Storage area management: the next generation. (Storage Networking).The first part of this article that appears in June CTR See click-through rate. discusses Gartner's official definition of SAM as SAM A Speech Technology Assessment for Multilingual Applications "the centralized cen·tral·ize v. cen·tral·ized, cen·tral·iz·ing, cen·tral·iz·es v.tr. 1. To draw into or toward a center; consolidate. 2. management of resources and data across a storage domain(s), providing shared services shared services, n.pl the administrative, clinical, or other service functions that are common to two or more hospitals or their health care facilities and used jointly or cooperatively by them. to a group of servers and their applications." Gartner analyst Nick Allen Nick Allen (born Artemus Ward Allen on September 14, 1888 in Norton, Kansas; died October 16, 1939 in Hines, Illinois) was a catcher in Major League Baseball. Teams
Automating SAM Karen Dutch, marketing director at InterSAN, said that automated configuration helps relieve huge SAN manageability headaches such as making chargebacks and monitoring service The general surveillance of known air traffic movements by reference to a radar scope presentation or other means, for the purpose of passing advisory information concerning conflicting traffic or providing navigational assistance. levels. "The customers that have SANs today and deployed them one or two years ago, they're starting to buckle under Verb 1. buckle under - consent reluctantly knuckle under, succumb, give in, yield consent, go for, accept - give an affirmative reply to; respond favorably to; "I cannot accept your invitation"; "I go for this resolution" their spreadsheet management techniques." With this kind of buzz around automation, many data storage customers are inquiring inquiring, v to draw information from a client—whether by verbal questioning or physical examination—to assess the person's state of health. about what automation really means. The benefits are compelling: Automated intelligent software could relieve IT staffs of tremendous burdens around backup and recovery and storage provisioning, and allow organizations to effectively inventory and manage myriad storage resources. But Hoffman points out two major issues that storage automation vendors must face squarely before automation becomes generally available in the storage management market: 1) People need to solve basic storage management issues before they can use sophisticated automation tools, and 2) customers rarely trust vendors to fully automate storage. Basic management issues: Dan Hoffman, BMC's director of storage solutions, believes there's a serious, growing need for effective SRM (1) (Storage Resource Management) The management of the storage resources in an organization in order to avoid duplication of files and to determine space utilization across all servers. tools right now, because storage customers simply do not know what they have. Larger companies often have hundreds to thousands of storage assets across the enterprise, and remote and over-burdened IT departments have no way to inventory them all, let alone manage them. This situation keeps organizations from fully utilizing their existing storage assets or reporting accurate ROI (Return On Investment) The monetary benefits derived from having spent money on developing or revising a system. In the IT world, there are more ways to compute ROI than Carter has liver pills (and for those of you who never heard of that expression, it means a lot). figures. SRM packages are available today that can help relieve the situation, and SAN customers should be taking full advantage of them. Customers don't trust full automation: Hoffman believes that even if a company delivered a fully automated storage management suite today, most companies wouldn't trust it. The SSP (1) (Service Switching Point) The local exchange node in an SS7 telephone network. The SSP can be part of the voice switch or in a separate computer connected to it. business model is struggling largely because of this fact--customers have remained highly skeptical of outsourced or automated efforts to manage their precious stored data. Sun's Staten agrees that customers do not generally trust vendors to automate. He finds that they are willing to work with SSPs and storage automation vendors on what data is safe to automate, but they want to control the process. "You want to put mechanisms for automation in place, but you don't want to force automation," said Staten. One of SAM's claims to fame is trying to eliminate a lot of the manual work that has to be done by storage administrators today to keep applications running. Many developers are trying to do that today, and are approaching the problem from many different angles. For example, Commvault is coming at it from a data movement and application life cycle and adding device discovery, while InterSAN approaches it from the opposite direction. Larry Cormier, vice president of marketing and business development at Commvault and a SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association, San Francisco, CA, www.snia.org) An organization devoted to the advancement of mission critical storage systems. Founded in 1997, its goal is to determine the standards that must be developed to allow hosts and storage systems to interact via board member said, "There is no SAM product today. There are many products that could fit the definition, but out of the dozen or so things listed [in Gartner's SAM tools definition], no one is likely to find a. product that 'does more than four of them today." Since the first generation of SAM tools is still in active development, talking about a second-generation toolset may seem immature. Allen is aware that the SAM concept is a giant stride beyond today's SAN management tools, but sees the concept as establishing evolutionary guidelines for storage automation vendors to follow now in their development [efforts. He recently published a follow up research note called "Automating SAM: A Manifesto" that details the automation development path for second generation SAN-management tools, which he calls ASAMS. Allen contends that storage administrators will have to initially administer SAM tasks, but the increasing size and complexity of application-centric storage