Storage management: to automate or not to automate? Just do it!

Since corporate data is doubling every six months, the IT challenge is to manage an ever-increasing amount of physical storage without increasing the number of storage administrators and capital resources.

One way for IT managers to face this challenge is through the use of policy-based, process-driven, automated storage-management solutions. Policy-based, storage-management solutions have successfully been implemented and used in the main-frame arena for many years but are relatively new in the open systems arena. The benefits of policy-based, process-driven, automated storage management are substantial increases in the number of terabytes that a storage administrator can manage, as well as substantial increases in application 'performance and availability. In fact, many analysts believe automated storage management is essential when moving to a heterogeneous networked storage environment to leverage the complexity inherent in these environments.

Effective storage management solutions are based on: Well-defined application centric policies, service-level agreement enablers, service level objective executors, best practice work flows inherent within the system, and automation that can be customized to the users preferences

It is imperative when implementing automated storage management that policies be an integral part of the process. Policies as defined by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) are "the measurable, enforceable, and realizable specification of method, action and/or desired state that meets service requirements in a storage-based information infrastructure." Automating poorly defined or non-defined policies will just speed up the rate at which issues occur in the organization. The old computer axiom, "garbage-in, garb age-out," applies here as well.

Successful automated storage-management solutions employ best-practice workflow that is based on the application centric polices that were defined and entered into the systems. A best-practice workflow should:

* Take into account all .of the application-level policies that have been defined by the business level requirements.

* Be modifiable by IT administrators for unique conditions in their environments.

* Allow either manual or automated execution to occur at every step.

* Provide the ability to distribute operational tasks based on user, group role security attributes.

* Maintain a detailed audit trail--including start, stop, and intermediate times, user logs, exceptions, and all data used during the process execution.

Automated workflows should also take into account multiple levels of policies such as explicit, rule and constraint policies (see.Figure 1).

Explicit policies are defined by the user and describe how the applications are to behave. An explicit policy, for example, is SAP 'needs to be up 24x7x365 with no backup window. This would be "translated" in the storage management system to ensure a mirrored copy was maintained that could be automatically failed over. Rule policies consist of an "event-condition action." These policies are used to handle escalation, notification, and activation of various processes including the automatic execution of storage management work flows. For example, if my CRM application's data base storage reached 60% full, automatically 'provision additional storage using the predefined policies for this application and database. Finally, constraint policies define the inherent advantages and limitations of the network storage components, such as Fibre Channel servers, switches, and/or storage arrays. For example, EMC Symmetrix devices today can only be mirrored to other EMC Symmetrix devices (see Figure 2).

These best-practice work-flows must also be automatically customized to the SAN configuration that is deployed by the customer to 'ensure complete accuracy. These best practice work flows also need to provide rollback capability, so that' the' system can recover to a known state when execution cannot be fully completed. Finally, best-practice work flows should have a detailed audit and timing capability so that 'it can be clear what steps were taken to achieve a specific objective and deliver IT accountability back to the business units that are being supported.

Finally, IT and data managers are notorious for being risk-adverse and conservative. It is an unrealistic expectation of software vendors that a "fully-enclosed" one-touch or completely automated, storage management solution will be readily accepted by the IT community. The workflow that is developed, must be customizable to ensure that a system administrator or organization's unique requirements are met. A best-practice workflow should enable automation when the IT administrators have confidence in the solution but also gives the option 'to manually execute the task. Administrators should also have the capability to stop, rollback, delegate, and/or continue the execution process at any point.

Which Process to Automate?

One of the, first processes that will provide the most benefit to IT administrators will be automation of provisioning 'of new storage for either a new application or expansion of storage: for an existing application. Effective policy-based, process-driven, automated storage provisioning depends on a number of criteria that the storage administrator specifies when using a storage management software solution. The provisioning decisions, based on that criteria and recommended by the storage solution, are guided by the policies that guarantee service-level agreements (SLAs) for that storage: in its support of a given application. The' optimal automated storage management solution must manage heterogeneous devices' to ensure that the application policies are enforced regardless of the servers, operating systems, HBAs, switches/directors, and/or storage arrays available.

SLAs are written business procedures that tie the IT department and the services that they provide 'to a business need. They are tied to applications and typically guarantee performance, availability, and/or cost related to that application. Having a well-understood connection between application SLAs, storage service-level objectives (SLOs), and the policies used to deliver those objectives is of fundamental importance in driving toward an automated process that will deliver expected service levels.

An effective automated storage management software solution needs to understand both the storage environment and the SLAs associated with the applications that are being supported. These SLAs need to be translated into SLOs and policies to ensure the storage management solution can understand the business rules required to manage the environment (see Figure 3). Finally, as the industry moves towards policy-based, automatic provisioning, it is critical that storage administrators are comfort- able and understand what is happening with the environment. Detailed best-practice scenarios that translate into auditable workflows can provide the storage administrator with this level of comfort.

The answer to the question "to automated or not to automate?" is "yes," automate your storage management. Infrastructure managers need tools that make it easier, for them to figure out what they've got and how to deal with it in a business-rules way. To realize the promise of networked storage, a policy-based process-driven, automated storage-management solution is a requirement.

Paula Dallabetta is director of marketing at CreekPath Systems (Longmont, Colo.)

www.creekpath.com