability, thus leading to very
complex product interdependencies that are difficult for customers
to install, configure and maintain.
Customer choice. By complying with standards developed
jointly - products interoperate with each other, preventing
vendors from locking in customers to their platform despite
customer's changing needs. Choice helps provide customers
with more flexibility and improve competition among vendors.
Today, IBM storage products adhere to a number of industry
standards for connectivity and it is enabling a number of
its products to adhere to the SNIA Storage Management Initiative
Specification ( SMI-S ). IBM will provide SMI-S support for
new infrastructure products including our block aggregation
and file aggregation offerings.
These products are being designed to be managed with integrated
device management software, IBM Tivoli Software, and other
non-IBM management software, that support the SMI-S standard.
Products that are based on newly developed standards are often
criticized for only supporting functionality representing
the lowest common denominator.
IBM's strategy for developing full function products based
on standards is to embrace and implement current standards,
extend current standards to provide full function capabilities,
contribute extensions to standards groups, and adjust implementations
if the extensions change as a result of the standardization.
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Copyright
2005 All rights reserved.