Managing storage resources.

Managing storage across a large enterprise is both a priority and a challenge for organizations today. With data volumes growing at unprecedented rates, compliance requirements adding another concern to already overburdened and understaffed IT departments, and budgets remaining relatively flat, the need for storage management is not only critical but increasing.

Indeed, IT organizations are struggling to deal with the compounded growth of storage, estimated to be 55 percent for the average company. The way these organizations see it, by making better use of existing storage resources through intelligent management, they can drive down the cost and complexity typically associated with data growth.

However, not all organizations' storage needs are the same. For example, organizations interested primarily in tactical management may be able to meet their goals by using the tools supplied by hardware vendors.

Other organizations need more. These organizations are looking for tools that will integrate storage resource management together with performance and policy management, storage provisioning, and SAN management in order to ensure a more efficient storage infrastructure. What's more, by actively managing storage resources, from application to array, IT organizations are better able to satisfy service level agreements while also ensuring optimal performance and availability of applications.

Furthermore, storage management tools that support heterogeneous environments can significantly streamline and standardize the otherwise time-consuming and highly specialized process of managing storage and, in turn, protect investments in hardware, training, and personnel.

Of course, not all storage management tools are created equal. For example, traditional storage resource management solutions simply collect data from the array, file, or file system. More comprehensive solutions, however, provide a more complete view of the supply chain to manage physical and logical storage capacity.

For the most effective management of storage resources, organizations can look to solutions that deliver a wide range of capabilities, from capacity management to centralized health monitoring, end-to-end visibility, and heterogeneous storage provisioning.

Managing Capacity

One of the most cost-effective benefits of storage resource management is the ability to reclaim lost or wasted storage and forecast current and future storage capacity requirements. To that end, IT must have a way to accurately track the availability and usage of existing resources. Furthermore, IT should consider the difference between monitoring allocated storage and utilized storage. In order to provide more comprehensive storage capacity management, an organization needs an application that will provide this visibility.

As a result, a growing number of storage management tools now report on total online capacity, providing metrics to determine available resources and storage burn rates, forecast capacity planning and budgeting, and prevent unnecessary storage purchases that might lead to reduced storage utilization levels.

An effective strategy can allow an organization to increase capacity utilization anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, resulting in significant capital cost savings. Additionally, storage tiering has emerged as a tool to help an organization make informed decisions about application utilization and storage reporting in order to maximize hardware assets. Until recently, IT has simply added disk space and replicated data as needed. However, as volumes have increased added disk space has become a much more expensive solution. Information that needs to be highly available can be assigned to fast, expensive storage, while other information can be stored on slower media or even archived.

Monitoring Storage Health

Because storage networks are complex, it is critical to monitor all of the elements of the data path, reaching even the remote corners of the SAN. To avoid having problems on these elements go undetected, storage resource management tools monitor everything from arrays to switches, host bus adapters (HBAs), hosts, applications, files, logical unit numbers (LUNs), and more.

For example, in monitoring storage elements, a storage resource management tool might find that the most used table in a database is on the slowest disk in a redundant array of independent disks or that a certain server is bottlenecked by a specific port on a SAN switch. By monitoring and alerting on performance statistics, availability, environmental details, and even space conditions, these tools identify any abnormalities that might indicate a problem and then send policy-based alerts automatically to notify the appropriate administrator when a variable is outside the set of acceptable tolerances.

End-to-End Visibility

Most organizations simply want to understand the storage assets they have and be able to report against those assets. This requires a storage resource management tool that offers discovery, visualization, and reporting capabilities so organizations can progress from having no visibility to enjoying a full supply chain view.

It is critical to understand the paths from applications to physical storage to ensure that applications are delivering the appropriate performance and availability levels. Organizations must have a view into the data path in order to understand how applications are spread across physical disk resources and give storage administrators the ability to identify bottlenecks or points of failure.

The most complete storage view is an end-to-end one that provides mapping from the array to the host and presents insight into array-level events that may impact applications. Such dynamic mapping not only is critical to identify incorrect storage configurations that might result in orphaned storage but it also helps ensure the performance of the data path while revealing unclaimed, unused, and underutilized capacity for storage reclamation.

Provisioning

Storage provisioning is a key function of storage resource management, reducing the time requirement for application deployment and change management. By offering hardware management information as it applies to the change process, storage provisioning minimizes the likelihood of errors while saving time. An effective strategy for storage provisioning will include a storage resource management tool that works with heterogeneous storage. IT can eliminate the need for multiple management tools by standardizing on a single layer of infrastructure software that works on every O/S and supports every major storage device, database, and application.

Further, storage resource management tools that provide a common interface for most management functions streamline and standardize the provisioning process with a single management tool across heterogeneous storage infrastructures. IT can utilize storage resource management technology to automate as much of the provisioning process as necessary for their organization, which can drastically reduce the time it takes for IT to provision storage to applications and allows the business to begin producing revenue faster. Also, provisioning templates can sometimes remove the need for highly experienced and more expensive personnel.

Ongoing Management

As information becomes even more valuable, computing environments become more complex, and management costs threaten to skyrocket, storage resource management represents an effective tool for simplifying storage management, protecting investments, and safeguarding the availability and security of information.

But storage resource management is not an event. It is an ongoing, evolutionary process with various stages of management maturity-and not all organizations start at the same level or have the same goal. Moreover, not all organizations are interested in every functional component of storage management and may put a higher priority on some components than on others. Because of their flexibility, today's most advanced storage resource management tools can be readily adapted to enable organizations to reach their specific storage resource management goals.

Furthermore, a highly centralized storage resource management tool increases the ability of IT organizations to meet the storage needs of a diverse set of applications across the enterprise. By enabling IT administrators to proactively manage applications and their associated resources, these tools also help organizations ensure more effective service level agreements and improved quality of service.

Sean Derrington is Director, Storage Management for Symantec's Data Center Management Group.

www.symantec.com