networks will make manual management incredibly challenging and in some cases near impossible. In the report, Allen notes. and prioritizes 23 SAM functional elements (ASAMS) in a top down order of automation development. See the Table for his Top 10 ASAMs. Ken Steinhardt, EMC's director of technology analysis, agreed that in the current economic environment, developing, automating and integrating these elements are key. "Vendors that pro- vide real functionality to address the segments that Nick Allen describes in his note, and more importantly a full strategic initiative to address integration of all of the key areas that he describes, will have a drastic competitive advantage in the market by providing significant customer impact." According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Steinhardt, discovery, monitoring and reporting are particularly important in multi-vendor implementations' and "are necessary (and not trivial) foundation building blocks which must be well established prior to deploying advanced multi-vendor functionality for automation and provisioning." BMC's Hoffman concluded that storage area management tools and automation should be "related to the fundamental concept that IT needs to have a closer alignment to business, and software needs to recognize that. Managing technology in isolation doesn't have the payback Payback The length of time it takes to recover the initial cost of a project, without regard to the time value of money. that people need. You must align infrastructure with the company's value, and make sure that IT can deliver all the value it can. Storage is an important piece, but it is still a piece." www.gartner.com www.intersan.com www.sun.com www.bmc.com www.commvault.com www.emc.com RELATED ARTICLE: TOP 10 ASAMs Manage Other Tools Most storage hardware today ships with element managers, software that enables storage administrators to configure the devices. Many also ship with APIs that automate device configuration. ASAMS should have the ability to launch both types of device-configuration software from central domain consoles. Manage Backups and Recovery Various storage service providers (SSPs) and storage management vendors offer some degree of backup and recovery automation, but the critical and never-ending backup process is still largely manual. ASAMS should automate backup and recovery operations Operations conducted to search for, locate, identify, rescue, and return personnel, sensitive equipment, or items critical to national security. . Failover/Fallback Automation Although challenging to develop, automated failover is an important part of disaster recovery procedures See: explosive ordnance disposal procedures. in complex storage environments. Storage Area Discovery Device discovery is already a basic part of SAN management tools, but ASAMS should be able to both automatically discover and manage all storage devices and applications across a storage domain. Discovery should take place in real time. Path Management Path management refers to managing all data and control paths running from applications all the way into the storage subsystems The part of a computer system that provides the storage. It includes the controller and disk drives. See storage system. Load balancing The fine tuning of a computer system, network or disk subsystem in order to more evenly distribute the data and/or processing across available resources. For example, in clustering, load balancing might distribute the incoming transactions evenly to all servers, or it might redirect them and failover software are particularly important since they can ensure that services will still operate in the face of software or component failures. Provisioning Provisioning an application's storage needs is fundamental to SAM. The process is demanding, since it must drill down through multiple layers between the application and the disk drive. Automated provisioning The ability to set up new communications services for customers automatically. Carriers use automated provisioning to set up their network based on customers' requirements. Such systems control all network devices from a central console and greatly speed up deployment time from days to takes advantage of other ASAMS such as path management. Policy-Based Administration and Enforcement Policies will be crucial for reducing manual storage administration so ASAMS must be able to create, administer, and enforce policies in terms of end-user applications. Storage Area Security Administration and Enforcement Security is critical to storage networks and automated provisioning. The first level of fabric security is administrative, granting or blocking access to fabric devices. Secondly, security should use such techniques such as port spoofing (1) Faking the sending address of a transmission in order to gain illegal entry into a secure system. See e-mail spoofing. (2) Creating fake responses or signals in order to keep a session active and prevent timeouts. in order to plug holes, and eventually should interface with enterprises' existing security infrastructures. Role-based access control The identification, authentication and authorization of individuals based on their job titles within an organization. Contrast with mandatory access control and discretionary access control. See least privilege. is necessary to grant or block access for various levels of users. Reporting and Billing With users requiring fast ROI, resource accounting and reporting are becoming increasingly important Reporting and billing ASAMS will automatically account for resources by application, recording and reporting events, and should also be able to monitor performance. Chargeback Chargeback The charge a credit card merchant pays to a customer after the customer successfully disputes an item on his or her credit card statement. Notes: Customers dispute charges to their credit card usually when goods or services are not delivered within the mechanisms will be important as customers attempt to control growth by charging for storage and related services. Asset Management Once storage resources can be discovered, they can be tracked. Asset management exists not only to maintain storage asset inventories, but for financial asset management. |
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