Intelligent storage provisioning takes a load off: automated provisioning tools in short supply.

Computer provisioning has been around since the inception of computers-computers produce data, and data must have somewhere to live. The process of providing that space is called provisioning. Before data started growing so quickly, provisioning was not a big deal--stick on a few disks or RAID arrays and go from there. Then things started to get dicey: fast-growing transaction databases gobbled up storage and drove their administrators crazy; LANs kept running out of room and kept network managers hopping; SAN and NAS never seemed to have enough storage in the right places. In a knee-jerk response, many administrators slammed on way too many storage devices and provisioned them all at once, just to keep from having to do it all over again in six months--or six weeks. Not only did this lower return on investment, administrators had to spend large amounts of time configuring and attaching hardware storage devices to the network.

Provisioning in clusters and messaging networks was bad enough. In many-to-many architected SANs, it was worse. Provisioning the storage area network not only meant spending hours hooking up new devices, it also involved remapping dozens of network components between hosts and arrays. The resulting staff hours were no joke, since manual storage provisioning can take as much as 50 labor-intensive steps and several days of an expert's time.

Storage Provisioning

Even when administrators adopted virtualization, they still spent a huge amount of time provisioning the virtual volumes. It got better--they didn't run out of room so quickly and could do better capacity management--but they were still stuck with manual remapping. This is where intelligent storage provisioning comes in: software tools that use a virtualization base to aid administrators to use their storage volumes without a huge amount of manual activities. Ranging from simple GUI-based movement and wizards to policy-driven automated tools, storage provisioning can help to relieve a good deal of administrative burden from if. Stephen Foskett, senior consultant at Glasshouse Technologies said about provisioning, "Right now it's extremely difficult to do this kind of thing. Without automated provisioning tools, [you] have to make changes in at least three different places to make changes to the host." Changes affect all aspects of the storage network path, including arrays, ports, HBAs, switches, fabric, LUN masking software, volume managers and hosts. Foskett added, "Automated provisioning software does those things for me and it does it the same way virtualization tools would have done it, but better, by showing me what I have."

Provisioning

Storage administrators can map business services Onto the storage pool. Business services are the requirements born from an application's demands and priority status in the corporation. By understanding the application's requirements for network and processor types, software, and storage, administrators can apply those requirements to the virtualized resources. For example, a critical database application with large transaction spikes may have a disk threshold of 50 percent capacity. When data storage reaches 50 percent of its assigned storage, the provisioning software alerts the administrator, who can then assign additional storage from available pools.

Policy and automation is the next step in provisioning and often accompanies it. It works by capturing provisioning information, applying states to policy thresholds, and growing or shrinking space allocations as necessary. Most of these tools allow different degrees of automation depending on IT's comfort level.

Not all development centers around these three separate pieces. Jean Banko, Fujitsu Softek's director of product marketing said, 'There are different levels of maturity that you go through. Provisioning goes through many steps depending on your application." Provisioning development generally falls into a maturing continuum, from simplest to most complex:

1. Application-aware provisioning: Application-aware provisioning runs across virtualized volumes and delivers business services by adapting storage to application needs--for example, allowing if to input threshold requirements for specific applications and data. When the data or service levels reach threshold capacity or drop below service level performance, the provisioning software alerts the administrator. Intelligent provisioning often runs across virtualized volumes, which gives it greater flexibility in managing storage areas, and provides tools to simplify or partially automate certain provisioning tasks.

2. Policy-driven automated provisioning: Automated provisioning builds on the previous development by automating provisioning procedures according to user-set business policies. Policy automation automatically maintains application service level objectives by assigning and configuring paths and storage space to applications depending on their threshold levels. It can also automate many provisioning steps when if expands the storage network.

Developers go across the board, from StoneFly's Storage Concentrators in the IP space, to Fujitsu Softek's newly released Storage Provisioner for heterogeneous environments, to EMC's powerful PowerPath 4. Other vendors who are shipping automated provisioning software include HP, EMC and Veritas. Sun is developing automated provisioning along their Nl roadmap lines, which develops virtualization, provisioning and automation in phases. Most automated provisioning is made for homogenous environments, though products like Softek's works in multi-vendor networks.

Provisioning and Business Services

Aligning provisioning with business services means supporting applications' service-level requirements concerning bandwidth, performance and availability thresholds. Once if knows applications' service-level requirements, they can carve out flexible storage volumes using virtualization technology and set up business rules for the provisioning tool. (Most provisioning tools either provide virtualization services or integrate with a product that does.)

However, just because automation exists doesn't mean users want to use it. Jack Norris, vice president of marketing at Rainfinity said, "I think the automation angle is a really interesting angle. When people talk about it they think they want it, but when you look at a lot of the complex environments, they're really conservative about automating much." According to Norris, whose company concentrates on data movement and migration in NAS environments, one of the major constraints in automating is interrupting user and application access. If if automates their provisioning tool so it automatically migrates data onto newly mapped LUNs, they could inadvertently cause a serious problem: for example, impacting large-scale simulations that have been running for two weeks. Whoops.

For IT to accept automation, it must be transparent to users and downstream applications. Implementation is best done in step by small step: if tests small movements and capacity management tasks and sees how they work, then broadens the scope. Once those are working without impacting applications and users, if can establish automated routines based on the successful tests. Norris said, 'That's what you'll see in an automation rollout, a series of steps that build on each other because these environments are complex."

Nor does everyone need automated functions, which are primarily suited for large data center environments. Departments and mid-ranged companies might want to do more conscious interventions since they don't deal with the same huge data stores. An IP storage network, for example, which enables storage clusters without the cost and complexity of a large SAN, would not require the same level of automation that a large Fibre Channel SAN would. IP provisioning differs from Fibre Channel provisioning in other ways. Huber said, "In Fibre Channel, typically you don't have an embedded storage manager, you just have arrays. You might go into the array and create a LUN. You set up the zoning on the Brocade switch, and eventually that volume arrives on the server. In the iSCSI domain, we bring the LUNs in and provision, then pop you into the access control zone that's parallel to zoning."

Banko believes that niche virtualization and provisioning products will not capture as much of the market as integrated products. "I think the market for the niche is going to be definitely smaller than the integrated market. The market didn't take off like the analysts thought it would, even though it has lots of benefits. The real challenge was that these are SAN-based technologies, but SANs hadn't really been adopted the way many people had expected. It's also a disruptive technology where you have to re-engineer your environment. A lot of customers were willing to live with that pain of provisioning instead of talking the time to re-architect and re-engineer."

Integrated products instead use virtualization technologies as the basis for their provisioning tools. (Virtualiztion underlies not only provisioning, but also new encryption and replication schemes.) Provisioning still often requires virtualization, but without the re-architecting it once did. Foskett said the older tools "would give value in terms of dynamic provisioning, but installing them was such a big effort that it didn't seem like something people wanted to do. That contrasts with the way things are done now. More products seamlessly edge their way in instead of shutting things down." This new ease of installation is driving up adoption rates for virtualization and provisioning.