Storage Resource Management: the future storage medalist?

IT organizations are looking for better alternatives to help them with the challenge of managing vast resources, the data contained within those resources and the ability to anticipate problems and take action before a problem becomes critical. Administrators need more efficient ways to navigate through the complexities of trying to manage hundreds, or maybe thousands, of heterogeneous systems distributed around the world. The amount of content that businesses create and store is massive. Almost overnight, companies are transitioning from storing gigabytes of data to managing terabytes, and even petabytes, of information. The need to efficiently manage a company's most strategic asset, information, has reached an all time high and IT managers are searching for better alternatives. An ever-growing number of Storage Resource Management (SRM) companies have emerged, all claiming that they are delivering storage management solutions that address these over-whelming management issues--but are they really?

The Landscape

SRM tools, although they have come a long way, have just touched the surface in addressing key management issues. For many years, mainframe administrators have had the luxury of using sophisticated tools for automating the storage management processes. Such tasks as capacity and performance planning, not to mention detailed reports and trend analysis, were inherent in the systems, arming administrators with information about their storage. These tools, combined with other management techniques such as hierarchical storage management (HSM) or other migration strategies, provided a cost effective management scheme. However, administrators in the UNIX, NT, and now Linux, along with other open systems environments, have struggled with finding tools and techniques that provided trivial tasks such as usage reporting, capacity planning, and generating event logs that could assist in providing trend analysis.

Today, there are over 20 companies offering storage resource management solutions--ranging from a tool that merely reports capacity usage or sets quotas, to sophisticated product suites that help administrators understand their entire storage/network topology. Storage resource management software has gained popularity over the last year.

According to analyst firm Gartner/Dataquest, the worldwide storage management software market is forecasted to grow from $5.3 billion in 2000 to $16.7 billion in 2005. The fastest growing sub-segment, Storage Resource Management, is estimated to reach $1.7 billion by 2003. The repercussions from Sept. 11, 2001 may accelerate these projections.

The Growing Management Problem Despite available management tools, a common practice for storage administrators is to keep adding capacity without addressing the root cause of the problem. It is a lot easier to add more disk drives than to properly manage all this capacity. After all, storage is cheap--right? The price of storage is dropping 35% to 40% per year. However, contrary to popular belief, storage may be cheap to buy, but it is very expensive to manage. The cost to manage the data ranges from 3 to 10 times the acquisition cost of the storage. Automatically adding more storage compounds the lack of management problem, while adding more expense. To further illustrate the point, a recent survey from Strategic Research Corporation's (SRC) new report, The Future of the Business Network, confirms a huge management gap. Today, network administrators often average as much as 5 terabytes of files to manage. Within a Database environment, the average site, by 2003 will have close to 15TB with an average of 1.4 terabytes per administrator, per the SRC report. This will perpetuate the management problem further. Bridging this gap will require a new set of management tools with embedded intelligence.

While it is true that net-worked environments help resolve some of the management issues, IT Managers still face the overriding tasks of controlling disk capacity, running out of disk space, backing up, and archiving the data, not to mention others, regardless of how it is connected. These problems only get worse over time as capacity demands increase.

Delivering Solutions

IT managers now have the ability to choose from a wide selection of product offerings that help them plan, monitor, and report key aspects regarding their storage and storage network. An SRM tool will collect detailed information about the data; conduct capacity planning activities, maintain records of storage assets, and monitor the environment--but is this enough? Can companies realistically manage these multi-terabyte sites with the tools they have been given? Many organizations have deployed quota restrictions and are strictly enforcing rules regarding unused and unnecessary files to help address this growing problem. However; it is still questionable whether they keep pace with the expansion of data and continue to expend the resources to monitor and restrict usage. Most businesses continue to face out-of-space issues, backups, disaster recovery, and archival issues on a daily basis. In fact, these issues have heightened with the events of this past year.

These days, typical business environments are made up of heterogeneous computing systems and need scalable solutions that track with the complexities of the data. Current budget restrictions impede companies from adequately addressing these problems and force them to look at alternatives. Companies who can't or just don't want the headache of trying to deal with all these issues are turning to other alternatives, such as managed services. Although the last year has been dismal for most SSPs and ASPs, a number of the companies have consolidated and changed their portfolio of services to specifically help companies manage issues of disaster recovery, security, and general consulting. This new model of managed services may prove to be very beneficial to a host of companies trying to manage their storage growth efficiently.

Those companies attempting to meet the challenge head on are finding that it is a tough road. They have to truly understand their data characteristics. When was it last used? Is it current? Is it strategic? How much storage is being consumed and by whom? They need to know where the data is allocated and ensure appropriate performance and availability. How does the data map to the application? Which applications are using the most storage and at what rate? How often is it backed up? How often should it be backed up?

These are just a few of the questions that need to be answered when developing a strategy around managing a company's most important asset, information. There are now a myriad of SRM tools to help the management problem. These tools provide critical functions such as reporting disk space consumption and how it can best be distributed, providing alerts when thresholds are about to be reached or exceeded and generating trend analysis to determine problem areas to project capacity needs for the future. However, do they provide enough functionality to help deliver an effective storage management strategy? Is a 2:00 a.m. phone page to report an out-of-space condition or system crash, due to an undetected failure, really acceptable? Can an IT manager determine the tradeoffs of effective capacity management without performance being part of the equation? Current SRM implementations only solve part of the problem. Effective storage management will require tools with far more intelligence about the applications and business processes than currently available. Advanced functionality beyond monitoring, alerting, and reporting will be needed in order to effectively orchestrate actions automatically.

The Challenge

SRM tools are key to closing the management gap, but to do so, they need to be "self-acting". Once they diagnose the problem and recommend a solution, the next logical step is to take care of the problem intelligently and automatically with minimal human intervention. SRM providers must begin to integrate decision-making functions in their diagnosis. Tools that provide an alert just aren't good enough any more. Administrators are already overburdened and don't need additional tasks added to their daily job. Companies need seamless tools that automatically manage a heterogeneous environment for them.

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Lisa Hart is a partner with IN_fusion, a business acceleration company, and president of Hart Enterprise Services. She is based in Boulder, CO.