Search for the Holy Grail: Best Practices for Storage Management in a Networked World

1. Search for the Holy Grail:Best Practices for Storage Management in a Networked World Jon William Toigo Independent Consultant and Author

2. Overview • Welcome and Context • Defining Storage Management • Technical Challenges to a Managed Storage Infrastructure • Best Practices for Realizing the Goals of Managed Storage

3. Setting the Stage • Business Realities • IT in Transition • Storage in Transition

4. Context: Business Realities • Dependency • Business process inseparable from IT • IT enables and inhibits corporate profitability • Performance • Increased attention to bottom line • Increased ROI expectations, even from IT operations • Perceptions • IT as service, subject to SLAs and competitive bids • Downtime = Poor Management

5. Downtime Costs Money Average of all industries: $1,010,536 per hour

6. Context: IT in Transition • Evolution • Centralization, decentralization, recentralization • Adoption of a network-based managed service delivery model • “Objectification” and “Webification” • Support business process deconstruction with deconstructed platforms • Object-orientation and n-Tier client/server proliferation • Competition • Outsourcing • xSPs

7. Deconstruction: Not just a cool sounding word… A method of criticism introduced by French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida c. 1966 that challenges the metaphysical premises that shape Western science and philosophy. A movement in popular music and literature popularized by “grunge” artists, c. 1995 (Your kids may be amazed that you know this.) Today, a term used by Forrester Research and other e-business analysts to describe the “externalization of vertical business processes” and the rise of new business models that leverage B2B/B2C technologies.

8. IT support for deconstruction: Not your father’s DP platform

9. Context: Storage in Transition • Storage Deconstructed: Networked Storage • New Value Proposition: • Storage as an Infrastructure • Storage as a Service

10. The Copernican Shift: Storage at the Center of the IT Universe

11. Networked Storage Ascending • Network-based storage is on the rise • 66-67% CAGR in revenue growth for NAS and SAN • Internal or server-captive storage on the decline • Negative 3% CAGR by 2003 • Server-Attached Storage sales continuing at 10 percent per year Source: IDC/Merrill Lynch 2000

12. Networked storage inevitable: for post-SPE scaling SPE 150 Gb/in2 120% in late 1990s 60% through mid- 1990s 25-30% in 1970s and 1980s AREAL DENSITY INCREASES

13. Networked Storage Value Proposition THE VALUE OF ANY BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY ACCORDING TO HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL Risk Reduction Cost Reduction Business Enablement

14. Cost Reduction Risk Reduction Business Enablement Consolidation to reduce administration costs; improved data sharing and mirroring; resource usage optimization High availability, meshed configurations possible; off-LAN backups; data replication ??? Networked Storage Business Case

15. Cost Reduction Risk Reduction Business Enablement Consolidation to reduce administration costs; improved data sharing and mirroring; resource usage optimization High availability, meshed configurations possible; off-LAN backups; data replication Support for business planning; storage as a service; integration with billing/ERP Managed Network Storage Business Case

16. Only Managed Network Storage provides… • An true infrastructure from a morasse of cables, switches and storage devices. • Lower TCO. • Real business value. Without management, networked storage cannot deliver on its business value proposition.

17. What is Storage Management? • Management of hard disks, storage arrays and cabling infrastructure. • Management of data movements (application I/O, replication, backup/restore, mirroring). • Management of data stored on magnetic and optical media. • Proactive monitoring of storage repository performance. • Storage cost accounting and service level reporting. • All of the above. Is that your final answer?

18. Answer: All of the above (and more…) • A collection of tasks aimed at the monitoring and maintenance of storage platforms and data movements at peak efficiency with the greatest economy of time, effort and resources. • A strategy for creating a storage infrastructure that yields measurable business value.

19. The Storage Management Stack SLA AND RESOURCE PLANNING INTEGRATION TOOLS AUTOMATION TOOLS TO REDUCE MANUAL TASKS FRAMEWORKS FOR CENTRALIZED MONITORING POINT PRODUCTS FOR DISCRETE MANAGEMENT TASKS

20. Effective Storage Management… • Not just software “bolt-ons” • A Strategy with four elements: • Business Focus • Infrastructure Design • Management Approach • Instrumentation

21. Business Focus  Best Practices • Focus on business requirements • Application performance reflects storage management efficiency • Application-centric focus required for storage management planning • Focus on business sensibilities • Senior management view of downtime: poor management • Keep ROI and business value delivery clearly in mind

22. Infrastructure Design  Best Practices • No panic buying. • Identify application-specific storage requirements and trends. • Provision storage and storage management per application requirements. • Centralize/decentralize storage as appropriate to application • Centralize management wherever possible. • Plan evolution to networked storage, with contingencies for disruptions during transitions.

23. Management Framework  Best Practices • Identify a storage management approach: • Standards-based: CIM, SNMP, etc. • Proprietary: device-articulated Web pages, dedicated configurators and monitors. • Framework products and their limitations. • Select storage devices that work with selected approach: • Make manageability a selection criterion. • Test all vendor claims.

24. Instrumentation  Best Practices • Evaluate Point Products: • Data management: Integrity, Security, Defragmentation • Device management: Topology discovery, Status collection, Virtualization, RAID, Capacity measurement • Data movement: Backup/Restore, Mirroring, Replication, HSM • Analysis and Reporting: Utilization trends, storage costs, labor and administrative expense tracking, SLA compliance monitoring, back-end system integration (ERP, CRM, billing) • Test Point Product scalability, impact on application performance, and interoperability.

25. Interoperability? • Framework vendors may not offer best-of-breed point product components. • Proliferation of point products: no one-stop shop. • Different products have different design philosophies, so interoperability issues may arise (example: tape restores and virtualization software) • Test over time and in combination.

26. Challenge of Storage Management Continues… • Platform diversity. • Resistance to standards-based management. • Special problems of SANs, with or without virtualization.

27. In-Band versus Out-of-Band Management Legacy Tape with SCSI - to - FC Bridging SNMP Console FC Fabric Switch Homogeneous Disk Arrays with Mapping & Partitioning Heterogeneous Servers Ethernet for Out - of - Band Mgt Fibre Channel for Data Traffic

28. Management Standards Still Evolving… • SNMP with IP SANs. • CIM at SNIA. • Fabric Services for Fibre Channel. • XML Agents for Web page status data capture and normalized reporting. Vote with your checkbooks. Buy standards-based components.

29. What about xSPs? • SSPs and Storage Management Service Providers • Status of market. • Differences in large enterprise and SME needs. • Challenge of bandwidth outside NFL cities. • Security concerns. • Ultimately, a potential competitor for IT provided storage services. • But, you can’t outsource problems – only solutions.

30. The Bottom Line. • Networked storage is not a panacea for storage management. • Neither current software nor services provide a silver bullet. • In the absence of the Holy Grail of management standards, we must make do with a “kluge” approach…

31. Definition of Kludge (pronounced klooj) 1. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II. 2. [TMRC] A crock that works. (A long-ago Datamation article by Jackson Granholme similarly said: "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.") 3. /v./ To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later.“ Source: The New Hacker’s Dictionary

32. Conclusion • Storage Management isn’t sexy. • It is a survival strategy for IT and for business. In the final analysis, without management, there is no storage infrastructure, no ROI, and no business value proposition.

33. Cost to Administer Storage • Storage Networking Industry Association: $3.50 per GB per year. • Yankee Group: $13.00 per GB per year. • Reality: much higher without effective storage management. Any Questions?

34. Definition of Kludge.