The need for simplification: open storage management for complex storage environments. (Storage Networking).

As information continues to grow, many IT organizations are forced to find a more efficient management tool to reduce the complexity that currently exists in their storage environment. Over the past 10 years, vendors have attempted to solve this problem by developing a wide range of tools versus a unified, task-oriented toolset. This influx of tools has added to the overall problem, and it has required businesses to manage costly, complex, people-intensive environments.

New products continue to be brought to market, and IT organizations are pressured to find a toolset that can ultimately drive down to zero their storage operating management costs. Their end goal is to meet changing business requirements without discarding previous investments, capture all disparate information, and increase productivity and growth.

By utilizing the total storage asset, IT organizations will be able to exploit information as they anticipate the needs of the business they support, the impact of technology, and the growth of information. This is particularly important as businesses gain a better understanding of the differences between disaster recovery (a reactive approach) and a business-continuity solution (proactively preventing something from occurring). IT organizations need to manage information replication to ensure the future recovery of information from a possible catastrophe.

The Changing Storage Landscape

The management of information has become increasingly complicated as each product contains its own set of tools, rather than a single tool to administer multiple products. The information residing on these multiple products has most recently begun to spread across storage and client networks, and technology infrastructures dispersed globally.

The growth in servers, storage networks, and storage platforms is also making it tough to prioritize changing business needs. As a result, IT organizations are forced to respond to fire drills with the hope of solving storage information requests on a case-by-case basis. Simple questions have become difficult to answer and force many organizations to say "no" to businesses requests for reasons such as "we can't respond that quickly," "changing storage is disruptive," "capacity isn't accessible to the systems that need it," and "we don't have the resources to get you that information." The only organizations saying "yes" are the ones who are taking a task-oriented approach and have become proactive instead of reactive.

Attempting to Solve the Problem

Unlike most mainframe data centers, which have a capacity-planning group to analyze and monitor utilization reports generated from operating system utilities, Windows and UNIX environments are becoming increasingly more complicated with less-sophisticated tools.

The wide variety of non-task-oriented products being brought to the market are attempting to solve the larger utilization problem, but they lack consistency across their offerings. Some vendors go so far as to claim they can send customers reports directly through advanced managed services technology. However, they fail to mention the many limitations based upon geographical locations. Other vendors are forming alliances to supply customers with various logical volume-monitoring tools for managing storage and file systems across the SAN. But these tools limit IT's ability to see beyond the logical view, because they are not being fully integrated and lack the ability to provide consistent management.

Major database and application providers are also developing their own set of specialized tools. And, many independent software vendors are offering tools exclusively for network planning and analysis within specific types of environments. But none of these approaches have the ability to report on the utilization of the entire storage environment. Their products can all be categorized as "point" solutions, because they cannot administer multi-vendor storage assets ranging from servers, databases, applications, and storage systems.

As such, vendors have begun to lose focus on the larger need for a simple, automated, and open storage management solution. They are limiting the development of "storage-monitoring" products that must work within a heterogeneous environment. Of all the products available today, very few look at utilization from the host or server viewpoint, the application viewpoint, or the limited environment viewpoint like the network topology.

No One Product Is the Perfect Solution

IT organizations have begun to realize that no one product can solve the larger management problem and still meet the changing needs of the businesses they support. Without a single management console and the ability to integrate all storage management functions, environments will continue to hinder business models focused on boosting revenue streams and reducing costs.

To address this requirement, storage innovators have proactively designed a flexible solution to simplify the management of complex storage environments. The solution referred to as open storage management (OSM), combines differentiated platforms, customer operations, and open software--to provide IT organizations with a single, unified, and consistent way to tackle their most pressing business and IT problems.

This solution has encouraged businesses of all sizes to integrate their information management strategies, enhance resource utilization, and improve the management and availability of information. Many are even partnering with experienced professional services consulting groups (knowledgeable of open storage management) to establish a top-down storage policy that ensures availability, profitability, and justifies the cost of investments.

Using Intelligent Software

Major advancements in open storage management include a set of intelligent software products that mask the underlying complexity of multiple vendors' products (storage systems, network devices, and servers). The software combines automation and simplification tasks such as performance monitoring, allocation, utilization, and backup--allowing IT staffs to:

* Identify inefficient allocation of assets within an environment and simplify business processes by integrating with existing applications, such as billing or CRM.

* Simplify the deployment of replicas or copies of information.

* Automate the information management of heterogeneous servers (NT, UNIX, Novell, and Mainframe), storage networks, differentiated platforms, and heterogeneous storage products across an enterprise.

* Provide a filter or universal translator between all heterogeneous components (servers, storage networks, and storage).

* Warn administrators and assist them in avoiding "out of space" errors when a host (file system or database), or a storage array approaches a customer-defined usage threshold.

* Mask the complexity of heterogeneous infrastructures.

Through the integration of intelligent software, IT organizations can calculate the total number of SANs, hosts, and arrays contained in an environment--and report upon "configured vs. reserved" capacity on the array side, and "allocated vs. used" capacity on the host side. This detailed information highlights each of the site's capacity details, and provides a dynamic link to more respective statistics.

For example, the environment captured in Figure 1 demonstrates how the reporting function provides an enterprise-view of the storage assets across eleven sites.

The New York site is highlighted to show the small amount of storage it's using compared to what it was allocated by the hosts. Drilling down into this site (see Figure 2) will enable users to access the additional information needed to reconfigure the arrays for more efficient use.

As businesses across the globe force IT organizations to gain control over complex storage environments, the need for more efficient utilization is critical to improving information availability and protecting crucial business applications. Unlike many of the products available today, only an open storage-management solution builds upon a task-oriented approach to eliminate the added costs and complexity across heterogeneous storage environments.

Open storage management combines everything in the stack, including path management, volume management, provisioning, replication, and 110 redirection into a single capability that harnesses functionality at every level. It performs tasks that ensure management applications work together seamlessly and effectively, and make the user-visible storage management tools even more powerful.

Businesses of all sizes now have the ability to drive down storage operating management costs, increase productivity, and gain noticeable return on investment.

Doug Kenbeek is director of field marketing at EMC (Hopkinton, Mass.)

www.emc.com