Virtualizing SAN Management Reduces Costs.

With the proliferation of Internet commerce, business applications, correlated databases and multimedia web content generating enormous amounts of data, IT leaders are finding themselves coping with storage capacity requirements that could double or triple in a single year with total capacities exceeding hundreds of terabytes. In addition, with the advent of Internet-based commerce, an organization's customer base can grow quickly and experience huge service peaks causing data center managers frustration as they attempt to navigate the unpredictable road of growth.

As a result, storage costs, as well as the total cost of managing all that data are growing exponentially. Often server-attached storage exceeds the cost of the server itself, and storage management costs can increase the total cost of ownership up to seven times the procurement costs. Today's users, including executives, customers, business associates and internal clients expect "24 by forever" access to information. That requires a reliable, scalable and manageable storage environment that can keep IT budget costs under control.

The shift towards e-business is triggering data center operators into renovating their storage environments and their move towards storage area networks (SANs). The traditional data center typified by most Global 100 companies has been viewed as something of a "glass house," housing large mainframe class computers with stable and carefully managed infrastructure to serve its users. However, the new Internet-driven data center, and particularly storage systems, needs to be designed to accommodate the rapid change necessary to keep pace with e-business growth. IT managers are looking beyond traditional storage architectures and focusing on sophisticated storage management software operating over a SAN to facilitate business-critical applications in a flexible new environment. The SAN is a key component of this new data center. SANs promise to bring mainframe class storage management functionality and scalability to the open systems world, thus meeting the needs for the flexibility, high availability, lower cos t, and vendor choice that today's IT infrastructure demands.

The Promise Of SANs - Virtualization and Visualization

Today SAN applications are solving a number of point storage problems. Specifically, applications such as clustering and LAN-free backup, that provide a dramatic increase in availability and resource sharing capabilities. Now that Fibre Channel technology has enabled storage networking with increased connectivity and flexibility, the next step in SAN evolution is to simplify the management of more complex SANs. By virtualizing the management of physical storage devices and applications through centralization and automation, the total cost of managing these new systems will continue to decrease, even as physical complexity increases.

Storage virtualization is the process of organizing multiple physical disks into logical, or "virtual," entities to better manage capacity. This ability to manage virtual pools of stored data allows a range of necessary tasks such as adding storage capacity of resizing volumes to be performed more efficiently and without downtime. These capabilities are critical to managing the cost of rapid growth and change. Virtualization of SAN resources allows an organization to take full advantage of the many-to-many device sharing capabilities and the flexibility to scale servers and peripherals to meet the ever-changing demands of the e-business environment. As SAN management tools emerge to provide a multi-server or "global" view of the SAN, the power of centralized SAN visualization will be realized.

In a centralized SAN environment, a much smaller, highly trained staff equipped with advanced storage management tools can manage significantly larger amounts of stored data than in a traditional, highly distributed environment. IT leaders need not look far for software that provides non-disruptive online storage management over SANs and SAN-attached storage, because software such as VERITAS' SANPoint Control currently offers logical volume manager software that allows the data center manager to centralize critical tasks. In addition, SANPoint Control offers a standards-based SAN management solution to provide automated SAN discovery and a visual view of customer's SAN environments. Furthermore, the need for new standards-based technology will improve SAN management, embedded SAN services, and global storage application efficiency.

Grasping The Many Benefits Of SANs

SANs have the ability to deliver high levels of availability, all while maintaining costs and adapting to unpredictable change. The SAN and Fibre Channel industry continues to move forward, solidifying standards and distributing knowledge through the education of IT staff and resellers.

Realizing Return On Investment Today

SANs are being deployed today to solve specific storage issues to realize significant returns on the investment. With a SAN, an organization can reap the significant benefits of storage networking applications, as well as ensure its chosen architecture will evolve to support the true promise of SANs tomorrow.

Reducing Total Cost Of Storage With SANs

SANs reduce costs by providing a better storage management infrastructure for a growing data center. Two examples of cost saving solutions enabled by SAN technology are storage consolidation and centralized capacity management.

Storage Consolidation. SANs help reduce costs by consolidating the capacity of sophisticated storage peripherals between multiple servers. Enterprise RAID systems and automated tape libraries can be five to ten times more expensive than a single server, making it prohibitively expensive to use a one-to-one devices-attach approach. Even with multiple channel controllers in the peripheral, the cost equation is often not attractive. However storage management software, in combination with Fibre Channel networks, provides dynamic resource sharing by allocating a tape drive in an automated tape library to one of many attached servers during each backup session on an as-needed basis.

Centralized Capacity Management. Running out of disk space or tape drive capacity means that new storage must be physically added to a server either by adding more disks to an attached RAID or adding another I/O card and a new peripheral. This highly manual and reactive process leads IT managers to deploy large amounts of excess capacity to avoid downtime due to reconfiguration or capacity saturation on the servers. SANenabled storage allocation and backup software applications provide centralized capacity management. The total cost of ownership is reduced through an efficient use of highly trained personnel and their system and storage resources. Storage allocation software can detect capacity constraints, and find and allocate free space from within the storage network. Sophisticated backup applications enable individual drives or entire libraries to be shared or allocated among multiple backup servers.

Increased Availability Without Exponential Costs

Delivering high levels of availability without exponential costs is a key requirement for the new Internet-driven data center. To achieve this, applications now offer virtualization of SAN resources to enable online storage management, implementation of multi-server availability clusters that provide application and services failover, and automation of manual storage tasks to avoid reactive management.

Virtualization of Physical Storage to Minimize Application Disruption. Minimizing disruptions to applications while storage configurations change is key to achieving near continuous availability and performance. This can be a challenge, as new storage must be added to keep up with capacity demands, or storage configurations must be altered to optimize performance and improve availability levels. Also, downtime must still be scheduled to add new RAIDs and map the new storage to applications. Reducing the number of RAID controllers can significantly reduce hardware costs while increasing centralized management capabilities.

Reducing The Cost Of Availability With Multiple Paths To Storage

Implementing high levels of availability require that server applications recover from failures as quickly as possible. Advanced clustering tools allow failover between multiple servers, providing more flexible and robust implementations. However, this increases the cost of storage, as every server must have a copy of the data locally attached. Fibre Channel networks facilitate connectivity between multiple servers and multiple peripherals. When an application failover occurs, a path from the new server can be provisioned to the failed server's data and the application can be restarted. Since the storage does not need to be replicated behind each server, it is possible to implement increasing levels of availability without significantly increasing storage costs.

Automation Of Manual Tasks Using Policies

Storage management tools, combined with SAN-attached storage, can lower the administrative cost of application availability. Increasing the automation of tasks will keep a lid on management costs. SANs provide many more resources to monitor and configure data, thus creating a more complex storage environment. By using policies to automate storage management, IT managers can ensure that the benefits of SANs are fully realized while the total cost of managing these new systems does not increase as additional levels of complexity are introduced.

What's The Solution?

* Online Storage Management: The SAN Virtualization Layer

* LAN-Free Backup: Reducing the Backup Window and Sharing Storage Resources

* Clustering for Improved Availability

There are a number of current SAN applications that will increase availability and performance--all without exponential costs. In fact, online storage management to virtualize physical SAN resources and minimize disruption, clustering technology for increased availability and LAN-free backup applications are all available for Fibre Channel-based storage networks today.

Jan Jentz is the director of strategic SAN solutions marketing and programs at VERITAS Software (Boulder, CO).