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Follow UsEver-increasing complexity in storage architecture is a major side-effect
of growing sophistication in data storage products. There are long-standing
concerns about interoperability between storage products from different vendors,
especially in the case of expensive SANs. Storage Networking Industry
Association (SNIA) has all of the big names in the world of storage as members,
with a mission to ensure that storage networks become more efficient, complete
and trusted solutions across the IT community. Sheila Childs is the chairman at
SNIA and V-P (product management) at Legato Systems Inc. Excerpts from an e-mail
interview...
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l What is your advice to
enterprises looking to manage their complex storage infrastructure, and to
achieve faster ROI?
Consider storage networks. Although the installed base for direct attached
storage (DAS) is still significant, storage networking technology adoption is
progressing at a rate faster than has been previously projected due to the
strength of these technologies. Consolidating storage in networks enables the
enterprise to scale up capacity in relation to the aggregated need of
applications. ROI can be achieved more quickly with a well thought out storage
infrastructure. Also, the deployment of appropriate software products to manage
complex infrastructures is what delivers a faster ROI.
l How can SMEs benefit from a
costly technology like SAN?
Small to medium enterprises generally don’t have the staff or the
expertise to allow them to dedicate individuals to the effective management of
storage, i.e. storage capacity, storage allocation and storage utilization. The
deployment of NAS or SANs allows an individual administrator to manage more
capacity via a centralized pool of storage. Once beyond the initial learning
curve, the administrator can devote less time to the complexities of managing
DAS and more to building and administering a better IT environment. Dynamic
reconfiguration allows smaller enterprises to work through the processes of
application migration and deployment of new applications according to the growth
of the business in a more seamless manner.
l What are a few best
practices that enterprises can adopt?
Many of the "best practices" today are designed to provide
effective management of both the storage infrastructure, and of customer data.
In a well-managed storage network (SANs, NAS), the management and provisioning
of capacity for applications tends to become an easier function to deliver than
in a direct attached storage environment. Companies are moving to either NAS or
SAN (and a lot of times both) when it is determined that their current storage
infrastructure won’t support their data growth. With respect to software,
applications that perform infrastructure or data management based on policies
have the potential to greatly simplify an administrator’s working day.
Automated notifications and responses to failure, automated configuration and
other infrastructure management functions provided by software tools enable more
capacity to be managed per administrator.
l Has the storage management
Initiative by SNIA simplified storage management?
SNIA released the SMI Specification version 1.0 for public review in mid-April.
This represents a milestone in the effort to unite the storage industry on a
common standard for storage management and deliver on the promise of
interoperability. Version 1.0 is today being implemented by a number of vendors
in SMI-compliant "providers" and "clients". The ultimate
goal is to simplify development and testing time for vendors, with cost savings
passed on to customers through applications that can be used to manage
interoperable configurations. With version 1.0, the SNIA SMI Specification is in
its infancy. Many additional features must be incorporated into the
specification in order to provide a robust, all-encompassing management
interface.
l What advances has storage
management software made?
Many of the new improvements in storage management software involve ability
to provide automated policy-based management. Other features include the ability
to do path management, virtualization, provisioning and other advanced
functions. The objective of these tools is to take a storage management function
that is very complex and to simplify it in a series of well understood and
automated steps in order to greatly reduce the time, effort and skill required
to perform that task. Data management software products have also evolved,
beyond simple backup and recovery. Features such as archiving, HSM (hierarchical
storage management), remote replication/mirroring, snapshot management, and
alternate backup methodologies are readily available. Perhaps the biggest
evolution in "next generation storage management" is the move to the
SMI-S standard. As the standard evolves, development costs for both hardware and
software vendors are greatly reduced, and again, these cost savings will be
passed on to the consumer.
l How far has SNIA been
successful regarding open standards?
The evolution of any standard takes time. As noted earlier, in April, SNIA
has successfully delivered version 1.0 of SMI-S to the general public for public
review. SNIA understands that the benefits provided by incorporation of the
standard into end products must be evangelized with both vendors and consumers.
To this end, we have built a number of programs that support the technical work,
most of which are administered and delivered by the SNIA storage management
forum. Programs for vendors include education and training, developer support,
and reference implementations such as CIM-SAN that enable vendors to test and
debug their code. This has resulted in very good momentum for the adoption of
the standard. The demand for compliance will also come from end-users. SNIA is
promoting and evangelizing the SMI-S in the end-user community through many
venues, including white papers, technical articles, conferences, tutorials and
other educational activities.
l Do you think storage will
get commoditized in the near future?
There is a likelihood that some degree of commoditization will occur as
hardware and software products are delivered that conform to standards. However,
functions that will be common to all hardware and management applications that
conform are low-level functions that provide little incremental value to
applications that need to use storage capacity. Many software vendors today
spend a great deal of time and energy with the most rudimentary functions, like
discovering what components they have in their storage network. IT professionals
today are no longer responsible merely for assuring the availability of enough
capacity and the recovery of data, but they are now expected to enable access to
information. Storage vendors are anxious to deliver value-added functionality to
assist with these business objectives, but without tools to perform appropriate
low-level management of the storage infrastructure, customers struggle with how
to achieve these objectives. SMI-S will provide these tools. While allowing for
some commoditization, no simplified management scheme or standardization would
be useful without the ability to incorporate vendor-specific advanced
functionality. The SMI-S allows for the incorporation of each vendor’s unique
and proprietary value-add functionality.