Storage tone: what networked storage can learn from consumer product goods. (Storage Networking).

"COMMENTARY. The Editors invite other perspectives to the views presented herein."

In today's business world, technology plays a significant role in every facet of the enterprise, resulting in a much more complex IT environment. Unfortunately, much of the technology affecting our lives isn't always the most straightforward or easy to understand and use. Today's organizations are faced with increasing amounts of information, decreasing budgets and too few resources, and yet the technology options available are not always capable of helping them run their business successfully.

Consumer products, like the handheld PDA, have grasped this notion of providing low-cost, simple and easy-to-use products that do exactly what consumers expect them to. Users want instant-on, always-accessible data from their handheld devices and that's what they get. They want intuitive user interfaces that don't require a manual before use. And they want something they can afford.

The same rules apply for a networked storage environment, a more complex, cumbersome and expensive technology. New storage solutions that are smart, intuitive and affordable are quickly becoming a reality and offering businesses IT advantages that just a few years ago were not available.

Storage Tone

As IT systems become more complex, expensive and difficult to maintain, the need for technology that is always on, and that can dynamically manage and self-heal with minimal human intervention is growing. New network storage solutions that address similar requirements to consumer products leverage this notion to provide users with instant access to their data.

Similar to a phone's dial tone, storage tone simply means that a user's storage solution is always on and ready. More importantly, the data stored on their storage network is always accessible, from anywhere, even if it is accessed wirelessly. In a world with storage tone, the user has instant access to stored files on the network at the click of a button.

To achieve this new notion of storage tone, vendors need to develop storage solutions that are much smarter, more intuitive and affordable than existing solutions. By making storage solutions that are available, reliable, self-diagnosing, self-healing and cost-effective like storage tone, we can provide users with what they want and increase the speed of adoption, enabling a more ubiquitous, plug-and-play networked storage environment.

Smarter Storage

Vendors and users look at the speed of adoption for any market critically alike. How long it takes to sell something is directly related to how easy and affordable that something is--and the goal generally should be to minimize time to adoption. For network storage, successful, widespread, and rapid adoption will occur only if solutions are designed to apply to a broader audience. These solutions, therefore, need to not only be easy to use and affordable, they also need to be smarter.

Network storage systems to date have been largely successful in high-end, expensive environments. This has afforded IT organizations the ability to closely manage their storage with skilled, expensive and highly talented IT professionals such as storage architects and operations professionals. These experts have been necessary because today's systems, while dependable, are expensive, highly complex and in many ways not interoperable or compatible with other systems in the network. They are islands of network storage and those islands are expensive real estate indeed.

What has allowed today's omnipresent consumer technologies, which first entered via the high-end and expensive commercial markets, to become so broadly adopted by consumers? A focus on simplicity, usability and low cost. Interestingly enough, the focus on simplicity is counter-intuitive. Simple is not always easy to do when it comes to driving sophisticated technology like network storage to the masses. It is hard to make something useful yet truly simple. Reflect upon the level of sophisticated technology in some of today's newer computing solutions and it's easy to understand the amount of thought, design, engineering and human effort required to make something truly ready for broad-based markets.

We in the storage industry must accept and rise to this same challenge.

How Do We Make Network Storage Simply Smarter?

Smarter solutions will leverage established and broadly adopted industry standards, such as IP, to increase the user's ability to easily manage their complex storage environments. They'll also offer easier-to-use management capabilities for handling routine storage tasks. For example, look at the amount of time and effort required using today's solutions to increase volume size in a networked environment. A typical timeline for this type of job requires the following steps:

* Plan in advance the proposed changes--usually one to two days.

* Contact the vendor to obtain the updated configuration file(s).

* Schedule for network downtime--typically four hours.

* Notify the user community of the scheduled downtime.

* Begin the required maintenance--an additional two to eight hours.

In dynamic storage environments where changes are typically easier to implement than in static environments, extensive planning and some downtime is also required. In a dynamic network, the customer's data must be physically replicated (typically at 100GB per hour for backup or replication), either to other disks or to backup tapes, before making the configuration changes. Once the data has been safely moved off the storage volumes, the structures can be deleted and recreated to reflect the new configuration.

Once the new data structure is configured, the following steps must then be performed to prepare the new volume for restoring of the previously backed-up data:

* Update host configuration device table files--two hours.

* Update network storage configurations--two hours.

* Layout new OS specific file system--two hours.

* Restore original data at 100GB per hour.

These steps are in addition to the required planning, scheduling, notifying and maintenance. As you can see, even this relatively minor change requires a typical storage unit be taken offline and made unavailable to users for a period of time. Since downtime adversely affects business continuity, the goal should be to decrease the amount of time spent offline.

