storage ICT D
ata in IT organisations will grow by as much as 800% in the next five years according to Gartner and IDC and this makes very uncomfortable reading for datacentre managers. The recent hike in HDD prices has made many buyers question the requirement for the next storage capacity procurement cycle. Do I really need to spend that money? Is there any way I can make better use of the storage I already have? Answering these questions is however not an easy task. Understanding storage usage in today’s multi-vendor, virtualised, geographically-diverse environments has become a near impossible task when relying on vendor storage management tools and spreadsheets, regardless of whether clever home-grown scripts are used.
This is why we are seeing unprecedented growth in the storage software market. Recently IDC reported the biggest ever revenue results in the last quarter of 2011 for this segment. The storage management sector in particular saw the largest percentage year-on- year increase. This sector consists of vendor specific management/ configuration tools and multi-vendor products that focus on reporting and analytics across a range of different platforms. Not all organisations are after the same information. Some will need visibility into the storage estate, other will require policy monitoring, and so on. A comprehensive storage reporting package will meet all these briefs by offering:
Visibility: the ability to view the entire storage estate and then being able to break that view down into department/customer/LoB/location/ application/tier/etc. or even a combination of factors. When multiple storage vendors are involved, an independent reporting product will be required to produce a single view of the estate.
Automation: producing a report that shows the utilisation of the Oracle applications and that confirms that they are running on the correct tier of storage with a minimum performance characteristic for example, usually takes a significant amount of time and effort with traditional tools provided by hardware vendors. However some standalone storage reporting software can run regularly these types of reports without human intervention once they’ve been set up.
Management by exception: what is often critical for IT administrators is the notion of managing by exception, where we only want to be told when there are instances not meeting our pre-determined criteria. This methodology therefore provides advanced notification when SLAs are likely to be missed, and this is an extremely valuable tool in a modern environment with contractual penalties.
Storage efficiency: are all storage resources being utilised effectively? If you combine storage allocation with a view from the hosts then areas of “dark storage” become apparent. They include unallocated LUNs, LUNs allocated to a decommissioned host and volumes that have been created but never mounted. By monitoring storage usage over a period of time, views of volumes that haven’t changed over that period become evident and can be nominated as candidates for moving to a lower tier of storage.
Planning: accurate capacity and performance planning results in optimised storage usage and spending patterns, as well as delivery of the required application capacity and performance. It is a complex task to allocate adequate amounts of a specific tier of storage to the right location without over-provisioning. Reporting software not only
gives you an accurate view of the current situation but uses history to predict growth. Sophisticated products allow you to inject “what if” scenarios for real world situations.
Chargeback/showback/shameback: attributing the cost of storage by consumption is what Managed Service Providers have been doing for some time but this methodology is becoming increasingly popular in enterprises looking to break usage by department, line of business or even individual user. Even consumers of SaaS (Storage as a Service) are using storage reporting tools to check whether they are getting billed correctly by their providers. And if there is no internal charging mechanism, presenting the figures to companies/departments can help precipitate a change in behaviour.
Compliance: certain industry compliance standards such as SOX, Basel II and the Data Protection Act require audit reports. Storage reporting software can automate this process and alert datacentres and their clients if the environment moves outside of those or any other SLAs. Proactive alerting will help companies avoid service penalty charges.
Whatever the reasons for embarking on storage reporting implementation, the over-riding goal is to make decisions based on accurate up-to-date information and to lower costs through efficiencies, management time reduction and the elimination of penalty charges and emergency spending. When looking for a storage reporting tool you will need to consider which is the most appropriate by taking into account some of the following aspects:
Data collection: you will need to understand how the data is collected, which platforms it can be collected from and whether it requires additional software agents loaded on servers.
Reporting: reports can be presented in many different ways e.g. dynamic or static, hard-copy or web-based, scheduled or ad-hoc. Do the standard out-of-the-box reports satisfy your requirement? Can you construct your own or will you need to engage professional services to achieve this every time you need a new design? Consider how different stake-holders will access the reports. Will you require a multi-tenanted, self-service portal where different customers will only get access to their information even though it is running on a shared infrastructure?
Scalability: choose a system that will grow and change with your environment. You should not have to limit your choice of product based on the suitability of your reporting technology.
Customisation: being able to add your business-specific attributes to a product hugely increases its usefulness. Reports become self-explanatory and a wider range of users will gain value from the solution.
At APTARE, we are seeing increasing numbers of clients wanting to utilise our storage analytics technology to tightly manage their storage infrastructures and provide reports that allow intelligent decisions to be made to drive significantly higher levels of utilisation and compliance. Our existing users range from small enterprises right up to some of the most demanding environments across a global network of datacentres because when it comes to making the most of your storage assets, size does not matter.
May 2012 I
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