With a smarter storage network, the difference in the time spent on planning, downtime and implementation pale in comparison. Imagine a smart network storage solution that allows an administrator to simply increase volume size through a drag-and-drop function that instantly creates the new storage space required. At the same time, it automatically creates the required structures and extends volumes into the newly allocated space. A user can perform a storage management function without taking the application offline, or disrupting end-users. No more weekends spent reconfiguring arrays because what used to take several days can now be done in a matter of seconds.

Intuitive Storage

A smarter network storage solution allows the product to be much more intuitive as well. It can be argued that lack of intuitiveness among storage products prevents widespread adoption. In fact, one could suppose that even if storage solutions were free, adoption rates would still be low because existing solutions are not easy to use. In the near future, with solutions based on consumer goods philosophies, users will no longer be intimidated by network storage solutions, but rather understand how to use them instinctively. Like handheld PDAs and other consumer devices, network storage should be easy to understand, self-healing, dynamic (without user intervention) and enable customers to use it to its fullest capabilities without ever having seen it work before. In other words, storage solutions shouldn't require a Ph.D. to operate them.

Intuitive network storage solutions move beyond wizard-driven GUIs that take the user step-by-step through each management process to offer a single-step drag-and-drop action for even complex management tasks (such as expanding volumes or moving data from one disk to another). They also offer a command line interface that enables more sophisticated storage administrators to build scripts for common tasks and to access advanced capabilities. In addition, they'll offer time savings through consolidation of network resources. For example, a typical storage network consists of up to 50 different servers all supporting various applications, such as email, databases, ERP programs and the like. Intuitive storage solutions will tie those various servers together to perform all storage and data management processes from a single location. Leveraging these intuitive systems can result in significant improvements in overall management when the disparate technologies that manage the environment work together, to deliver performance results throughout the network.

By making systems more intuitive and self-healing, businesses can re-focus their resources onto mission-critical projects to reduce costs and improve productivity and business continuity overall.

Affordable Storage

Affordability is another crucial piece of the network storage puzzle. Solutions should be affordable, appealing to the broadest possible audience.

New network storage solutions will reduce the overall cost of storage, including hidden costs such as human error and user training, to offer high -end, enterprise-class functionality without breaking the bank. Without having to plan days in advance, shut down the network and perform the many steps outlined above to carry out everyday management tasks, this new class of solutions will require fewer human and technology resources. Instead of having IT departments focus significant amounts of time on these mundane tasks, users will be able to spend their time on more business-critical and strategic operations.

Furthermore, less training will be required to learn the ins and Outs of the system, allowing customers to use their time to improve the business. By developing products built on established industry standards, such as IP, off-the-shelf equipment can be used and existing resources leveraged, enabling the industry to ride the wave of high volume, commodity components.

By offering more affordable solutions, users will be able to save on the overall costs of storage. Lower-priced solutions with enterprise-class functionality such as snapshot and remote mirroring of data will compliment higher-end solutions without costing an and and a leg. Many businesses find themselves either storing most of their data and files on one or several expensive, high-end storage solutions or, more often, under-protecting the vast amount of reference data within the organization because it is not managed using network storage solutions. While these high-end storage options are reliable, this method is not always the most effective or efficient. While some of the data and files that reside on these storage systems are "mission critical," typically most of it is not. In fact, there is a very large percentage of enterprise data that, while not mission critical, is considered mission important. These types of data include email and email attachments, static Web content, manufacturing lists of part n umbers, and stored images, for example. In these cases, the information that is not as important can bog down the network, hindering it from functioning at its highest capacity.

With the advent of smarter, more affordable solutions, businesses will be able to transfer their huge amounts of mission important information to these more intuitive and easier-to-use options, freeing up higher-end storage products to tackle the organization's most mission-critical data. By doing this, businesses will see a better yield on their ROT without sacrificing any of their data storage capabilities.

Storage: The New Network Resource

Enterprises want and need to reduce IT spending, simplify storage management, realize a faster return on their IT investment and ensure the highest possible levels of system availability and performance. This new class of smarter, more affordable and intuitive network storage solutions addresses these issues through a fundamental shift in the way network storage solutions are developed. Moreover, such systems will free critical IT resources from detailed routine tasks, allowing them to focus on managing critical business processes.

Learning from the experiences of consumers, we can develop technology that appeals to the masses, enabling network storage to become a commodity down the road. Drawing a parallel to the evolution of printing to network printers, the progression of smart storage solutions will be accomplished through centralized management of storage as a network resource. When data is always available and users can reliably access it from their desktop or notebook computer at any time, network storage will become a reality.

Alan Kessler is president and CEO at Intransa (San Jose, Calif.)

www.intransa.com